A little FYI, especially for the noobs:

I use the HOSTS file from the Microsoft guru - it's huge - about 550k and 15,000+ lines - updated regularly at least every 2 months.  It includes variations of the short list below and URLs you would never think of. 
It's available FREE from the blog,

http://msmvps.com/blogs/hostsnews/default.aspx

and the main site page,

http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.htm

You will find some browser pages don't load or don't load nicely after installing this hosts file!
Among those that may not load neatly (preventing videos of your fav shows) are the major
commercial media sites.  The media sites try to enforce the digital millennium rules in their own
way! 

Designed for Microsoft OS's, the actual HOSTS file can be used on almost any  *nix clone, including
Mac OS X, just change the name to lower case to be safe.

This HOSTS file is a good place to start.  You may want to comment out some entries and add your own,
especially for own network.  It'll speed up your lookups because the hosts file is the first place
your system will look for address resolution.  It will cause visual artifacts in your web pages.

Keep it up-to-date.
Make sure only ROOT can write to this file!!!  



On 06/07/2013 04:59 PM, Eric Cope wrote: