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Save Some Bandwidth - Block Ads

My previous post on saving paper and ink/toner using the Aardvark Add-on on Firefox has inspired me to seek other topics on efficiency. This post advocates the client-side blocking of ads on the web as a way of being less wasteful with internet bandwidth. I feel slightly guilty about this because a lot of the free content on the internet is supported by ad revenues, and users blocking those ads might deny access to those revenues for the providers of the free content. However, if you are like me and you almost never pay attention to or click on any ads, then you are probably doing no damage.

How do I know what to block? I looked through my Firefox cookies and did a search for 'ad'. I would then selectively block those domains. You can block the ad servers locally on your computer, for example suing 'iptables' in Linux or Network Magic in Windows, or for your whole network through whatever interface you have. In my case, the easiest thing was to configure my wireless router to block the ad servers.

  1. Find out what to block:: If using Firefox, click on Edit>Preferences to open the preferences window. Select the 'Privacy' tab and click on the 'Show Cookies' button. Then, search for keyword 'ad' in the list of cookies, or manually locate cookies that could be from an ad server.
  2. Block the ad servers:: I chose to block them using a website filtering option on my wireless router. Most routers should have an easy interface that easily allows website filtering/blocking.
Well, in the simplest possible way, I have probably cut down my internet bandwidth usage by 10%??! A few of the sites I frequent look substantially leaner already.
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