My fight against ads.

Running openwrt on my router and hating advertisements, I decided to look into dnsmasq's possibilities. And indeed it supports hard binding of addresses to Domain names.

adding to dnsmasq.conf, and putting a file generated by http://pgl.yoyo.org/as/ in there (as ablock.conf) quite securely blocks all ads on my network (and from basic testing, it seems that even ads at the beginning of flash videos are filtered out. YAY!).

I know using /etc/hosts would achieve the same result, but somehow I find this approach more elegant (as well as more efficient, from what I've read).