Today I opened my Skype and got a ton of “One or more ActiveX controls could not be displayed” error constantly when I was trying to chat with a friend in Skype.
Turns out, skype uses components of IE when displaying ads in Skype. (Which is very scary considering the recent 0day).
I was poking around in process monitor trying to figure out how the hell I can block ads on Skype when I took a more simple approach using Windows Firewall.
I simply created an outbound rule that blocks 443 and check marked the box for only a specific program. I used the skype.exe from C:Program Files (x86)SkypePhoneSkype.exe, restarted skype, and BAM. no more ads.
