Why bother? My list works fine for me. If you compiled your own list, with competent computer skills, Im sure it would be just fine for you too. BTW, what are these so called "ads" you speak of? I get incredibly few ads. Not because of some list I subscribe to, but because I am the one that maintains it, just as you can as well. The reason that I put mine in the HOSTS file is due to the way firewalls work. They can block your outgoing requests to specific sites, but then your browser "waits" for those connection requests to time out. By redirecting to localhost with a HOSTS file, your own system responds immediately that the ad or service isnt available, which speeds up browsing. The disadvantage to using the HOSTS file, as I said in an earlier post is that HOSTS (thats just the way its spelled, all caps, not trying to shout) files dont support Wildcard * characters, so an entry has to be entered for each host. Firewalls will accept *.facebook.com, *.fbshare and *.fbcdn.net, but those do cause timeouts, which can actually go slower.
There is a point to this as well. Facebook doesnt give a fuck if you've said you quit their service or not. They dont even give a fuck if a court came down and said you are expressly prohibited from tracking this individual forever, they are going to do it anyway. The only way you can protect yourself from Facebook's intrusive technology is to make sure your comptuer doesnt talk to facebook's servers directly, which is about as much as you can do. They can still acquire information about you in other ways, but that is well beyond the scope of this post.
Ive made my privacy rants before, and will refuse until the end of time to use facebooks services for plenty of reasons which obviously many many people could care less about. Just as many people think the Federal Reserve is actually a part of the US govt and think we need it, they are the good guys, they actually prefer for someone else to do their thinking for them, which is exactly what facebook can help the Govt and Corporations accomplish. I dont really care if anyone else thinks that I have a Right to stop private company from tracking me, I am going to stop them. At the same time, I am not going to make that decision for you or anyone else. If you want to be used by facebook, that is not my business to make that decision for you. Facebook unfortunately does not feel the same way. They dont think that you have any say so in your privacy and should be told what to think. If you want to stop them from tracking you, then I can and am willing to help. And yes, facebook has even infected this site as well. Try doing a netstat -a and oh, look at that, facebook shit even here because of what I believe to be poor decisions by the person(s) running this site, but doesnt work at all unless my computer talks to facebooks computers.
And for the record, VPN's dont help as much as one might think.
