January 31, 2003

A brilliant idea.

I just heard of this brilliant idea, from Nash Foster. To speed up your browser, and block ads, quickly and easily, do the following.

Open up your local hosts file. Make a reference in there for, say, ads.doubleclick.com. Point that to, say, 127.0.0.1. Bang. Now when you hit a page, it’s going to resolve locally, (re: fast), and without that annoying ad.

I just now have to figure out where my hosts file is on the Mac. Noel pointed me in the right direction. It’s at /etc/hosts. As well you can use NetInfo to help you out. Thanks Noel.

The hosts file is owned by root. So you have to su -, which puts you into root mode. Then vi hosts. That will open vi. Go down to where you want to add your additions. Type in a. (for annotate). Type in your lines. 127.0.0.1 ads.doubleclick.com. Then hit esc, then :, then wq. (write, quit). Done.

So far, I’ve added in the following ad servers:
ads.doubleclick.com
global.msads.net
m2.doubleclick.net

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