On my Mac, MSNBC seemed to be throwing a popup to annoying low-rent ads served by http://content.pulse360.com/. There’s a delay between navigating to MSNBC and the popup launching — which helps blur the connection between the two sites.
Solution: Simply bock popups and this site in particular, right? Not so easy!
- One of our corporate sites requires popups to be enabled.
- Mac’s Parental Controls won’t let you block sites on the admin account.
- There might be browser specific options, but I prefer something global.
What to do? Here’s one solution, by editing your Hosts file …
One idea is to edit your local Hosts file so that you Mac cannot resolve the call to undesirable domains. Still interested? Not for the feint of heart, so tread with care, we’re going to use the Terminal app …
- Launch Terminal from within the Utilities folder in Applications.
- Backup you current Hosts file to Desktop:
cp /etc/hosts ~/Desktop/hosts.txtand hit enter/return. - Type
sudo pico /etc/hostsand hit enter/return. - When prompted, enter your admin account password followed by enter/return.
- Move the cursor down to the last line and enter the nonexistent IP# 0.0.0.0 (alternatively 127.0.0.1, your Mac’s local IP#) on a new line with the domain you want to block …
0.0.0.0 content.pulse360.com
- Enter
Ctrl-Xto stop editing and answerY(yes) to save your changes. - Hit enter/return to confirm the file you’ve overwriting is
/etc/hosts - Quit the Terminal app, we’re done.
Switch to your browser and test that it cannot find the offending domain. Done.
Link MSNBC.com Launches Vertical Ad Networks With Pulse 360 To Compete With Major Ad Networks | Pulse 360 | Waffles at Noon’s article MSNBC and Pulse360: Advertising Collusion
