I don't know about the rest of you, but I HATE web adds. They eat up bandwidth (slowing down my surf'n). I also hate the profiling done by some of the big guys, i.e. doubleclick, adforce, BeFree, etc.

I generally go to the sites and "opt out" of any profiling. Opt out is a way to set the cookie to a 1 or 0 to say to them to not to profile me. Well this is irratating and time cosuming.

In my monthly search for easier ways to go about this "opt out" process, I just ran across a relatively simple way to avoid the ads.

Tell your computer the address of these sites do not exsist.

Now, this is something that takes just a little bit knowledge, but it isn't that hard. Most systems use a simple text file that it does to lookup a friendly address to a it's IP address.

The file name is "hosts". It is located depending on your operating system:

Windows NT                  %Systemroot%\System32\Drivers\Etc
  Windows 95                  \
  Windows for Workgroups      \
  Windows 3.1                 \
  MS-Client 3.0               \Net
  Lan Manager 2.2c Client     \Net
(I am not sure about MAC, or Unix. Try searching your hard drives).

Now... What are you supposed to do with this file? Edit it!

Example:
127.0.0.1       localhost
127.0.0.1 ad.uk.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 ad.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 ads.x10.com

As the first line says... the address for "localhost" is 127.0.0.1, where 127.0.0.1 is actually a default IP address to your local computer! By adding extra addresses pointing back to yourself, your web browser can never get to the offending websites! Kinda neat, huh? When you open up a web page with the above address, you just get an error of "can't locate site".

The next big project is to start finding all the addresses of the ad web sites. So if you know the addresses, post them.