Blocklist-Update.sh is a script that I wrote to manage blocklists from bluetack etc to be used in conjunction with Transmission torrent downloader in Linux/MacOS. The script can be taylored to work with Qbittorrent as well, but the placement of the blocklists means you'd have to redirect the blocklist to go somewhere locally manageable as Transmission uses its own blocklist directory in .config. I believe there are about 10 lists there now. It works well for my needs. It can be ran weekly using crontab in standard user profile. To download: blocklist-update.sh To download the others: Github
Recently in the news, a viral topic is going around and while much focus has been on tracking for the past few years, Ad creators and web admins have had to get clever to devise new ways to make their sites pay for themselves. We get that Web site developers and owners need to make money wherever they can, nothing wrong with ads in general, but too many domains misuse such a scheme and often the ads get compromised in spite of the original creator. There is no honor among thieves, of course there are legitimately vile malvertising sites out there, but for whatever the reasons, tracking is usually not a good thing.
Tracking could potentially lead to companies finding out about you, from the size of your monitor to the color of your shirt, tracking comes in all forms. Lately, many top sites are utilizing scripts to track users. Scripts are really ingenious in that they can load in all browsers and all system setups, barring content blockers. Scripts are more commonly used to make the page more interactive. In today's world, scripts are being implemented for everything and sites that are heavy with scripts tend to have a hard time closing or bog the system down and can crash the browser at times.
Scripts aren't cookies, but they are the biggest leak some browsers can have. Java scripts are exploitable and executable, cookies are text files that can be read. Scripts can fetch information from what color font you're using, what size pixels of screen real estate you have, they can even tell what operating system you're running. Some common sites have been added to Easy Privacy for blocking this new scourge of tracking. I myself have added several of these in the Jameshostslist file on Github. There are a few, however, that you might want to implement in your router's firewall or with iptables.
If you're running Windows, by now it's best for everyone to have a router, any cheap router that is still supported offers some kind of access control feature, or otherwise block list. Blocking Top Level domains in the router or firewall is usually best because they don't block too well in hosts files. DNS offers much better blocking a lot of times. It frees up resources on the client as well. Nevertheless, articles and hosts files are available should you wish to learn more.
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