When I’m browsing the web, by virtue of using this tool, I see very little to no ads in page content. All operating systems, including Windows, Unix, and Mac, have a place where a HOSTS file blacklist can be plugged, causing every attempt to establish network communications with the listed servers to be short circuited with extreme prejudice at the earliest stage of hostname resolution. Other applications exist on the market that block ads and enhance browser privacy (often, in fact, leveraging MVPS HOSTS as an underlying database), but what I like about the HOSTS file method is, it operates in raw form and doesn’t require any separate application to be installed.Ī HOSTS file is designed to act as a local preemptive override for DNS resolution. There are a variety of these lists packaged up by different parties, with no doubt significant overlap, but MVPS HOSTS is one of the oldest and best recognized as far as I am aware, and the one which I have used on all my Windows systems and those of my customers for many years. The MVPS HOSTS file is a regularly updated, community curated list of internet server hostnames (currently over 15,000 of them) known to be implicated in advertising, user habit tracking, and other unsavory security and privacy infringing sorts of activities.

Backgroundįirst, a quick background review. Allow me to demonstrate the specific procedure that I used and hopefully save others some time. Installing this blacklist confers the same browsing security, privacy, and performance benefits on my phone as I have long enjoyed on conventional workstations: ad blocking, faster web page loads and decreased bandwidth usage, mitigation of browsing behavior profiling and contextual ad targeting, and reduced exposure to malware infection by malicious web sites. I have replaced the default HOSTS file on my Android device with the MVPS HOSTS file, a blacklist for blocking advertising, tracking and malware-distributing server names.

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