To block ads on the web, we need to catch requests to a particular ad server and send them to our local server. We do this by adding an entry to the hosts file. The hosts file on a computer system gives the system information about where to find a computer on the network by mapping hostnames to IP addresses. For our purposes, we will be taking advantage of this by routing requests to ad servers from webpages to our personal system.

These steps will require that you have Apache HTTP server (or IIS with ISAPI_rewrite, something that can rewrite URLs) running on your local machine (or on a system with low latency, possibly on your network).

Continue reading this entry ▶