mattisg/adblock

Block ads and trackers system-wide, before a request is even issued.

adblock's Issues

Add the ability to install it via homebrew

For lazy guys like me, brew install adblock would be great :)

Merge hosts from other lists?

I just discovered that one: https://adaway.org/hosts.txt

I don't know if there are new hosts compared to hosts zero but that might be interesting to check.

Do you know any other list?

Mention complementary browser blocking

Alternative: https://www.eff.org/privacybadger

Support customized list?

Do you think it would be interesting to extend your script to add a list of domains from the user side.

Explain actions that will be done before calling `sudo`

Or really, just set that setuid bit.

Please Update

Please update the files to new one

Support Windows

File path documented here.

Consider using dnsmasq

dnsmasq could be an interesting way to make adblock available for the whole LAN, including devices that don't allow setting up a hosts file.

There will probably be side effects though, so this needs thinking through.

Add options to activate some commented entries from hosts zero

After reading the source file, I realized that some hosts are commented:

#<maybe-spy>
#0.0.0.0 auto.search.msn.com  # Microsoft uses this server to redirect
                                # mistyped URLs to search engines. They
                                # log all such errors.
#0.0.0.0 sitefinder.verisign.com	# Verisign has joined the game 
#0.0.0.0 sitefinder-idn.verisign.com	# of trying to hijack mistyped
					# URLs to their site. 
					# May break iOS Game Center.

#0.0.0.0 s0.2mdn.net		# This may interfere with some streaming 
				# video on sites such as cbc.ca
#0.0.0.0 ad.doubleclick.net   # This may interefere with www.sears.com
				# and potentially other sites. 
0.0.0.0 media.fastclick.net	# Likewise, this may interfere with some
0.0.0.0 cdn.fastclick.net	# sites. 
#0.0.0.0 ebay.doubleclick.net		# may interfere with ebay
#0.0.0.0 google-analytics.com			# breaks some sites
#0.0.0.0 ssl.google-analytics.com
#0.0.0.0 www.google-analytics.l.google.com
#0.0.0.0 stat.livejournal.com		# There are reports that this may mess 
 					# up CSS on livejournal
#0.0.0.0 stats.surfaid.ihost.com	# This has been known cause 
					# problems with NPR.org
#0.0.0.0 www.google-analytics.com		# breaks some sites
#0.0.0.0 ads.imeem.com		# Seems to interfere with the functioning of imeem.com
#</maybe-spy>

I wonder if it would be possible to activate/deactivate some ranges like that:

sudo adblock --with-range maybe-spy

I'm not sure about the syntax but hopefully you get the point :)

Retire software?

Should adblock be retired, and suggest switching to https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts? It seems to have almost all of the features of this piece of software, and more.

What is missing:

• Updates autodetection. Ok, I can live with that.
• Ability to switch off the blocks in one line. That's annoying.

Support Debian

• silently check for presence of sw_vers before calling it
• find equivalent of date -j

— thanks @asciimoo!