Written by Michael Nikitochkin
on 

War With Ads and Trackers

War With Ads and Trackers

My story begins with wish to see pure content of a new page in 2 seconds many many years ago. As young padawan I tried with small stuff — Disabled Flash and Java. In that period most sites have animated flash elements.

Next second step was Install AdBlock Addon. I tried multiple solutions. One of the best was Ghostery at least on that period. It was a bit different from others. It can detect social networks integrations and other trackers. I used it for some period.

I was growing up. Started use services to keep secrets and financial information. That is potential could be available from the browser addons. Besides I found that not all pages load correctly with enabled ad blocker addons. Third my step to use DNS from the my favorite router MikroTik and programmatically add new rules.

/ip dns static add address=127.0.0.1 ttl=600w name=".*\\.vk\\.com"
/ip dns static add address=127.0.0.1 ttl=600w name="rs.mailer.ru"
/ip dns static add address=127.0.0.1 ttl=600w name="googleads.g.doubleclick.net"
/ip dns static add address=127.0.0.1 ttl=600w name="pagead2.googlesyndication.com"
/ip dns static add address=127.0.0.1 ttl=600w name="www.googletagservices.com"
/ip dns static add address=127.0.0.1 ttl=600w name="a.pr.dotua.org"
/ip dns static add address=127.0.0.1 ttl=600w name="google-analytics.com"
/ip dns static add address=127.0.0.1 ttl=600w name=".*\\.google-analytics\\.com"
/ip dns static add address=127.0.0.1 ttl=600w name="mc.yandex.ru"
/ip dns static add address=127.0.0.1 ttl=600w name="share.yandex.ru"
/ip dns static add address=127.0.0.1 ttl=600w name="vk.com"
/ip dns static add address=127.0.0.1 ttl=600w name="yandex.st"
/ip dns static add address=127.0.0.1 ttl=600w name="ad.admixer.net"
/ip dns static add address=127.0.0.1 ttl=600w name="counter.marketgid.com"
/ip dns static add address=127.0.0.1 ttl=600w name="ads.adfox.ru"
/ip dns static add address=127.0.0.1 ttl=600w name="fbstatic-a.akamaihd.net"
/ip dns static add address=127.0.0.1 ttl=600w name="content.adfox.ru"
/ip dns static add address=127.0.0.1 ttl=600w name="an.yandex.ru"
/ip dns static add address=127.0.0.1 ttl=600w name="log.pinterest.com"
/ip dns static add address=127.0.0.1 ttl=600w name="r.mailer.ru"
/ip dns static add address=127.0.0.1 ttl=600w name="rs.mailer.ru"
/ip dns static add address=127.0.0.1 ttl=600w name=".*\\.addthis\\.com"
/ip dns static add address=127.0.0.1 ttl=600w name=".*\\.adexprt\\.com" 
/ip dns static add address=127.0.0.1 ttl=600w name=".*\\.exoclick\\.com"
/ip dns static add address=127.0.0.1 ttl=600w name="mr.mention.net"

It was good solution, it supports wildcard domain names, Web interface and Telnet. I setup VPN tunnel to the router and route traffic through it. It works awesome. As Ghostery idea, block most of trackers and analytics domains. One minus of this solution: you could not block specific place on the page as AdBlocker Addon. If a service wrap all ads elements through its domain, this solution was useless.

Fourth solution came after I change the office and could not control a router in the new place. To keep similar idea to have own file with rules. Only /etc/hosts came to my mind. This solution does not have sync between hosts and any UI. So here is a sync script :

# Download current state of the gist. Concatenate the output of the hosts and gist
{ curl -s "https://gist.githubusercontent.com/miry/2a7635beaa7078e0d7af/raw/hosts" & cat /etc/hosts ; } | sort | uniq | grep '127.0.0.1' | grep -v -e '(^\s*$\|localhost\|broadcasthost\|#)' | tee /tmp/hosts | gist -u 2a7635beaa7078e0d7af -f hosts

# /etc/hosts should put blocked part between 2 lines of `#ADBLOCKER`
{ sed '/\#ADBLOCKER/,/\#ADBLOCKER/d' /etc/hosts;  echo '#ADBLOCKER';  cat /tmp/hosts; echo '#ADBLOCKER' ; } | sudo tee /etc/hosts

Explainshell for this command. In few words:

Run latest sync command:

$ curl https://gist.githubusercontent.com/miry/2a7635beaa7078e0d7af/raw/sync.sh  | bash

Small benchmarks:

35 seconds require to open main page. My CPU fan’s noise increased, because of number of JS programming.

With blacklisted domains it show 10x times faster, and no waste of CPU energy or networking.

I am still looking for perfect simple solution to block ads for my phones and laptops without extra services. I understand the services/publishers that want to make money on old school advertisements — it is simple and cheaper.

Let’s save the energy and build Green services without Ads.