I have a couple hundred (at least) entries in my hosts file. Dozens from hitbox.com sites for hit tracking from espn, microsoft, vmware, etc.
Anyone know a quick and free way to resolve all subdomains of a domain to 0.0.0.0? I'd like to do this but it doesn't have any effect:
# hosts entries
0.0.0.0 *.hitbox.com
0.0.0.0 *.adserver.com
# end of file
I use the "adblock" extension for firefox, which supports wildcard blocks. It doesn't affect spyware, of course, but it's a good start for blocking ads. There's a second extension you can get that automatically updates the adblock list with a recommended list. Since I started using that, I haven't seen a single ad, so I'm pretty impressed.
Another option, which is system-wide is to run your own DNS server and keep up with the DNS-blackhole (http://www.bleedingsnort.com/blackhole-dns/) list, which is an actively maintained list of Spyware/Adware/Worm addresses (plus instructions on how to use it with bind or windows). That'll block it straight from the DNS server.
I like the DNS blackhole list. Time to run my own DNS and install that.
Thanks iago, great idea.
You're welcome.
Let me know how well this works, I was thinking of installing bind but never got around to it.
Yeah, I'd like to know how this goes too. I tried to send a lot of those sites into a blackhole with my hosts file but of course that didn't work =/
You'd have to convert the list into a format useable by hosts. I'm not sure how you'd do that on Windows, but a quick awk script would work in Linux
A quick awk script would work on Windows too, once you download a Windows port of awk. :) You might be able to get one from the GNUwin32, UnixUtils, or Cygwin projects.