get rid of ad.yieldmanager.com pop-ups.

[drpellow]

I have a Gentoo Linux OS (not that I am a Linux techie, my son set it up for me!). I cannot search my Yahoo home page to read the news, or even ebay, without spending half my time with pop-up boxes that say the same thing, "ad.yieldmanager.com" with a bunch of numbers. It gives you three choices, save at, open, or cancel, along with a box which you can check "don't ask again." The more I cancel, the more it pops up, and it is getting worse daily. The "don't ask again" is a joke. I have stopped reading my Yahoo news or checking baseball scores it is so bad. How can I get rid of this problem?

[shuuhen]

What browser are you using? I'd guess Firefox, Opera or Konqueror. There are a bunch of others it could be, but those are fairly common ones.

For Firefox, go to the Edit menu, then Preferences then there should be a Content tab. Under Content, there should be a Block pop-up windows checkbox. Make sure it's checked and see if that solves the problem.

If you a different browser, let us know which one and we'll see if we can help get rid of those pop-up windows.

BTW, Gentoo is a fantastic distribution of Linux.

[drpellow]

I checked the "Block pop-up windows" in Firefox and it is already checked. This is not the problem. Something is bypassing Firefox. I have the same problem when I use Konqueror. What now?

[lensman3]

There is another way, but it requires you to install a dns server. The Sysadm (now defunct) magazine had an article about 5 years ago on a howto. Esentially the DNS server becomes an authoritive server for the ad popups. So when the browser asks for an IP address for say "doubleclick.net" and the dns server returns "127.0.0.1", the IP address which is the local loop back IP address. The scary thing is that your dns server becomes the "authoritative" dns server for the pop IP numbers. For it to work, every popup that appears, somebody, has to find the dns name for it so you can add it to the list maintained. The local dns server becomes the "master" for the popups, but you don't want your dns server forwarding the bogus IP numbers out to the internet.

In the named.config file you add one line for every site you want to block like:

zone "doubleclick.net" in { type master; file "dummy-block"; };
zone "go2net.com" in { type master; file "dummy-block"; };

and the file "dummy-block" looks like:

@ IN SOA ns.bp. root.bp (
2005032602 ; Serial
8H ; Refresh
300 ; Retry
28D ;Expire
1H ; Minimum TTL
)
@ IN NS ns.bp.
@ IN A 127.0.0.1
* IN A 127.0.0.1


Good luck.