Adblock via /etc/hosts

I had been doing this until some time ago to block ads and to prevent Google from collecting my web browsing history via Google Analytics. During the time I witnessed a strange phenomenon. Every time I added "127.0.0.1 www.google-analytics.com" to C:\Windows\System32\Drivers\etc\hosts. I saw the line removed from the file some hours later. Although I had added tens of lines I only saw the Google Analytics line removed. IIRC finally I decided to figure out whet caused the removal. I used…

It's almost the 40th anniversary of RFC 882. Back when the Domain Name System was being invented as the replacement for everyone sharing hosts files, I wonder whether anyone expected that 40 years later there'd be a shared hosts file with its own copyright licence, Docker file, and code of conduct. Interestingly, from what I remember of the April Fools columns of electronics magazines of the time, one thing that people would not have been surprised by is that the…

Was this complexity needed? It's just a few lines in bash #!/bin/bash wget "http://adaway.org/hosts.txt" -O- > hosts wget "http://www.malwaredomainlist.com/hostslist/hosts.txt" -O- >> hosts wget "http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.txt" -O- >> hosts wget "http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/zero/hosts" -O- >> hosts wget "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/StevenBlack/hosts/master/data/StevenBlack/hosts" -O- >> hosts wget "http://pgl.yoyo.org/adservers/serverlist.php?hostformat=hosts&mimetype=plaintext&useip=0.0.0.0" -O-…