adblock - Can one blacklist zedo (or other ad servers) in the browser?

I HATE those zedo popunder ads that show up all the time when I go to certain sites. Is there any way to tell my browser to ignore anything from zedo? Preferably without using adblock software, which usually seems to cause its own problems sooner or later.

I can get partial relief in chrome by creating a whitelist of sites that are allowed to give me cookies. This creates its own problems, as some cookies I attempt to whitelist appear to be blocked anyway.

For a permanent solution you can use the hosts file, add a entry in the host file for the machine serving ads, and point it to the local address 127.0.0.1.

In Windows host file can be found here:

C:\Windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts

In Linux/Unix/MacOSX it can be found here:

/etc/hosts

First you need to get the server name of the machine which is to be blocked, then in the hosts file add following line

127.0.0.1 zedo.com

You will have to add entries for every site to block. There is no wildcarding. E.g. if there are sites zedo.com, ads.zedo.com, ad1.zedo.com, etc, you would have to add them individually.

Note that in effect, this will disable all contact with the site - not just HTTP. For most situations this is not a problem.

See this thread for more information on Host file editing.

The hosts file solution above is probably the easiest, with the caveat of no wildcards.

You can also look into:

Using a configurable dns server or resolver - OpenDNS allows controls on some site blocking.

Your firewall can be configured to block certain sites.