Oh thank Christ! Aside from the fact that having “mob” in your company name sounds more like you’re going to put a horse head in my bed or break my knees than simply annoy me with advertising on my mobile phone, I hate AdMob. I clearly understand that stuff costs money, and that if I’m getting it for free, and it is not a crippled “lite” version, a demo or FOSS, I really should expect there to be a catch, like having to view ads, but I just couldn’t stand it any longer. Every time I’d look for something interesting in Cydia, I’d try to scroll down for a screenshot, or “More Information” or whatever, but just as my finger touched the screen, the goddamned huge ad would finally load and I’d end up accidentally clicking it. No, I am not going to wait for the whole thing to load, only to try to find a tiny spot where I can touch outside an ad that spans essentially the entire width and nearly the whole length of the screen, without clicking the link I didn’t want, and no, I am not going to learn juuuuust the right way to touch so I can touch the ad, but scroll rather than click. If they’re that much in my way, then I’m sorry–I don’t care whether you need ads to keep your business running…yer out. If they were smaller banners instead of big boxes, I’d tolerate them, and if they were little text links like Google’s, I wouldn’t be bothered much at all, but I’m never, ever going to intentionally click on any ad–never–so it just wastes my time, screen real estate, and bandwidth, and tries my patience. Aside from AdMob in Cydia, there’s also the fact that the web is goddamned near unusable without blocking advertising, and if I’m stuck browsing on Edge (as I am often), it’s so goddamned slow that by the time the page content and the advertising have all loaded, I forgot what I wanted in the first place.

So I don’t lose it, here is the original hosts file that was on the phone, and here is the one on there now. It doesn’t block all of the ads in Cydia, but it blocks the huge AdMob ones that were pissing me off (blocks them in Cycorder, too, but it still works), and so far, the small banners don’t bother me enough that I’m inspired to find out where they point and edit the hosts. I just want enough space that I’m not accidentally clicking shit that is of absolutely no interest to me. The hosts goes in the root of /etc, just like Linux, and when I forget to change the default in gFTP, it needs to be SSH2, 22.

So, yay, and goodbye to huge ads. I think there’s some app in Cydia that doesn’t work if you block AdMob, but if that’s the case, then whatever it is, I don’t need it that badly. 🙂

Now…can I post this from here, then add a screenshot to it from WP on the phone? Yep, I can…here’s more bearable Cydia. I was just picking something at random to take a screenshot, but the little cartoon SMS birds were cute, so I installed them.