Advertisement-Free Hotspot Shield Experience

Among my many frustrations with using a media center setup in our home in the Philippines is the inability to watch streaming movies and tv programs from the US, apparently due to some licensing issues with countries outside the US. I thought If I only could find a way to watch streaming videos from Netflix and Hulu and a few other websites, my media center would be perfect, and that I can already have my cable subscription terminated.

If you are living outside the US, Netflix and Hulu (and the others) would normally prevent you from watching streaming videos from their site, as they block IP addresses that do not originate from US. One work around to this is to use a VPN service that will hide your IP address and make you appear to be in the US.

I googled and found a few vpn services, some are free, some are paid, but the best that I found, in my opinion, is Hotspot Shield. Its is small in size, easy to use, and it's free. The only thing I didn't like with it is the advertisement banners it generates on every webpage you open. I don't blame them, they have to do it to be able to provide that "free" vpn service that we all want.

While I am totally ok with the advertisements Hotspot Shield generates (if I want to use their service, I had to support them by at least looking at their ads), I thought I could experiment and find a way to eliminate the banner ads and make the web pages look normal again.

Here's what I did to remove or block the advertisements from AnchorFree, provider of Hotspot Shield, the free VPN software that I used to hide my IP address and make myself appear to be in the US, thus allowing me to watch streaming movies and tv programs that are usually only allowed to residents of the United States (due to some licensing issues with other countries)

First, I edited my hosts file and added a few websites that I want blocked. I did it by opening notepad as administrator (right click on Notepad shortcut and click on Run as administrator) and opening the hosts file found in C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc (change the file type filter from text files to all files to see the contents of the folder). Once loaded into notepad, add the following entries to the bottom of the file then save and close it afterward:

127.0.0.1 box.anchorfree.net
127.0.0.1 rss2search.com
127.0.0.1 a433.com
127.0.0.1 bannerfarm.ace.advertising.com

This trick removes the advertisement banner that usually appears on the top of the browser screen whenever Hotspot Shield is running and connected to their server. This also gives you a blank page instead of the box.anchorfree.net page the Hotspot Shield client redirects to after connecting to the server. This trick alone is enough already to remove the advertisements being forced by AnchorFree into every webpage I open.

While at first already satisfied with the result, I thought I could use the redirect trick AnchorFree is using to bring up advertisement pages. I went back to opening and editing my hosts file and modifying the first entry that I made. Instead of using 127.0.0.1 (which is equivalent to localhost) as IP address for box.anchorfree.net, I changed it to 208.75.76.17, the IP address of Netflix.com, my favorite website for watching movies and tv programs. That way, whenever I connect to Hotspot Shield, the client automatically redirects me to Netflix.com's homepage.