Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by QuasiAlon 3158 days ago
Interesting. For the less tech savvy, is there a way to take the list on [1] and _automatically_ update the hosts file on my own machine (mac)?
4 comments

For the less tech savvy, I’d still recommend considering installing PiHole. The “one line” command install can be run on an out of the box Raspberry Pi (starting at 5 dollars plus cost of power supply/SD card/usb network adapter if using the Pi Zero) and attached to your existing router in very few steps, then you have pretty robust adblocking on everything on your network: computers, games consoles, TV streaming sticks/boxes - great for devices that otherwise don’t support adblocking extensions. The 3 steps on PiHole’s front page really is all that’s involved.

You don’t need to use a Raspberry Pi either, If you have an old computer lying around you can repurpose it for this task. I just like using the Pi because it’s tiny, super cheap, fanless and consumes very little electricity.

Here you have a gist that can get you started. https://gist.github.com/chew-z/2b4d4ff905fd64473e18f130c8c39...

Also dnscrypt-proxy has an option to download a bloc-klist from sources (I haven't used it). If on Mac you are using Murus it also has an option of regular downloading of a selected block-list as well as blocking traffic form selected countries. The tricky part is to select right list for you..

Not automatically but you can use something such as Gasmask (https://github.com/2ndalpha/gasmask) to easily manage your host.
You can actually use a "Remote" hosts file with Gasmask and set the update interval in preferences. I actually just figured this out after a little bit of trouble -- my issue was that Gasmask cannot files from Github or any https site[0]. There are non-Github mirrors listed in the table at https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts which I have been able to use successfully.

[0]: https://github.com/2ndalpha/gasmask/issues/90

Obviously it can be hacked together with bash scripting, but that’s fairly advanced usage.