This is how I have been dealing with things, one site at a time when needed.
If it's something I don't want, and don't need, I will blackhole the domain to even prevent myself from wasting time on their site in the future.
In this example I was linked to a Wired article that was paywalled and gave me this warning "You've read your last free article" - well I'm not paying for Wired so into the blackhole.
EDIT: This is called 'editing your hosts file' - if you have a computer you can do this without any additional software or downloading anything. If you use a telephone for internet you likely do not have admin rights on your own telephone due to the Operating System, and will have to likely 'jailbreak' your phone to become the admin to do something like this. Not being 'admin' on your own mobile device is part of the enshittification.
Yup, blackholed TikTok a long time ago !!!
um
and when would you EVER want trump (dot) com?
someone get this person a pihole
You’re a liberal of Reddit… we get it already.
liberal or conservative has nothing to do with this.
Just a bot trying to push their agenda of dividing people
I'm not sure this solves anything
As long as you're not sure, I'm good.
I do the same thing.
You can use the same hostfile on your Android phone using AdAway without root.
The open source app AdAway can be installed from the open source F-Droid app store.
It used to only work when the phone was rooted as it needed write-access the the host file, but now it also works without root by running a personal VPN locally on your phone acting as a DNS filter.
You could even sync the host file between your devices using your prefered file hosting service or file synching software.
https://preview.redd.it/s0e4pdkfcl7g1.png?width=925&format=png&auto=webp&s=f2e55f24c126c3430e609b9cc6870025b9827a71
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole_(networking)##)
[quote] Perhaps you meant "blacklist"? [unquote] 😂😂
Well no, I meant blackhole: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole_(networking)#Black_hole_filtering#Black_hole_filtering)
This is a common networking term used to mean 'discarded traffic'.
My bad, thanks for pointing it out.
(just fyi, I was trying to jokingly mimic the Google search thing, but seems like my humor succumbed to my ignorance)
All good. Now I can read that in a robot voice, hehe
This is stupid why don't you use one of the billion unpaywall options
Because I don't really want the service. I just happened to get there via a link. Additionally, you can use this technique on other sites. Also, my mentality is 'less is more'.
Because the site traffic still rewards this enshittification
you sure showed them!
Inch by inch, row by row.
Gonna make this garden grow.
I don't get it. What have you done?
This cuts my computer off from accessing the Wired[dotcom] domain. If I click on a link that happens to forward me to them I will no longer be teased by half a paragraph and a subscription offer and my browser will say "Cannot Connect". They are gone from 'my internet'.
This saves me time and mental space. You can do this with any website you personally feel you want to stay away from.
Badass.
Nice. Can you teach us how to do this? Any YT video maybe?
The response from u/joshuakb2 is correct.
I simply open up my hosts file then scroll down to the bottom, below everything that already exists in the file, then I add my blackhole list.
Lines that start with "#" are just comments and don't do anything.
sudo echo "0.0.0.0" www.website.com >> /etc/hosts
On Linux, edit
/etc/hosts. On Windows, the same file isC:\Windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts, I believe. It's just a plain text file, so you can edit it in notepad.For each website you want to block, add a new line of text:
Archive.ph
You know that if you turn off Javascript in your browser for a particular site, you can bypass paywalls and subscriber-only content blocks? I'm doing this with several news sites
Unless JS is used to actually load in the content, instead of blocking it
Yep
I am familiar, and used Brave for that in the past. But now I prefer to block and move on instead of crow-barring it.
Some sites got wise and build the sample page server-side. Even looking at the page source doesn't reveal more.
just use pihole like a normal person.
Diversity of tactics.
Good point.
AdGuard is the way
Just looked into it. Isn't AdGuard Ad Blocker just a way to pay a subscription to do the same that OP is doing but with a pretty interface - am I missing something?
I mean, I didn't pay anything. I'm running it on a raspberry pi in Docker.
Ah I see. I'll look into that. Thank you.
Technitium
Pihole more effective; Adguard more immediately convenient.
Also, why do I keep hearing about Adguard? Aren't there better ad blockers out there? (Genuine question, because I haven't paid attention to that scene in a while.)
I'm surprised to hear about Adguard too tbh. uBlock Origin is generally the best I'm aware of.
(efficient, fast, very broad)
Honestly I was using pihole for a long time and just recently switched to adguard. I find it much easier to manage lists and I also needed to show some technically less savvy people how to whitelist things sometimes.
When something becomes so 'normal' it becomes a great attack surface. I like to keep it simple, without additional hardware or software. Thanks for the suggestion though!
I know I'm kinda late to the party but, for my desktop and laptop, hosts entries has been the simple solution for years. That being said though with the prevalence of mobile phones and the increasing difficulty to actually do administrative tasks on them, tools like pihole are great for achieving similar results to editing the hosts files across all devices on your network. Same goes for all smart devices whose ability to "call home" can be stopped. Just some added points of consideration.
Several replies have mentioned the pihole and it sounds like a great idea for some people, and maybe even me one day, but for now:
Your system dramatically slows down the moment you have more than a few thousand entries because of the way it is implemented.
It also lacks the ability to filter subdomains. shit.com and www.shit.com, two different entries.
I don't know how pihole is that popular, besides being able to run in the first raspberry it has very little advantages to AdGuard DNS or Technitium DNS. It isn't easier to set up either.
Maybe older machines or Windows machines?
There is a popular github hosting 1.2M hosts in a file for blocking and people use it all the time:
https://github.com/Ultimate-Hosts-Blacklist/Ultimate.Hosts.Blacklist
Doesn't mean it works well though.
Basically you make the operating system scan the whole file each time a DNS query arrives, the file stays cached in ram, which is nice, but there is a substantial impact.
If you use a DNS you benefit from data structures optimized for quick retrieval, you get a query for poo.net and because it is indexed, it automatically knows where it should retrieve the days from.
Everything I have read and experienced proves it works fine for me. I don't think your understanding is correct. Can you offer any more information for your point of view with links?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole_(networking)#Black_hole_filtering#Black_hole_filtering)
/etc/hosts was used 50 to 40 years ago in the dawn of internet communications when you could easily list all devices connected in networks.
It is ok for a few additional entries, as a temporary workaround.
Downsides of /etc/hosts filter
- No subdomain filtering.
You can't filter poo.com and www.poo.com on the same line
- Not easy to centrally manage.
- No traceability.
- Very vulnerable to malicious redirection if a list is compromised. DNS blackhole will never redirect you to another site.
- No caching.
- Performance issues .
Why is filtering with DNS blackhole slow? When filtering using /etc/hosts, the entire file must be scanned. This is CPU inefficient (in ways that is invisible to the user as it will report as system usage), but usually not very slow because of what we call the dirty page cache, which is free memory being used to cache files opened recently. In windows you can see it as standby memory,the transparent block below.
In linux, linuxatemyram.com
https://preview.redd.it/clin17h54q7g1.png?width=1511&format=png&auto=webp&s=d016990ab0243c8aac7aa456bb50b257ec47c683
What's the issue here?
- You won't always have free memory to cache the blackhole file
- You are losing the opportunity to cache other files instead.
It is ok to have a 10MB /etc/hosts file, but when you are in the range of GBs like most of the blocklists I work with, it's a huge waste
Well good thing is that I'm a human that visits a human number of sites.
Do you think using bullet points means that ChatGPT wrote this? It has screenshots for fuck sake . And typos
No. I mean to say that I am a human that only needs a small block list / blackhole. You okay?
EDIT: Now I'm considering that you did use ChatGPT, since you brought it up unannounced and are insanely defensive about it. But who cares if you did? Not me. So what?
honestly etc hosts blackholing is more intended for spot-treating / one-offs rather than mass blockade.
I'm a human, so I don't visit tens of thousands of websites, so I personally only need a spot treatment.
Exactly .
It's kind of crazy that it is still supported after all this time however, the same mechanism that was used in the seventies when you could just tell everyone "here is all the computers in the network".
You cant "attack" pihole. Its a dns level block for your home. So hosts file but for everyone in the home. If set up properly you can force all dns tru the thing even for devices trying to bypass it. Its great for tv's and assorted chinese devices that phone home.
Are you familiar with a 'supply chain attack', or compromised packages?
Or framework vulnerabilities like 'log4j'?
Direct attacks are so 2010, lolol110101011
Or in latest news, frickin' REACT
Pihole does not use log4j.
Sorry, that was meant but as an example of how modern day software can have vulnerabilities regardless of best intentions.
I dunno, I don’t expect magazines and newspapers to be free. To the extent paywalls have become more of a thing, I see that as a symptom of the stranglehold Google has on advertising (ie they take all the pie), which used to be how print media actually sustained itself. Subscriptions are bullshit for a lot of services, but they’ve pretty much always been the case with print media.
That said, completely reasonable for you to block sources you would never subscribe to.
Newspapers made lions share of profits on their classified ads.
This technique goes beyond blocking magazines and newspapers. You can 'clean up' your overall internet experience and even prevent yourself from going to sites you spend too much time on.
Have you heard of Pi Hole? https://pi-hole.net/
Similar idea, but it has extensive blocklists and nice interface.
Yes. I think it is great, but after a couple decades in computing I personally prefer the 'less is more' approach and do not like relying on, or managing, additional hardware or software.
I have the belief that more equipment and more software are just more attack surfaces and more time eaten up by management education.
You can also use NextDNS on mobile devices.
why do you expect people will work for free for you? That's exactly the reason of enshitification - people don't want to pay for quality content and just default to ad-driven slop media
I don't have that expectation. I pay for the services I want and ignore or block the ones I do not want or find annoying.
You are jumping to conclusions.
you clicked on the article link, and have read a couple of them, so clearly you want that service
I don't mind paying for some ad-free news, or having some ads with 'free' news where our attention and or data is the 'currency'.
However, in my example this is now a pay-only service, and I would like to ignore it and their teases [showing first few sentences of article] from now on.
I cannot afford the service.
Makes sense. There's a difference between being told upfront that you need to pay, and being roped in before they drop the bomb.
Because we're the product, they're selling our data to advertisers, why should I also pay them for that privilege?
Probably not worth reading anyway but a lot of people recommend things like archive.ph to de-wall paywalled news articles.
I like this solution though. If their traffic drops entirely over time because everyone is blocking so even accidental clicks don't register maybe it'll change.
I do struggle with the reality that this is how they make money though and they have to make money somehow. But it's also fair to say that most of these places are just money accumulation vehicles anyway rather than an actual useful company.
Not worth reading, even for free.
They can try their hardest to lure us at a new domain such as "wired-free-articlesdotcom" and hock their subscriptions from there... and that domain too, will be blocked if it turns out to be shitty content.
This is called 'editing your hosts file'. If you try to visit a site after doing this, your browser will say "Cannot reach yadda yadda yadda...".
Embedded posts will also fail, for example if you are on a news site and they 'embed' a tweet and you have twitter blocked you will not see that embedded tweet - unless they simply used a picture/image.
How do you do that 😭
Editing the 'hosts' file. I updated the post with details.
This seems great, is this a program/plugin of some kind?
No just editing your hosts file. I added detail to post.
Cool! Thank you!
You can just make a list in the hosts file. Or make a list of domains to block in an add-on like ublock origins.
You do you, but I do not endorse 'add-ons' - less is more. Browser add-ons are a cross-OS/platform attack vector IMO.