jomen
How do you know which site is legitimate or not ?
I never noticed any prob by blocking it : which problems are you talking about ?

The problem that you can't know for sure wheter a site is "legitimate" or not.
How do you make this decision?
The problem that you may block sites you actually need for things to work properly.
The problem that an IP can be reassigned from one you dislike today to one you actually want tomorrow.
...

You already wrote that before and that doesnt help solve the problem, but thanks anyway.

You're welcome.
I (and others) suggested things to help solve your problem.
Mine does not help? So be it...
I see a problem you don't (want to?) see.
Thats fine with me - have fun!

I am interested in that subject because I like a faster browsing, without ads, and also without spying sites or cookies.

For example in /etc/hosts, first I block all then I test manually and I unblock what is needed etc.

o.k.
What you describe is the "hard way" for me - as opposed to the easy way of AdBlock/FlashBlock/NoScript browser extensions, possibly combined with allowing javascript and cookies only after being asked for permission and deleting them automatically when the browser is closed.
If you initially block everything and allow it only once something does not work - you have a lot of work ahead of you.
The problem however remains - you need to look at something to determine if this will make work what did not because of the block - and then: how do you know that this is not "evil" to you?
And what is or seems evil today can be totally different or neccesary tomorrow. A big hassle and a lot of work - to me.

I will refrain from further comments - and hope you get the advice you need.

Why you would want to manually create your own list that you have to test and verify and guess at instead of taking advantage of the work done by others is beyond me.. You will spend a far greater amount of time working on your list, adding to it, verifying the sites are good or bad then you will lose by just letting the ad's load on a page. Yes it cost you LESS to view those ads, than to spend your time creating a block list of tens of thousands of sites to block..

I think if you did a poll you would find many many people here running Adblock Plus and NoScript as default plugins for Firefox. I'm with jomen on this one for sure.

Have fun !!

I don't run adblock but I do run noscript - it is great.

I run privoxy for system-level blocking. Works with konqueror and anything else too.

To the topic starter: don't be paranoid. :) My /etc/hosts file is now around 2.1 MB large and still there are unblocked sites left. If you are interested in I can send it to you or upload it on my server. But remember that this is *my* block list. My internal IP is 192.168.1.17 where I have running a web server for URL analysis and development.

If you're trying to browse faster, it seems like you're trying to save time. How much time are you really saving by manually editing your hosts file constantly? I'd posit that you are actually wasting more time than you save, therefor defeating the purpose.

Doing this stuff with browser plug-ins will save you a ton of time and hassle. Why you would want to do it manually is beyond comprehension.

Just as an addition. :)

also it you happen to have a windows xp machine .Install "spy bot search and destroy" . It has it's own list it adds to the windows host file , just copy it,the host file, to Linux .
P.S. both the SBSD and the one from
http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm
will crash FireFox/seamonkey on fedora

I also got my selfmade hosts file at http://linuxcbon.over-blog.com/article-2661230.html But that is work in progress.


Related question :

Do you know tools to track/trace http or network requests ?
This is to check what goes out and in.
There is netstat, which options do you use ?

there is " snort " http://www.snort.org/

I have written a small set of shell and PHP scripts to handle adding hosts/domains very easy. I will upload them to my server within the next days.