A small program to filter ads, trackers and malware using your systems hosts-file.
There are multiple ways to filter ads, trackers or malwaresites. There are bowserplugins, firewalls etc. than can help you doing the job. One nice way is to filter the bad domainnames using your systems hosts-file. This way all internet-traffic of your machine is protected against those known bad guys. While this approach can only filter traffic to known domainnames it is no 100% protection. But with ease you can block traffic to over 100000 known bad sites. This way you don't need any additional software, because the hosts-file is part of your OS.
hostfiler downloads known hosts-files, containing ad, tracker and malwaresites and put them inside your systems hosts-file. This way you can prevent all communication with those sites. Running hostfilter downloads the ad-hosts-files you specified and adds them to your systems hosts-file. As it is unlikely that a malwaredomain will become a nice place to browse, domains that were added to your hosts-file, even if they are no longer inside the downloaded hosts-files. Domainnames are only added once, so you can run hostfilter multiple times without bloating you systems hosts-file. Running hostfilter the first time should create a backup of your current systems hosts-file. hostfilter does not interact in any way with your networktraffic. It just puts malwaredomains in your hosts-file and tells your system to discard all traffic to them.
Only configuration you can do is to set the URLs to the ad-hosts-files containing the domains to block. hostfilter searches in the current directory and in your etc-directory for a file called adhosts.cfg which contains the URLs to the ad-hosts-files to use. The repository contains an example-file you can use, that holds a set of URLs to filter more than 116000 domains.
There are two types of ad-hosts-files that are supported. The first kind is structured like a normal hosts-file, so it has an IP and a domainname per line. To block the domains the IP should point to 127.0.0.1 or to 0.0.0.0. This kind of file looks the following way.
127.0.0.1 malwaredomain.com
127.0.0.1 anotherdomain.com
There are only domains added to the blacklist that have the IP 127.0.0.1 or 0.0.0.0 attached, any other host will be ignored. This is done to prevent that a bad hosts-file redirects your traffic.
The second type of supported files contains only a domainname per line. Those files look like this.
mailwaredomain.com
anotherdomain.com