I find myself at the moment without a license for Office 365 and for the time being, I’m just using the web-based version of Outlook as found on outlook.live.com. This would probably be bearable only it’s a fair bit irritating to me with their frequent ad rotation/animations as seen in the right panel.
I’m guessing that people in marketing must think that if they’re not irritating, we won’t pay attention to them. But how should rudeness result in a sale? That just defies logic to me but that’s how they think now.
Adding Insult to Injury
Looking into this further, I can see that Microsoft is allowing third parties to track what I do, what I type, etc. I’ll be culling some of these abuses as well.
The Fix
Without further ado, I indicate the work-around to stop their ad server from functioning. I’ve given the instructions for OS X. For a Windows computer, you’d use Notepad to edit c:/windows/system32/drivers/etc/hosts instead.
$ nano /private/etc/hosts
127.0.0.1 ads.adacado.com adacado.com
127.0.0.1 lax1-ib.adnxs.com adnxs.com
127.0.0.1 aka-cdn.adtechus.com adtechus.com
127.0.0.1 a248.e.akamai.net
127.0.0.1 ads.scorecardresearch.com scorecardresearch.com
127.0.0.1 ol.at.atwola.com
127.0.0.1 pixel.advertising.com advertising.com
Initially, you’ll need to supply the you password. When finished adding these lines, you would enter Ctl-O, Enter and Ctrl-X and finally exit. Refresh in your browser and the ads should be gone.
outsourced guru 