[rmlug-general] Effective Ad Blocking

[Michael Brown]

For awhile now I've been using the AdBlock plugin for Firefox to prevent 
ads from being displayed on my web browser, and it works great.  More 
recently I've started using my /etc/hosts file to redirect ad showing 
domains to my local machine, which in effect doesn't display the ad on 
the web page (an entry in my /etc/hosts file like 127.0.0.1       
www80.valueclick.com for example).  I like this idea even better because 
it doesn't require a browser plugin, and I can copy the /etc/hosts file 
to other computers on a regular basis to update their ad blocking 
capabilities.

The problem I'm running into now is when domains start hosting their own 
banners.  I don't want to block www.myfavoritewebsite.com but I would 
like to block www.myfavoritewebsite.com/banners or some other 
sub-folder.  To my knowledge /etc/hosts doesn't handle that and I must 
go back to using the AdBlock plugin.  I was wondering what others were 
using, and if there really is an ad blocking nirvana out there (using 
the links browser does not count as ad blocking nirvana :)

-- 
Michael Brown