Block any outgoing request to ad and tracker servers, system-wide.
Usage
Yes, you'll need to sudo, since you impact DNS resolution for the whole system.
Install or update the blocklist
$ sudo adblock [--force] [on] # --force to ignore lack of updates
This will merge the blocklist with your current hostsfile, so any local adjustments you had made previously are still active.
Deactivate blocking
Deactivating blocking is useful to access, for example, affiliate links.
$ sudo adblock off
When you deactivate blocking, your original hostsfile is restored, so any local adjustments you had made previously are still active.
Installation
On macOS with brew
If you're on macOS and use Homebrew:
brew install mattisg/mattisg/adblockThe repetition of
mattisgis not a typo: the first is the name of the tap, the second the GitHub username to install from.
Other UNIX (GNU/Linux, macOS…)
You can download this repo as a ZIP and install the adblock script anywhere you want, or use this one-liner:
sudo mkdir -p /usr/local/bin && sudo curl -\# https://raw.githubusercontent.com/MattiSG/adblock/master/adblock --output /usr/local/bin/adblock && sudo chmod u+x /usr/local/bin/adblock
Copy and paste the above to a Terminal prompt and press enter.
Tested on:
- Debian Stretch
- Debian Jessie
- OS X Mountain Lion
- OS X Mavericks
- OS X Yosemite
- OS X El Capitan
- macOS Sierra
- macOS High Sierra
- macOS Mojave
It should work as is on many other GNU/Linux flavours.
What does it block?
Ads, shock sites, hijack sites, malware servers, click trackers, popup traps (sites that make you confirm on and on), spam sending servers…
If you still see some ads after installing, please identify the domain that serves them, and send a request to Dan Pollock at [email protected].
How does it work?
This script is a simple wrapper around downloading and installing Pollock’s hosts file.
Dan Pollock maintains a list of servers to block based on community reports. This list is then simply formatted as a hosts file.
A hosts file maps hostnames (i.e. domains) to IPs. It does the same job as a DNS, but the lookup is made entirely locally.
This feature is used to map all the domains to blacklist to the 0.0.0.0 IP meta-address.
Is it enough?
Using such a hosts file ensures adblocking, and a good level of privacy from tracker networks. However, I recommend to complement it with a browser plugin that can block trackers on a site-by-site basis. Privacy Badger or Ghostery are good choices.
Analytics software that tracks your behaviour can be served by each site from its own domain, thus being impossible to block on a DNS level. Moreover, some trackers (most notably, Google Analytics) are so common that some websites break when they are blocked, and they are thus not blocked by the hosts file. In order to prevent them from loading, yet easily load them if a site seems broken, an interactive browser plugin is easier.
License
MIT