I was doing some research for an assignment i'm doing on DNS, and I came across a site about using the hosts file to block web traffic.

I thought it was pretty cool... "There is no place like 127.0.0.1 "

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

It's got a file w\ all sorts of documented adware / virii and other malicious websites. Basically you switch out your hosts file w\ the one they have on this site w\ all these sites and it gives 127.0.0.1 as the location of all these malicious sites, so that if it were trying to open up it would fail because it would be looking on your computer for the web site.

I'd gone over this file before in a class I had but never thought about manipulating it like this. I might start using it at work.