The Xbox Metro dashboard has brought lots of shiny new features to the console, but many gamers are troubled by the amount of advertising appearing on there.
Redditer absurdlyobfuscated says there are many ways to do this, but he decided to use OpenDNS because it’s the easiest solution. Straight from Reddit’s intertubes:
Step 1: Sign up for a free OpenDNS account, and add a network for your IP address.
Step 2: Go to Advanced Settings, then Domain Typos, and, if it isn’t already, check the ‘Enable typo correction’ box and then Apply.
Step 3: In Web Content Filtering settings, you’ll need to set your filtering level to ‘None’, and by ‘Manage individual domains’, key in rad.msn.com which you’ll then want to set as ‘Always block’. After that, click on ‘Add Domain’ in order to rubber-stamp your changes.
Step 4: On your Dashboard, head to System Settings -> Network Settings -> (your connection) -> Configure Network -> DNS settings -> Manual, and type in the following OpenDNS IP addresses for the primary and secondary DNS servers: 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220 respectively.
Step 5: You’ll probably need to clear the cache in order for your cunning tampering to take effect. Simply head to System Settings -> Storage -> Hard Drive -> press Y -> Clear System Cache.
absurdlyobfuscated also suggests reconfiguring your router to use OpenDNS’ DNS servers via a static DNS setting. That way you don’t have to block each Xbox 360 in the house individually. Also, if your IP address changes, you will need to update your OpenDNS network to match.
Another solution for some routers is to just block the ad-serving domain. You can test to see if it worked by trying to load https://rad.msn.com/.
