MacKeeper/Zerobit Pop Up ad Problem

debraturner1958 wrote:

I am now having the same problem. Did you ever get resolution to the problem?

You are replying to a posting that is over four years old. There are several answers just above your posting that were posted this year.

If you can't find your answer here then you need to start a new topic and describe your issue in detail. Where do you see these? What application? What version of OS X? Post a screen-shot so others can understand what you might be talking about.

Hello,

As you will see other answered first at the end of the post you should try : AdwareMedic http://www.adwaremedic.com/.

But if this does not help you also can edit the /etc/hosts file to block several sites : http://osxdaily.com/2007/03/19/block-access-to-specified-sites-by-modifying-etch osts/

Hope it helps

You're adding info to a four year old thread; and, the linked article is from 2007 - there have been quite a few OS iterations since which may make the instructions less than helpful unless you just tried this with the latest OS version (as per the ToU: test on your own computer before posting).

tschenk wrote:

But if this does not help you also can edit the /etc/hosts file to block several sites

Here is something which was posted to this forum explaining why that is not a good idea:

Use of the hosts file to block ads.

David Charlap MacInTouch Jul 7. 2014

1: It blocks servers, not URLs. This means if a single server is hosting ads and legitimate content that you want to see, you have to take both or block both.

2: There is no wildcarding or domain-scoping, so you need to know all of the hostnames that may be used by an advertiser. Since it is pretty easy for them to rename their servers and change the ad-serving scripts, you're forever playing catch-up. You'll need to keep on adding new hosts to the list (I assume the tool you installed would do this for you.)

3: It blocks all protocols, not just web traffic. So if you want to access that server through other means (maybe ping/traceroute it to figure out who is providing connectivity, you can't.)

4: It blocks servers by redirecting traffic at the null-address (0.0.0.0). This address was historically used as a "don't care" address and many systems, when sending packets to it, will send them as a subnet-broadcast (equivalent to 255.255.255.255). This may put unnecessary traffic on your LAN and might even put a load on your own servers if you have your own local web servers running.

If you decide to stick with the host-file approach (meaning problems 1-3 will remain), I suggest you pick a different IP address than 0.0.0.0 for the blocked hosts. One approach is to pick 127.0.0.1 (localhost), which will result in immediate failures of all requests, if you're not running a local web server. Another would be to pick an unused IP address on your LAN and use that.

But there's another issue. Some web sites load ads via scripts, and those scripts sometimes cause the page to hang for several minutes (network timeouts), if there is no reply from the ad server. A solution to this is to use the IP address of a host on your LAN that is running a web server (possibly even your own computer). Every request will return a 404 error page, which should keep most of the scripts from hanging, since they are getting an actual reply.

If you would like to do this only for web pages and not for all network access, you can set up the same list of hosts using a proxy-auto-config (PAC) file. I wrote an article about this 10 years ago: "Ad blocking on the cheap."

Finally, you might find that some ad-loading scripts hang and timeout even if they get 404 errors. To satisfy them, it should be possible to configure a local web server to serve an actual page (not an error) for every failed URL it receives. It doesn't have to be fancy - it can be a simple HTML page with one line of text. This way, the scripts get no error, the page doesn't hang, and you don't see the ad.

I used to use this approach a long time ago, but I stopped when I realized that tools like AdBlock Plus (running within Firefox and Safari) work even better. They block based on URL filters, not just hostnames, and they are capable of removing advertising scripts from pages, so there isn't even an attempt to load ads.

Thanks, forgot to say running still Mavericks

Thank you to recall all possible issues when editing the /etc/hosts file. Still, I use it on Mavericks without those network "overloading" issues also the entries from MVPS HOSTS are picking IP 0.0.0.0. For "Ad-block Plus" I agree, you have just to edit some filters

OMG Safari extension adblock!!!! go to safari extensions, get adblocker and you are sorted!!!!!!!!!!!! I didn't install mackeeper( who would?) and that silly program keep popping up if I was clicking on a link to watch a video. Adblock plus extension for safari solved it!!!!!!!!!!!!

No its not. Many ad-spammers using scripts that generating unique code every time you open a page that contains it.