Recently, I updated my /etc/hosts file. I don’t currently use any ad blocking software aside from that.

The last one I used was Ghostery, which seemed to work well. I’ve heard great things about the Privacy Badger, though I haven’t downloaded it; it’s not really so much an ad blocker but a privacy tool. Anyhow.

My /etc/hosts file is 30,731 lines long. 72 lines are blank, 2,089 lines are comments, and 5 refer to localhost. That leaves ~28,500 foreign hosts, all redirected to either 127.0.0.1 or 0.0.0.0. Some hosts might appear more than once, so it’s a rough number.

It’s not a perfect ad blocking solution. I still see ads occasionally, but most seem to be gone. It’s not just about ads, though: I don’t need my machine making useless connections to at best analytics and at worst malware sites. It wastes bandwidth and energy I’d rather not use. Plus, it’s such an easy modification, I don’t see any reason not to set it up. Perhaps it will cause an issue using some sites. If it does, I’ll just inspect which HTTP requests are failing and rerun the tool, excluding those domains. This hasn’t happened yet.

Here’s how I set it up. It’s pretty easy:

  1. Clone StevenBlack’s excellent repository from GitHub. It’s a large repository (for a bunch of textfiles), so clone it on a good Internet connection and/or be patient.

    git clone https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts.git
Cloning into 'hosts'...
remote: Counting objects: 567, done.
remote: Total 567 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0), pack-reused 567
Receiving objects: 100% (567/567), 21.69 MiB | 312.00 KiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (235/235), done.
Checking connectivity... done.

cd ./hosts/

  2. Back up your original /etc/hosts file. (optional)

    You might want to keep a copy of your original hosts file around, for old time’s sake.

    cp /etc/hosts ~/hosts.original

  3. Run the tool.

    python updateHostsFile.py 
Do you want to update all data sources? [Y/n] y
Updating source malwaredomainlist.com from http://www.malwaredomainlist.com/hostslist/hosts.txt
Updating source mvps.org from http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.txt
Updating source someonewhocares.org from http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/hosts
Updating source StevenBlack from https://raw.github.com/StevenBlack/hosts/master/data/StevenBlack/hosts
Updating source yoyo.org from http://pgl.yoyo.org/adservers/serverlist.php?hostformat=hosts&mimetype=plaintext&useip=0.0.0.0
Do you want to exclude any domains?
For example, hulu.com video streaming must be able to access its tracking and ad servers in order to play video. [Y/n] n
OK, we won't exclude any domains.
==>::1 localhost<==
==>::1 localhost<==
Success! Your shiny new hosts file has been prepared.
It contains 25845 unique entries.
Do you want to replace your existing hosts file with the newly generated file? [Y/n] y
Moving the file requires administrative privileges. You might need to enter your password.
Password:
Flushing the DNS Cache to utilize new hosts file...
No matching processes were found
Flushing the DNS Cache failed.

  4. Don’t worry about that last ‘failed’ part. Flush the DNS cache by hand according to readme.md. (OS X below, see the readme.md for Windows/Linux)

    dscacheutil -flushcache

  5. Done! You can check that it blocks any/all domains in the file:

    ping adcore.ru
PING adcore.ru (0.0.0.0): 56 data bytes
ping: sendto: No route to host

    curl -v 'http://adcore.ru/'
* Hostname was NOT found in DNS cache
*   Trying 0.0.0.0...
* connect to 0.0.0.0 port 80 failed: Connection refused
* Failed to connect to adcore.ru port 80: Connection refused
* Closing connection 0

That’s all there is to it. Happy hacking.