Digital Infinity

Photo by Oliver Sjostrom Life has changed dramatically since the start of the personal computer revolution in the late 1970s. We have seen computing go from the realm of military to industry, then to the home and now to the pocket of our pants. Connected computers have followed the same path, as the Internet has forever changed the landscape of computing, including how people interact with it. Along the way, we've seen computing go from being rather anti-social to being a completely mainstream component of popular culture. Let's pause for a moment and examine how technology migrated into being chic. In the late 1970s there was a lot of optimism around what computing technology could someday do for us and while many people were eager to learn, that number was still small. Computers were essentially souped up calculators and most people weren't eager to learn an arcane programming language or spend their free time noodling around with calculations. One pivotal use ca...

Google is an advertising company first and foremost, lest we forget. They want to create ads people want to see, they say, but I find it hard to trust their motives. It comes as little surprise they want to clamp down on browser extension based adblockers as Ars recently covered. Fortunately, there are other ways to block ads which are more effective anyway. Every OS has a hosts file, which is simply a plain text file that can route internet traffic from one host to another. In Linux and Mac OS X the hosts file is in /etc/hosts and in Windows it is in C:\Windows\System32\Drivers\etc\hosts and editing it will require sudo or Administrator rights. Once you have your hosts file open, we are going to add a bunch of entries to it that will take traffic from many thousand known ad-serving domains and route it to 0.0.0.0 which is equivalent to a digital trash can. There are options for host file ad blocking. Personally, I use the list from mvps.org  but the list from Steven B...