Custom host files

[vasa1]

Here:
A tip to cut down the Hosts file

And this:

One additional hint: I use the hosts file from www.mvps.org but experienced a lot of time-out error messages under WinXP. These time-outs vanished after I replaced all 127.0.0.1 entries with 0.0.0.0 (with the exception of localhost, of course!). Worth a try if somebody experiences the same problem.

Source: http://www.wilderssecurity.com/showp...18&postcount=4

[vasa1]

You've got me interested in this hosts file business
I've dumped Adblock Plus for Chrome since recent versions seem to have some "issues". I moved (back) to Privoxy but the one problem is that Privoxy doesn't do anything about https sites. The hosts file could come handy in such cases.

While poking around in /etc, I noticed that in addition to hosts, there's hosts.allow and hosts.deny. Wonder what they're all about since whatever I remember reading has been just about the hosts file.

Edit: "hosts.allow and hosts.deny are deprecated."
http://askubuntu.com/a/23225/25656