I have done a lot of work on blocking ads and what I am doing has been very effective.



I have discovered that the ad sites themselves dont necessarily need to be blocked, but the servers that the sites contract with that provide the scripts that read your cookies and serve your ads on the site are the real culprits.



If those sites are blocked some of the most obnoxious places on the web are the most quiet and serene places you will ever surf on the web unmolested.



The solution is not perfect but it gets more than 90% of the garbage and I just dont see the ads or the placeholders on my web pages but I am relatively unaffected in the content. I have had to make some adjustments when it came to Google and also Yahoo, but they are not the big offenders.



When I was at the IT security show there was a company that made a unit that was very fast that took the burden off your server and stood at the gateway blocking regions of the world and also a black list of servers on their way in. The hardware was unremarkable but the software they developed for it and the GUI was really nice and it was very fast and efficient at what it does.



I dont have to tell you guys that the domain controler or the router in your business is very very busy these days with all the hundreds and thousands of connections coming into a computer as pages are open and work is being done. Its a big load requiring big power.



This device was developed to take that burden from the router splitting the load and making network flow easier to control, and I might add, very nicely done.



I have come to the conclusion that as my businesses and networks grow, I am splitting blocking, DHCP, and network control into three different parts by deploying a gatekeeper, a strong router, and then smart switches to look after the internals. This seems to make the most sense for me.



There are no servers in the building... all is in the cloud.



Any thoughts?



And for those of you who want a look at what I am doing in the block list, I will be glad to show you some of the evil culprits that I have ferreted out.

