pwnt.be

As most of you are probably aware, Windows Live Messenger is supported by advertisements and there are several patches that allow you to remove those from the UI. Now, personally, I’m sort of opposed to those. The thought of unofficial binary patches isn’t very comforting to begin with, but I prefer to keep the ads there, since I’m willing to accept that maintaining a costless large-scale IM network can’t be done without substantial investment. Be that as it may, my ISP has a nasty habit of capping download speeds to a rather ludicrous 4 kilobytes per second, thus making downloading the ads a burden. If you suffer from a similar problem, there’s a fairly straightforward way of avoiding downloading the ads, without having to use another client or install shady software. All you need is a decent firewall. Personally, I’m a big fan of the freely available Sunbelt Kerio Personal Firewall. Its Packet Filter option allows you to restrict traffic per protocol, port and address. All you need to block Windows Live Messenger’s ads is an embargo on its HTTP traffic, since, as far as I can tell, that’s the only thing it uses HTTP for. That results in this packet filter rule, which seems to be working well for me so far. Of course, alternatively, you could use another software firewall—even ZoneAlarm, but trust me, it’s shit—or even a hardware-based solution, though that won’t give you fine-grained control over the source application, so you will have to figure out what destination address range it uses, and block that for all applications, which may be an inconvenience.
Update: When HTTP connections fail, Windows Live Messenger also removes a number of other features from the UI, such as the MSN Search shortcuts, dynamic display pictures, and stuff from people’s Spaces. I can only applaud that.