Some weeks when I first talked about GuixSD with someone who shares my dislike for facebook, they came up with this idea "Why stop at facebook with the block options?"
Giving users who want to (and this is what it should be marked as and documented as) the choice to exclude most of the big players in advertising by /etc/hosts blocking. I know this is not very effective and it does not fix the overall situation plus might introduces some problems if we get torbrowser in for example, but just for the people who want to block ads this way it could be a useful feature. I am thinking of sending in several patches for services following up to the facebook block. These services will be big advertising players only and not be focused on specific things. Eventually it could all be renamed to a different name set like ads-$name-host-aliases to make the functionallity more clear. The service facebook-host-aliases does block all of facebook, my intention is to just block ad distribution networks. I can't test it all, but I try to rule out problematic, site breaking hosts in time, which is why this service set will be described with something like "this might break some websites, if you encounter problems please file a bug" (or similar). Giving people who want these kinds of blocks the freedom to choose this. A first version for google I just came up with starts like the attached code. What do you think? PS: For consistency with code and mailinglist I will use my legal name now (etc, long reasoning and positions and pro/contra could follow but I won't do this here) (define %ads-google-host-aliases ;; This is a list of known google services excluding google.com "\ # Block Google Services IPv4. 127.0.0.1 www.google-analytics.com 127.0.0.1 ssl.google-analytics.com 127.0.0.1 www.google-analytics.l.google.com 127.0.0.1 google-analytics.com 127.0.0.1 googletagservices.com 127.0.0.1 video-stats.video.google.com 127.0.0.1 googleads.g.doubleclick.net 127.0.0.1 adservices.google.com 127.0.0.1 affiliate.googleusercontent.com 127.0.0.1 buttons.googlesyndication.com 127.0.0.1 feedads.googleadservices.com 127.0.0.1 m4.afs.googleadservices.com 127.0.0.1 mimageads*.googleadservices.com 127.0.0.1 mpartner.googleadservices.com 127.0.0.1 pagead*.googlesyndication.com 127.0.0.1 tcp.googlesyndication.com 127.0.0.1 www.googleadservices.com # Block Google Services IPv6 fe80::1%lo0 www.google-analytics.com fe80::1%lo0 ssl.google-analytics.com fe80::1%lo0 www.google-analytics.l.google.com fe80::1%lo0 google-analytics.com fe80::1%lo0 googletagservices.com fe80::1%lo0 video-stats.video.google.com fe80::1%lo0 googleads.g.doubleclick.net fe80::1%lo0 adservices.google.com fe80::1%lo0affiliate.googleusercontent.com fe80::1%lo0 buttons.googlesyndication.com fe80::1%lo0 feedads.googleadservices.com fe80::1%lo0 m4.afs.googleadservices.com fe80::1%lo0 mimageads*.googleadservices.com fe80::1%lo0 mpartner.googleadservices.com fe80::1%lo0 pagead*.googlesyndication.com fe80::1%lo0 tcp.googlesyndication.com fe80::1%lo0 www.googleadservices.com\n") -- ng/ni* vcard: http://krosos.sdf.org