May 04, 2003
Why "Bob"?
[Thanks to Andrew Bangs and Rob Mortimer for their historic assistance here]
All tech support personal are called "Bob". (Female support personnel have an option on "Bobette", as they feel appropriate). This has nothing to do with "Bob", the Divine Drilling Equipment Salesman and the Church of the SubGenius. Nor it is "Brother Of BOFH" (although that's smart sidewise thinking, which is good). The real story of Bob can finally be revealed...
The time: August 1995. The place: Demon Internet, Support Department. A large number of new victims recruits were due to arrive, and it was observed that there would be much duplication of names. To ease the confusion, it was decided that all support techs would henceforth be known as "Bob", and identity badges were created labelled "Bob 1" and "Bob 2". (No, we never got any further).
The reason for "Bob" rather than anything else is due to a luser calling and asking to speak to "Bob", despite the fact that no "Bob" was currently working for Tech Support. Since we all know "the customer is always right", there had to be at least one "Bob", just in case.
Just a little sillyness, but it snowballed. Shift leaders and managers began to refer to their groups of 'bobs'. Whole ranks of support machines were set up (and still exist in the DNS) as bob1 through bob[lots].
Then came a.t-s.r, and it was filled with Demon support personnel. They all referred to themselves, and to others, as 'bob', and after a while it caught on.
Just one of those strange things, I guess...
Mark Halsall (mhalsall@mail.io.com) notes that:
Bungie Software's Marathon [0] series has a bunch of civilians [1] running around. Fun to shoot, even better to just punch to death. And, they're all called Bob.
[0] A trilogy of shoot-em up games for the Mac.
[1] Read "moving targets"."
Being a Trainer-of-Bobs and Bob-to-Bobs, I can kind of sympathise with that. But surely something involving destruction (or preferably lots of pain and *then* destruction) of lusers is better. Or PH1s, for that matter...
And more, on the Marathon BOBs, from Acheron :
In Marathon Infinity (the last of the trilogy), the BOBs get their revenge. Gone are the wimpy civilians running around, replaced by teleporting, fusion-pistol packing BOB-teams with loads of firepower. If you so much as nick one of the BOBs with a stray bullet while in view of another BOB, you'll be greeted with cries of "HEY!!! HE SHOT BOB!!!" as they all turn their loving projectile attention to you and blow you away. This is starting to digress. Badly. Let's hear no more on pixelated bobs, unless you have a "Hell^HpDesk Total Conversion" for Quake of course ;)
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Technically,
Bobco
Block Web Ads
By Neil J. Rubenking
In the futuristic world of the recent film Minority Report, targeted advertisements accost pedestrians on the street calling them by their first names and touting various wares. Mere science fiction? Not on the Internet. When you surf to a page that contains banner ads, advertisers can get the URL of the page, your IP address, the time, and your browser version. Advertisers can then plant cookies on your system that let them track which ads you've seen. They may not know your name, but they know your habits.
Privacy issues aside, ubiquitous online ads are plain annoying. Whether banners, pop-ups, or pop-unders, they all take up bandwidth and get in your way. You can download dozens of shareware and freeware programs to block them, but there's another way to stop many ads, which requires nothing more complicated than a text editor.
To understand this solution, you need to know a bit about names and addresses on the Internet. Every Web site has a unique IP address; for example, 63.111.13.100. Such a numeric ID is fine for computers, but people need a more memorable domain name, like www.pcmag.com. The job of translating domain names to IP addresses is handled by a Domain Name System (DNS) server. If you configured your Internet connection yourself, you may remember entering either one or two DNS server addresses in the TCP/IP Properties dialog.
# Copyright (c) 1998 Microsoft Corp.#
# This is a sample HOSTS file used by Microsoft TCP/IP stack for Windows98
#
# This file contains the mappings of IP addresses to host names. Each
# entry should be kept on an individual line. The IP address should
# be placed in the first column followed by the corresponding host name.
# The IP address and the host name should be separated by at least one
# space.
#
# Additionally, comments (such as these) may be inserted on individual
# lines or following the machine name denoted by a '#' symbol.
#
# For example:
#
# 102.54.94.97 rhino.acme.com # source server
# 38.25.63.10 x.acme.com # x client host
127.0.0.1 localhost :: Anormal hosts file would list the individual IP adresses of the domain so you can allow some through and block others. My own hosts file reflects my local host, so all ads are blocked.
I'll go over this in detail in another post but, to put it in a nutshell, this technique has been another more complete and automatic solution. A bit more complex, perhaps, but there has been very little to no maintenace at all.
Most popular operating systems provide a mechanism to short-circuit DNS lookup by hard-coding the IP addresses for specific domains. Windows uses a simple text file called Hosts (no extension). In Windows 9x platforms, this file is usually in the Windows folder. In Windows NT–family platforms, it resides in the folder Drivers\etc below the Windows System folder. You can open it in Notepad to take a look (see Figure 1).
Each functional line in the Hosts file consists of an IP address, one or more spaces, and a domain name. Anything after the comment character # is ignored. A typical line might look like this:
63.111.13.100 www.pcmag.com # PC Magazine
Your system doesn't request a DNS lookup when the domain name is found in Hosts.
To display a banner ad, your browser requests the ad's content from the advertiser's site. If that request fails, the ad won't appear. You can ensure that such requests fail by using Hosts to associate an advertiser's domain name with the wrong IP address! The special IP address 127.0.0.1 represents the local host—your own computer. If you associate an advertiser's domain name with 127.0.0.1 in the Hosts file, any requests for a URL in that domain will quickly return an error message. Because the URL is completely blocked, the advertiser has no contact with your computer. That advertiser doesn't get to see your IP address and can't access cookies on your system, and its Web bugs fail. Pop-up and pop-under windows may still appear, but without their advertising content.
The task of compiling a Hosts file to block all known advertiser domains would be daunting. Fortunately, you don't have to do it yourself. Just do a Web search on the words ad blocking hosts file windows and choose from the many sites that offer their own collections. Be sure to back up your original Hosts file before overwriting it with a downloaded one, and copy any noncomment lines from the original file to the new one. Clear your browser's cache, to keep it from serving up previously cached ads. As soon as you restart the browser, it will begin blocking ads.
On some systems, a large Hosts file can interact with other processes to slow Internet or network access dramatically. If this happens, restore the original Hosts file and try a freeware or shareware ad blocker instead. Naturally, the Hosts technique can't block ads that come from the site you're viewing; if you see the site, you'll see its ads. And if the advertiser uses a URL starting with the numeric IP address, the Hosts file has no effect.
If you get unexpected errors accessing a particular domain, you may need to edit the Hosts file and remove that domain name. For example, some downloadable Hosts files block www.netflix.com, the DVD rental service. If you use the service, you'll need to remove the URL from your Hosts file.
When you block a domain using the Hosts file, that domain is completely blocked, including all protocols and applications. You can't choose, for example, to allow images but block cookies. If you need finer control for just a few domains, use the Hosts file in conjunction with a utility such as PC Magazine's free CookieCop 2 (www.pcmag.com/utilities). Just remove any domain names from the Hosts file that you want CookieCop 2 to handle.
Ads that the Hosts file blocks are replaced either with a Hosts error message that reads This page cannot be displayed or with a red X, indicating a missing image. This can make the page look rather peculiar. Also, the blocked URLs may turn up in your browser's Back list, preventing the Back button from working. In that case, try selecting the earlier page you wanted from the drop-down list.
Despite these limitations, the Hosts technique enhances your privacy and blocks most ads. And it's free!