Tag: kakao

The kakaotalk client on Mac is okay but the Windows client is full of ads: ads in friend list, ads in chat, ads in the corner of the screen, ad under your cursor.

It annoyed me to no end. So what’s the solution? Find a way to block it!

I used a nifty tool called TCP View (very old, but still works). It can resolve domains from IP address and is not as heavy as Wireshark 😉

I looked up the domains kakaotalk.exe connects to and found the following, so I added this to /Windows/System32/drivers/etc/hosts

#Block kakao ads
 0.0.0.0 alea.adam.ad.daum.net
 0.0.0.0 wat.ad.daum.net
 0.0.0.0 display.ad.daum.net
 0.0.0.0 analytics.ad.daum.net
 0.0.0.0 ad.daum.net

And voilà! No more annoying ads!

Update

Since Kakao stopped offering the Windows Store version (which had less ads), it’s time for an update

There’s a Korean program that runs in the background and block the ads for you.

You can find it here https://github.com/blurfx/KakaoTalkAdBlock . The drawback is you need to install and keep it running with administrator priviledges, but at least it’s open source so you can have a look 🙂