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One hosts file to block them all

Boris Schapira on September 13, 2018

As a field expert, people often ask me how to improve websites' performance. Sometimes, they also ask me how to improve the Web's performance on th...
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Ahmed Musallam

This is genius!! Makes me think of making a GUI for managing the hosts file. Or even multiple host files. Since the file format/structure is extremely simple, it would be extremely easy to parse! Slap a gui on it and you have the best add blocker there is!

This is definately going on my long list of things to build :) thanks for the inspiration!

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Jasper Stephenson

What a great idea! Seems like it goes perfectly with the recent posts we've had about making desktop apps with vue through different tools!

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Ahmed Musallam

I love Vue, If I end up building this, it would definitely be in Vue :)

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Phil Ashby

Nice job Boris :)

For those who run their own DNS server locally (come on I know this audience by now :)), I maintain a couple of scripts that pull Steven's excellent list and adjust for both IPv4 & IPv6 support plus local whitelisting, before dropping the result wherever your DNS server can load it. This will likely work just as well as a local /etc/hosts file if you don't run your own DNS...

github.com/phlash/sinkhole

I find this really helpful to reduce the pain of modern web browsing, detect infected devices on my network (friends mobiles typically!), and back up other tools like uBlock Origin.

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αη∂єяѕ кαяℓѕѕση

I've been using this for ages> someonewhocares.org/hosts/

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Susensio

pi.hole is also a pretty neat solution for blocking ads via DNS loopbacks

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Boris Schapira

Can't access the website anymore, but it was up when I wrote the piece, a few days ago. I'll ping them on the birdsite. Thanks for the hint.

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Boris Schapira

No answer from them, but I've found a portable version of hostsman and added the link to the post: portapps.github.io/app/hostsman-po...

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Jasper Stephenson

Hey, this is awesome! Is there a mac equivalent?