Wherein I post a useful tech tip.

[theweaselking]

How To Block Ads In Skype

Advertising, as we all know, is terrible and wrong and how malware gets delivered and is never good. Any product that shows ads is broken.

Skype shows ads, making it broken. It also does useful things, so rather than "don't use Skype", my solution is "fix Skype so it's not broken any more".

And the fix is easy: open Control Panel -> Internet Options, Security, Restricted, Sites. Add "apps.skype.com". Click OK/accept/close until you're back at your desktop. Restart Skype. Poof! Skype is no longer broken.

Comments

[skiriki.livejournal.com]

:O

To which address I will send a complimentary box of delicious noms, gold, myrrh and sandalwood?

You just made my life better and I didn't even have to google it.

[franklanguage.livejournal.com]

Ah…I finally went to the link; it says "Windows Only."

Otherwise I was going to ask you what menu I was supposed to be doing this under; never mind.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Yeah, sorry. I figured that "control panel" and "internet options" would give that away, given that they're 99.95% of the market and the remaining 0.05 percent is Android users who don't have a Control Panel

[franklanguage.livejournal.com]

To be fair, the Macintosh OS used to be all about Control Panels—and Extensions, but those usually ran passively.

[skiriki.livejournal.com]

On the other hand, if someone has rooted 'droid, sticking that site and pointing it to 127.0.0.1 in hosts file should do the trick, right?

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Quite possibly! Can't hurt to try, then reverse if it won't load.

[glaurung-quena.livejournal.com]

The same funtionality is available in IOS right now -- See, eg, weblock (https://www.weblockapp.com/). It sets up a proxy server on the wifi connection and works against web ads, in-app ads, etc. I assume there are similar apps on the google play store.

Interesting Links for 20-07-2015

[livejournal.livejournal.com]

User andrewducker referenced to your post from Interesting Links for 20-07-2015 (http://andrewducker.livejournal.com/3313676.html) saying: [...] ) How to block ads in Skype [...]

[harald387.livejournal.com]

Well, that's a thing of beauty.

Doesn't block updates, right?

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Don't know, don't care. If this blocks updates and an update is required or it breaks Skype at some point in the future, I can reverse this change long enough for the update.

[skiriki.livejournal.com]

Nah, it is still whining at me about updates, so obviously not blocked. (I won't update until I can either customize the interface the way I want it, or it stops being that stupid tablet-like layout.)