Tagged in: ads, projects, dns

For a short while now, I’ve been slowly killing news writers. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t shoot anyone: I just made it impossible to reach their ads’ servers from my networks. So they don’t earn money from me.

Call me heartless or whatever, have a look yourself: malvertising and also this rather unsettling “discovery” (Ads use bandwidth! a lot!)

I wrote a tiny^? script that generates lying DNS files for unbound, bind or simply your hosts(5) file. You may clone the repo, as I might or might not update these scripts in the near future:

$ git clone https://github.com/moviuro/moviuro.bin

Usage is stupidly simple (I like writing stuff with a simple interface):

$ lie-to-me [-f unbound|bind|hosts|none] [-o path] [-t IP]

To avoid 404s or 504s, you should have a webserver serving 204 on the IP address. (204 means No Content, and is thus the shortest answer that will not show up as errors in your web browser, see here for an example setup)

A really great side effect is also that I completely block known bad servers (malware C&C, “shock sites”, etc.) on all machines on my network (that means my AndroidTV, my Android phone, my GF’s Windows machine, my router). Free and painless! What else could you possibly ask for?