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Comment by MichaelCrawford | Hacker News Reader

These mostly serve one-pixel GIFs; sometimes I find one-byte javascript "sources".

Put these in your hosts file:

   127.0.0.1 aax.amazon-adsystem.com

   127.0.0.1 ad.crwdcntrl.net

   127.0.0.1 b.scorecardresearch.com

   127.0.0.1 gs.dailymail.co.uk

   127.0.0.1 gum.criteo.com

   127.0.0.1 i.dailymail.co.uk

   127.0.0.1 moat.pxl.ace.advertising.com

   127.0.0.1 pixel.mathtag.com

   127.0.0.1 pq-direct.revsci.net

   127.0.0.1 rta.dailymail.co.uk

   127.0.0.1 sync.go.sonobi.com

   127.0.0.1 t.dailymail.co.uk

   127.0.0.1 ted.dailymail.co.uk

   127.0.0.1 x.bidswitch.net

   127.0.0.1 www.google-analytics.com

   127.0.0.1 ssl.google-analytics.com

   127.0.0.1 www.hosted-pixel.com

Search with https://www.duckduckgo.com/ For extra credit use DuckDuckGo's Tor Hidden Service.

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You shouldn't use loopback to block hostnames but instead use 0.0.0.0

I understand that 0.0.0.0 is the local subnet broadcast address. Is that really the case?

I've puzzled over using 127.0.0.2. What I really want to get is an RST immediately upon sending a SYN.

Can you please explain why?

0.0.0.0 is a completely invalid destination IP, and any attempts to establish a connection to it will fail long before any packets are sent. 127.0.0.1 is still valid so you depend on the network stack to either receive a RST sent to itself, or time out.

At least on Windows, the former is much faster to return with an error.

It also avoids potential conflicts if you happen to need to run a server on port 80 for any reason.

When I ping 0.0.0.0, I get replies from 69.41.141.1. I don't know but expect that's earthlink's router.

That's odd... on Windows, pinging 0.0.0.0 results in "Destination specified is invalid."

On *nix, the behaviour is slightly different and is supposed to ping localhost instead (confirmed on one of my Linux machines):

http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/99336/how-does-ping-...

Do the RFCs have anything to say about 0.0.0.0?

Perhaps it is left up to the implementation, in which case both Windows and *NIX would be, strictly speaking, correct.

This isn't true on non-windows OSes, where 0.0.0.0 (or simply 0) means all interfaces, not nothing. ssh to a web server and do curl 0 ; it's a super-useful shortcut.

Further reading: http://serverfault.com/questions/78048/whats-the-difference-...

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/0.0.0.0

When I ping 0.0.0.0, I get replies from 127.0.0.1 (running Ubuntu 14.04).

Of that set, only these weren't in the comprehensive (60k+) hosts included in the Chrome extension uMatrix's hosts files (I've added these to my own /etc/hosts file): gs.dailymail.co.uk gum.criteo.com i.dailymail.co.uk moat.pxl.ace.advertising.com www.hosted-pixel.com

I strongly recommend using a hosts file these days, as well as tools such as uMatrix, privoxy, and where possible, Tor (more discussion below).

And thanks, by the way.

Since by far my browsing is done on an iPhone, any recommendations for dealing with hosts files? I am guessing scriptable solutions like Firefox but t be honest I mentally gave up when I don't have root

Not sure about iPhone, but there are AdBlock plugins for Android, and the hosts file itself is accessible if you jailbreak.

Better: install CyanogenMod.

VPN + Privoxy.

http://ba.net/adblock is geared for iPhone iPad

I very much prefer this one http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.txt

Edit: I see some of the ones you posted are not on the file.

See http://pgl.yoyo.org/adservers/ for a nice comprehensive list of hosts to block.

Anyone know how this compares to http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/ ?

This merges the two of the common lists, easy to add more: https://github.com/jakeogh/dnsmasq-blacklist

http://ba.net/adblock seems to block all these. They list 180k blocked ad and malware domains

I use DDG as my primary search now. Have been for months. It's getting a lot better. I'd say it's as good as Google about 95% of the time now. For about 5% of queries I end up bumping over to Google, but over time that's shrunk from ~15% of queries.

Have you noticed any particular classes of search for which Google is still better than DDG?

Hmm... hard to say, but the first thing to comes to mind is programming-oriented stuff. Google tends to find a more accurate hit there sometimes. Google also seems to do a better job filtering out spammy stuff like those irritating portal pottie sites that clone StackOverflow or mailing list content.

My pattern is if DDG finds nothing of value or brings up too much noise, hop over to Google and sometimes it does better. If I can't find it via either search engine it's probably not out there.

I will say that there's rarely a case where Google is worse than DDG... unless you count the tracking and near-monopoly issues but those are peripheral to the core function.

Not a class of searches, but a feature: DDG does not have an equivalent of Google's time-based searches (e.g., last 24 hours, last week, etc.).

I've been using DDG for over a year now, and I haven't had to bump over to Google for a long time. In fact with the bangs I search pretty much everything with it.

I do wish the "defaults" were more trackless oriented though, for example, !i searches images... on google images.

Or use uBlock or similar as well.

Recommended privacy extensions:

- Privacy Badger by the EFF: https://www.eff.org/privacybadger

- uBlock Origin (blocks ads as well): https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublock-origin/cjpa...

- HTTPS Everywhere by the EFF: https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere

I recommend running all three, they each do a different job and cover all the bases. If you are on Firefox, RequestPolicy (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/requestpolicy...) is also useful but I find PrivacyBadger simply does the job better.

Nobody told me before that DDG has infinite scrolling! I'm sold!

I regard infinite scrolling as a Tool of the Devil.

I sometimes agree, but it seems pretty useful for search results. I mean, do you often find yourself bookmarking the second page of a google search?

I built this list with the Activity window from an old release of Safari. I expect there's lots of ways you could do it, I often contemplate such ways but this way works pretty well.

Just open the Activity window then visit a few random, at least somewhat sketchy websites. Pop-culture news sites are good. You'll see lots of 43 or 60 byte GIFs, commonly they will have lots of query parameters in the URLs, sometimes I see one-byte javascripts.

https://www.requestpolicy.com/ is useful in this regard as well. - Firefox plugin to block cross-domain content.

lots of websites pull shit from 20+ 3rd party domains. An obnoxious number of sites block/don't render completely ( or at all ) without allowing shit from all over the web to load.

I used to use RequestPolicy, but found Policeman is better.

Strictly speaking a one-pixel gif could be legitimate. What I find especially sketchy is that the URLs that my browser actually fetches are huge, long and full of query parameters.

I do not want one-pixel gifs, because the only use of such techniques is exploiting the HTTP "referer" field.

They used to be somewhat legitimately used for spacing and sizing table-based HTML layouts (through the mid-2000s or so). That's rarely done today -- layout is in CSS and gifs are generally used for tracking.

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