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Ways to block annoying shit on the web


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2023 May 11, 10:38am   586 views  11 comments

by Patrick   ➕follow (61)   💰tip   ignore  

1.

/etc/hosts blacklists on Mac and Linux. Maps certain DNS names to localhost so that they don't work:


127.0.0.1 pagead.googlesyndication.com
127.0.0.1 pagead1.googlesyndication.com
127.0.0.1 pagead2.googlesyndication.com
127.0.0.1 pagead3.googlesyndication.com
127.0.0.1 pagead4.googlesyndication.com
127.0.0.1 pagead5.googlesyndication.com


Search (on non-Google search engines of course) for "/etc/hosts blacklists"

2.

Little Snitch for a nice interface into blocking by DNS https://obdev.at/products/littlesnitch/index.html



3.

AdBlock Plus browser plugin:

https://adblockplus.org/

4.

Brave browser ( https://brave.com/ ) has easy blocking of annoying page elements by CSS selector: (works great against Wikipedia nagware!)



If you learn a bit of CSS you can make it do amazing blocking for you: https://www.w3schools.com/css/default.asp

Comments 1 - 11 of 11        Search these comments

1   Patrick   2023 May 11, 10:39am  

I use all of them, all the time.
2   Ceffer   2023 May 11, 11:27am  

It thought I WAS the annoying shit on the web.
4   richwicks   2023 May 11, 12:09pm  

Honestly, Brave does a pretty good job of it.

Although I still modify my /etc/hosts - extensively. For example:

https://someonewhocares.org/hosts/

There's a bunch of github lists to block different sites. Be careful in modifying your /etc/hosts file - you want to APPEND to it, not replace it. ALWAYS back up your /etc/hosts file so if you fuck up, you can restore the original.
5   fdhfoiehfeoi   2023 May 11, 12:26pm  

Missed the most important tool, Pihole! Thanks to Pihole I was able to easily identify and block all the Microsoft analytics events.
6   Patrick   2023 May 11, 12:44pm  

Thanks, looks like it also blocks selected DNS addresses.
7   richwicks   2023 May 11, 1:01pm  

NuttBoxer says

Missed the most important tool, Pihole! Thanks to Pihole I was able to easily identify and block all the Microsoft analytics events.


I believe PiHole also modifies the /etc/hosts file, but I'm not positive. And raspberry pi's are still in short supply. That's bullshit.
8   Patrick   2023 May 11, 1:35pm  

What I'm missing and would really love is a way to automatically disable all javascript timers when a page is loaded, so those annoying delayed popups would be disabled.

I'd just want to automatically run something like this on each page:


// Set a fake timeout to get the highest timeout id
var highestTimeoutId = setTimeout(function() {});
for (var i = 0 ; i < highestTimeoutId ; i++) {
clearTimeout(i);
}


Maybe I need to write a browser plug-in.
9   richwicks   2023 May 11, 1:52pm  

Patrick says


What I'm missing and would really love is a way to automatically disable all javascript timers when a page is loaded, so those annoying delayed popups would be disabled.

I'd just want to automatically run something like this on each page:


// Set a fake timeout to get the highest timeout id
var highestTimeoutId = setTimeout(function() {});
for (var i = 0 ; i < highestTimeoutId ; i++) {
clearTimeout(i);
}


Maybe I need to write a browser plug-in.



I believe you can stop javascript by holding down the Escape key. It used to work at least. I just use wget and curl to bypass this, but anything behind a paywall, it's just propaganda bullshit anyhow. I only go through effort to see what sort of ridiculous bullshit they are printing and then it shows up in www.archive.org in time anyhow.
10   fdhfoiehfeoi   2023 May 11, 6:23pm  

richwicks says

I believe PiHole also modifies the /etc/hosts file, but I'm not positive. And raspberry pi's are still in short supply. That's bullshit.


No, uses it's own files, separate installation. You can run it on anything. I'm using an old Dell Celeron I also run my Tor obfs4 bridge from. OS is just base Debian.
11   fdhfoiehfeoi   2023 Nov 20, 7:53am  

Parrot OS just moved to a new LTS and added Open Snitch. Seems to monitor more than just network traffic, also processes running in the OS.

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