Blocking Ads in OS X

[paladin]

An article on MacMerc about a tip to block advertisements in all browsers, as long as you are using OS X:

http://macmerc.com/sections.php?op=viewarticle&artid=83

The basic idea is to compile a list of major sources of ads (say doubleclick.net, admonitor.net, etc), and edit your /private/etc/hosts file such that those domain names all point to localhost.

The disadvantage, I think, is that you will have to compile the list very carefully such that you will not blocking some innocent sites....

[the real unknown]

Don't you also need some kind of httpd running for that to work?

[oeyvind]

Don't you also need some kind of httpd running for that to work?

nah, but need to tell lookupd to refer the flat file. (man lookupd for more info)

[paladin]

Don't you also need some kind of httpd running for that to work?

Oh, yeah. The article did recommend turning on 'personal web sharing'. Might sound a bit dumb but still faster than loading the ads. This is how Tucows looks like without the ads:



The error message looks awful. The next step is to have them being pointed to a blank page by editing /etc/httpd/httpd.conf. The result looks like



Do you know how to do this without running am httpd, oeyvind?