Block websites locally in Windows and LINUX

Sometimes, you may want to block access to some websites from your computer. And this is easy to do both in Windows and LINUX.By simply editing a text file named hosts, you will be able to block the websites you want to prevent access to. This is useful for blocking websites at home to prevent kids from accessing wrong type of websites for them. Note that editing the file will require administrative privilege in both systems and in case of LINUX, I root the server(will post article on this one day, google for now) and edit the hosts file.

We can find a file hosts which stores IP address to host mapping for the quicker access to the site.
In Windows: C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\hosts
In Linux: /etc/hosts

Now open the hosts file in the text editor like notepad(in case of windows) and gedit(in case of Linux) and map the incorrect IP address to the website address you want to block. See the screenshot below on Windows XP to be clear on doing this.

I hope you will do some experiments on your own to do other cool stuffs with this knowledge.