This has been around for some time now but its possible that some of you have not heard of it yet. I found a site through digg.com that has a neat list of 40000 entries that you could partially or fully add to your windows host list and prevent ads from those 40000 hosts to be shown on your system, ever again.
Whenever you open up a website that has a ad link on it it changes the hostname of the ad to the one of your computer, which means of course the ad cannot be found and thus not displayed. Its an easy trick. I would be cautious nevertheless, a list of 40000 is not easy to maintain and overlook and it could be that hosts are in that list that you want to have displayed. I´d suggest you take a look and see for yourself, maybe add only some ads to your hostfile from sites that you visit a lot.
They have a nice faq on that site which answers lots of basic questions e.g. uninstallation, download, install etc. Pretty good site.
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3 Responses to “Block Ads Using Your Host File”
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[...] This has been around for some time now but its possible that some of you have not heard of it yet. I found a site through ghacks that has a neat list of 40000 entries that you could partially or fully add to your windows host list and prevent ads from those 40000 hosts to be shown on your system, ever again. [...]
I´am not sure if it is such a good idea to add that many entries to the windows host file.
FYI: sites such as WallStreetJournal, CBS, etc. use some of these ad sites, so pages may not be fully function when visiting legitimate websites.