Blocking Unwanted Connections To Ad Sites In OSX

The Internet as is sucks big time! You have Ad sites violating your privacy and trying to track your WWW behavior to profile you. You can use your built-in OSX Hosts file to make the Internet not Suck as much. But more importantly, protect your identity and privacy and speed up your browsing noticably. Here is how:

Step 1 – Download hosts-file from mvps.org

download hosts-file from http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.zip

Step 2 – unzip host-file

double-click on the downloaded file hosts.zip

Step 3 – become root

open a terminal and type:
$su - administrator
$su - root¹ (Launch the Directory Utility and enable root in the edit menu - http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1528)

Step 4 – replace current host-file

first it's a good idea to backup your current hosts-file:
#cp /private/etc/hosts /private/etc/hosts.sik
#cat [location of your unziped hosts-file]/hosts > /private/etc/hosts

Step 5 – Flush the DNS cache

flush the DNS cache, and have your host file changes to take immediate effect:
#dscacheutil -flushcache; exit