How to fix Gamespot images being a red X

[druski]

Hello,

I'm a long time lurker who thought I'd just pop in to help out the people who are having difficulty seeing images in Gamespot or other websites (the images appear as a red X).

First off I'm betting you have Kazaa Lite installed. Even if not read on, this will probably solve your problem anyways.

On your computer there is a file called the 'HOSTS' file. This file is used to map domain names to IP addresses manually. Usually it only contains one line which is:

127.0.0.1 localhost

This line tells your OS to map the IP address 127.0.0.1 to the domain 'localhost', so if you type localhost in your browsers address bar you hit 127.0.0.1, which is a special IP address which means basically "this machine".

Kazaa lite and a few other apps decide to "help you out" by "upgrading" your HOSTS file so as to block ads. What they do is they set a great many domain names known to host advertising images (doubleclick.net, etc) to be also set to "127.0.0.1".

That way, when your browser is told to display an image like "http://ads.adserver.com/1424213/big_annoying_ad.gif" your computer first checks its HOSTS file, sees that "ads.adserver.com" has been set to 127.0.0.1 and so it tries to display "http://127.0.0.1/1424213/big_annoying_ad.gif", which unless you happen to be running a web server and happen to have a directory called 1424213 with an image called big_annoying_ad.gif in it, will not work. So the image will appear as broken, which is often depicted by a white square with a red X in it.

To fix this, simply find your HOSTS file. On XP its in "C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc" and its called "HOSTS", if you are running another version of windows it may be in the same directory otherwise just do a find file for "HOSTS".

Open this file using notepad, and you will see that it has long lists of domainname-IP address pairs, headed by usually three comments (if Kazaa Lite did the dirty deed).


It should look like this:

# localhost: Needs to stay like this to work
127.0.0.1 localhost

# KaZaA related:

127.0.0.1 desktop.kazaa.com
127.0.0.1 www.altnetp2p.com
127.0.0.1 alpha.kazaa.com
....

# Adservers and other crappy sites:

127.0.0.1 123banners.com
127.0.0.1 ad.adsmart.net
127.0.0.1 ad.ca.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 ad.de.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 ad.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 ad.es.doubleclick.net
....


You can either delete all of the lines except for the first two (containing the "localhost" name) or if you like the ad blocking functionality, scroll down until you find:

127.0.0.1 image.com.com

and delete that line. Save the file and then reload your webpages and if you deleted all the linse except for the localhost line all images will start working again. If you just deleted image.com.com then the Gamespot screenshots, etc, should start working again but many other ads will be blocked.

Hope that helped!

-drew

[mikkyT]

Hes bang on, well spotted sir.

I realised this morning why it was doing it, as I only installed the HOSTS file at the weekend.

One point to note, don't delete any lines, simply comment them out with a #. Then should you wish to block them out in the future, you just remove the #, in case u forget the address its still in there for ya.

[Hamma]

Or http://www.planetside-universe.com/m....php?cat_id=45

[korezero]

Originally posted by Hamma
Or http://www.planetside-universe.com/m....php?cat_id=45

Problem solved

[mikkyT]

Not if you wana look at other gamespot piccies

[afex]

Originally posted by mikkyT
Not if you wana look at other gamespot piccies

the only ones worth looking at are PS ones, and we've got them all