For now, most of those services all live on machines dedicated to the banner service, rather than on the same machine as the server. Making machines vanish is easy - put them in your hosts file as aliases to 127.0.0.2, and if you're behind a proxy server, put them on your "no proxy" list. Of course, if everybody starts doing this, then more systems will start using ad servers that have names in their own domain, but it works for now on most of the major servers. I've found that killing doubleclick.net and linkexchange.com gets rid of most of the banners. What I'd really like to see in a browser is an option to turn off animated GIFs (other than by killing all images.)
Speaking of browsers: I'd rather *pay* for a browser that has such an obvious feature as a list of URL regexps that you don't want to browse. Neither IE nor Netscape has it. I don't know about Lynx. I'm now using junkbuster from www.junkbuster.com (highly recommended) to filter out ads and banners and cookies. I generally think WWW sucks; but if I use it, I want to be able to tell the browser that if the page tried to load an image from a URL that looks like
valueclick.com bannermall.com ... I suggest writing a proxy server that does such filtering, running it on the local machine, and using it as proxy server from your netscape browser.
There is a proxy server in form of a 20 line perl script, you can take it and modify it.
If you have a unix box, try using the roxen web/proxy server. It has a regexp module that does exactly this. http://www.roxen.com
Thanks! Bill Bill Stewart, bill.stewart@pobox.com PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF 3C85 B884 0ABE 4639