One thing I really like about Opera is its ability to block content. But Ads can be a tricky thing to block some times. Advertisers make their money by finding ways to get around ad blocking software, and often use tricks such as javascript obfuscation.
One place I hate seeing ads is within a video. Often these ads will have a little [X] button to close them during the video, but they keep sliding up over the video every so many seconds. Some of them even redirect you to other pages when you try to click the [X]. This is because they use static images that don’t actually close, but use dirty tricks to get you to click them, which gives them all kinds of info on you, your browser, your pc, etc. Demographic stuff really. They get this wether you click the ad or not, but its another way to fill in their stats and follow your usage.
Now, swf videos have come a long way. One such video site that has grown over the years is Justin.TV. They are notorious for the whole sliding ad/redirect to their site tactic. I watch a live cam on this one site, and every time you try to close the ad, it launches the cams main profile on Justin.TV. Well, not any more!
What I did was use Wireshark to capture the video and then start clicking the close buttons to generate new traffic to the Justin.TV site. It becomes pretty clear where the ads are coming from once you look through the packets in wireshark. So, now that I know what site generate the ads, I can use this to block them in Opera.
Open your Opera browser, and go to Tools>Preferences>Advanced>Content>Blocked Content. Click the add button and then put in http://*.adsfac.us/* and then add another one for http://*.adotube.com/*
You will now have blocked the main ads from JustinTV videos, leaving you the full viewable area of the video untouched. Now, if another ad shows up, use the same method of Wireshark and going through the packets to find the advertisers. Block them as well and you are all set to watch, ad free and uninterrupted.
I’m not sure how many different ad sites are used on JustinTV, but so far, those two seem to do the trick in blocking them for me. Have any other useful ways to block ads? Oh, by the way, you can also ad these sites to your HOSTS file and block their sites all together, but you would need to know each site sub-domain prefix. EX: instead of *.adotube.com you need the fully qualified name of chibis20.adotube.com, but it chibis20 changes, you need to add each one, every time it changes. Doing it in Opera saves time of having to find each one and adding them to the HOSTS file. 