The Glorious Series of Tubes

The internet is a wonderful and glorious place...except when it's not of course...which is fairly often. As the internet has become more useful and more used, it has of course become more dangerous and more annoying (like those flash ads that cover the whole page).

But what if I told you there was an easy way to get rid of all that junk? Something that probably even my mom could do. All you have to do is download a file and replace it for another one and many of the intrusive ads and phishing sites are then rendered "localhosted".

So what is this magic bullet? It's called the hosts file, and you may heave heard of it on the Security Now podcast. Basically what this file does is define domain names for your browser. So before your browser goes across the internet to retrieve the data, it will check the hosts file to see at what IP address that domain name (the www.whatever.com) is found. If you lie to it, and tell it a different IP address (such as localhost 127.0.0.1), then it will not show that annoying flash ad that covers the whole page like a virus.

So with all the explanation aside, all you have to do is download a hosts file and for Windows XP place it in C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc. You can get it as a text file here (which you would rename from "hosts.txt" to just hosts before you copy it into the folder) or download the zip file, unzip it and open mvps.bat. And you're done...man, there no place like 127.0.0.1.

**Editing this file is also a great way to play pranks on people such as changing their Battlefield 2 (159.153.177.11) website to automatically take them to My Little Pony's (207.162.131.61) website...think of the possibilities...