If the reviews are to be believed, Ghostery has been sold to an advertising company and may be functioning as spyware

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/9609

From the Ghostery/Better Advertising Privacy Policy- "We collect user traffic patterns"; "we track click-through information, including IP addresses"; "We may place a text file called a 'cookie' in the browser files of your computer."; "We may provide personal information to or permit access to personal information by our vendors and service providers"; "If Better Advertising should ever file for bankruptcy or have its assets sold to or merged with another entity, information Better Advertising receives from you, from this website, is a Better Advertising asset and may be transferred."

I just add them all to my hosts file I don't see the need for anything additional. I think I may have adblockplus installed. I was reading the top article now the one about firefox and h.264 and saw a lot of net hits for disqus, so I added that to my hosts file too and wow, does the page ever load faster.

is this needed even with adblockplus? [edit - adblock doesn't stop the js pings with the default us subscription] [edit2 - or with an explicit listing; i ended up blocking them via dns] [edit3 - no i didn't; firefox is ignoring my dns?! confused...]

I ended up installing this, which is pretty neat - http://www.requestpolicy.com/

firefox can't ignore dns. on windows, you have to do

   ipconfig /flushdns

to clear your dns cache, then restart firefox

i intend to look again this evening - i may well have made a mistake, but i couldn't understand what was happening (i am on linux, restarted firefox, and also restarted nscd; i didn't modify hosts, but did add a master record for the domain to my local network's name server - "host" and firefox were, apparently, inconsistent) (i was so surprised i went into the code and checked it was using a name and not a numerical address...)