My little ad-blocking tool; adblock-c
24/12/2011 Filed in: Programming
First of all, Merry Christmas to whomever is reading this article! ;)
I hate ads, and only tend to enable them on pages I use frequently (to support the page). I've been using various ad-block extensions/plugins with the browsers I use--I only use Chromium for the time being. I like the extensions, but with Chrome the ad-block extension does not actually remove the ads--it only hides them--fair enough you may say, but I like not using bandwidth on ads or material I never actually see. Therefore you can go back to use your machines /etc/hosts file. This is actually much better, because you can then "blacklist" the domains that hosts the ads; affectively never using bandwidth from these domains/hosts. This is easy, you just add the hosts to your /etc/hosts file and set their pointing IP-address to your localhost... problem solved. This is tiresome to do manually because there are so many different hosts handling ads. Therefore I decided to write a little tool. I made the tool in C, rather than a shell-script, this is because I like C, simple as that.
The C program grabs ad-block hosts lists that are provided by third-party providers that frequently updates these lists--you can also add addional ad-block hosts sources to a file yourself and then fetch this file to the program. The C program then merge these hosts to your /etc/hosts file... and voila... ads are gone! You can add this program to your crontab and have it update your host-file on a regular basis; ie. every day or week. You are never dependent on a browser extension/plugin after this.
The source is freely available and I invite you to tamper with it as much as you'd want. You can of course just download, and compile it yourself, then use it on your machine.
- You can grab the source here; https://bitbucket.org/Tobiaswk/adblock-c/
Please fork it and make changes/additions/fixes, I'd appricate that! Or just give it a spin ;)
Over and out! Merry Christmas and a happy new year!
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