For a while now, I’ve been using the trick of setting known hosts for advertisements to localhost in my hosts file… This has the effect of not displaying ads I don’t want to see, instead showing me a satisfying ie not found error…

I’ve taken this a step farther by changing the hosts file to instead point at my local linux server, which I’ve configured to kick back spacer.gif on all 404’s… spacer.gif is a 1×1 transparent image that used to be used pretty commonly in web dev.

So now, instead of an ad, i just see a nicely formatted empty space. ;D