[SOLVED] Akregator and privacy

[bra|10n]

I was a little taken back by advertisements showing in Akregator feeds.
I checked in configuration settings but could not find an option such as 'Do not track' in Firefox.
Advertisements appear in only a few threads that I have noticed, however this appears to be a targeted ad.

[SteveRiley]

An RSS feed author can choose to pull in ads if they wish.

Try my shell script that creates an ad-blocking hosts file. It catches most of the sources that distribute these ads.

[bra|10n]

An RSS feed author can choose to pull in ads if they wish.

I was guessing that was the case.

Thank you for the link to your script. Works a charm here.

Is it possible to take it a step further and remove frames also?

[SteveRiley]

Thank you for the link to your script. Works a charm here. Is it possible to take it a step further and remove frames also?

Glad you find it useful.

The script works by updating your system's /etc/hosts file. Whenever your computer performs a DNS resolution, it first consults this file before sending the query to your DNS server. My script pulls down four regularly updated lists of known ad serving sites and fills in /etc/hosts with an IP address of 0.0.0.0 for each site. Therefore, when any software on your computer tries to resolve the name of an ad site, that resolution comes back as 0.0.0.0, effectively blocking the true resolution.

The advantage of using a script like this over, say, Ad Block in Firefox is that the script works system-wide. That's why you see the results in Akregator. The disadvantage is that it only works at the DNS level. It can't do any application-level modification, like removing frames.

[bra|10n]

Well thank you for explaining this.