Journal TechnoLust's Journal: Roll your own popup/ad remover 12

OK, so I'm getting really sick and tired of pop-under ads and (to an only slightly lesser extent) pop-up ads. At home they are a mere annoyance, with my DSL connection and killer system, they pop up or under and I promptly close them, making a mental note to NEVER do business with that company.
However at work, they are more than a mere annoyance for two reasons. 1) MY PC is slower at work and so is the connection. Hence, it takes a few seconds for the pop up to pop, then a few seconds for them to go away after I close them. This is frustrating. 2) We have a system that runs as a screen saver on all the PCs on the shop floor (I work in IT at an industrial manufacturing company) and it pulls information off our webserver and acts as a sort of virtual bulletin board. It also pulls the weather from the local news stations webserver, and pulls our stock off the internet. We've tried several places including Yahoo!, Red Herring, and excite. We are currently using lycos, which uses Quote.com. The only problem with it (and all the others) is the damn pop up ads. Recently, they have been for a casino. This doesn't really go over that well with the managers, so I have been looking for a way to get rid of pop up ads. I downloaded Popup Killer at home, and it gets most of the pop ups. Unfortunately it gets most anything else that opens in a seperate window. Even when you right click and Open in New Window, it kills it. Needless to say it is about useless. So, I started looking at ways aroud this problem. I noticed the other day that most of the ads were coming from ads.doubleclick.net when suddendly it hit me. Why not just make it so the computer can't find that server? But how? Since all the machines on the shop floor are running some version of Windows, I used a host file. If you are running Win9x open C:\WINDOWS\HOSTS (or wherever you installed Windows) or on NT/2K look under C:\WINNT\SYSTEM32\DRIVERS\ETC\HOSTS for the file. Open it in notepad. It should have some comments and the a line like:
127.0.0.1 localhost
If you add the following line to file:
127.0.0.1 ads.doubleclick.net
no more popups from lycos! Of course, you will need to do this for every server that you commonly get popups on, and it won't work for ads that come from the same server as the content, but most of the pop ads I get are from larger companies that host their own ads. Another good one to block might be X10...

As I said, this won't get them all, and it may take a while to build a good "blacklist" but it's free and it works for my purposes. If anybody else wants to do this, copy your HOSTS file's contents and post them, and I will take the posts and put them with mine and combine them into one big HOSTS file and post it so everyone can use it.

SIDE NOTE: You can also use this to play a trick on your friends or coworkers. ping www.chevy.com and get the IP address, then go into hosts and put chevy's IP address in front of www.ford.com and tell your friend that chevy bought ford out, and make them go to the website. When they type www.ford.com they will get chevy's site. Or just mix all the car makers up and let them think they are going crazy. There are MANY variations of this. Use your imagination.