Block Unwanted Advertisements with a Hosts File on Linux

I surf the web an awful lot, probably slightly more than your average 13 year old geek. I notice that a lot of sites load rather slowly mostly because your waiting on content from outside the specific domain. For example if you go to a website like thechive.com (one of my favorites) you will notice it takes quite a long time loading the ads. It would be nice if you could block advertisements… oh you can?

Although I mentioned thechive.com I spend most of my time on the net looking for information, not entertainment. These ads really hinder my search speed!

So here is a quick way you can block all the ads. Not only will your surfing be faster but you will also save some bandwidth.

First off I would like to thank the fine folks at http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/ for doing all the leg work and collecting all the data necessary for this to work.