Hacker News Reader

I've found sites that put ads in front of video sometimes break with privacy blockers (anything from news sites to comedycentral.com). I assume there's some code that won't load the content if it can't load the ad. Fair enough -- I'm not actively targetting the ads (something needs to pay for the content), but my privacy blocker gets them sometimes.

For those sites, opening up the site in incognito mode (which is by default sandboxed from any plugins) fixes them. A hostfile blacklist would require far more work to fix the jank.

The only breakage I have ever noticed is the occasional site which has about 30 or so "broken image" placeholders surrounding the content. Otherwise, I don't even notice its presence.

µBlock can import hosts files, and it has an off-switch :)

Are there any utilities for management of the hosts file?

I've never used one aside from a text editor. Plain text file with whitespace delimited items; about as simple as it gets.

Gas Mask on OSX: http://clockwise.ee/