How to filter ads on your G1

delta_foxtrot2 · Apr 28, 2009

You can find the latest version of this app on the slideme app store.

http://slideme.org/application/adfree

This is the old thread, I started a new thread in the general section => http://xdaforums.com/showthread.php?p=40759351

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Spoiled by ad free browsing on my normal desktop computer it became increasingly annoying seeing all the ads on my phone. However it's really easy to make them disappear, although you most likely will need root on the phone.

Download the hosts.txt file from http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.txt, you may need to run dos2unix over the file to remote \r characters, rename the file hosts and copy it to /system/etc on your phone and say goodbye to most ads.

You may find the list to be imperfect, for example some feedburner URLs are "blocked" as a result which can screw with RSS feeds, although it's annoying giving too much info to Google but like everything else in life some things are a trade off.

If you want to root your phone, try this article.

Dark X Dragon · Apr 29, 2009

Thanks for this!

As soon as I read the topic title I realised what you were doing and I never thought of it myself.

My hosts file was /etc/hosts though, not /system/etc/hosts

delta_foxtrot2 · Apr 29, 2009

Dark X Dragon said:
As soon as I read the topic title I realised what you were doing and I never thought of it myself.

I've been using this technique for a bit, just didn't think to post about it before did a quick search and noticed no one else had so thought I might as well

My hosts file was /etc/hosts though, not /system/etc/hosts

Doesn't seem to matter, I just checked the /etc dir and it has the same hosts file.

lbcoder · Apr 29, 2009

Actually, /etc is a symbolic link to /system/etc, so your hosts file is really at /system/etc -- however, accessing the file through either path is equivalent.

ShatBag1105 · May 1, 2009

Ha ha hosts exists on android!? I had no idea. I'm also a spoiled ad-less pc user. This is great. Thanks.

If you can't download the file above (it appears as text in browser), replace .txt with .zip at the end of the url. This will download the zip file which u can later unzip with an unzip app in the market.

Ok. I can't paste over the original hosts file using the phone? Astro and lynda file managers don't do it for me. And yes I am rooted, running 1.5 dudes build. Can this be done only from a PC?

delta_foxtrot2 · May 2, 2009

ShatBag1105 said:
Ok. I can't paste over the original hosts file using the phone? Astro and lynda file managers don't do it for me. And yes I am rooted, running 1.5 dudes build. Can this be done only from a PC?

You have a couple of options, you can download the terminal app from the market and use it, or you can use ADB to shell into the phone, or wait for someone to code an app to do it all for you.

For the time being go with installing terminal, then type 'su' to become root. That is unless you have a copy of adb handy, if you can 'adb shell' the following commands are the same, except you can copy and paste.

Then remount the system partition read-write.

Code:

mount -o remount,rw /dev/block/mtdblock3 /system

Then you go into the etc dir

Code:

cd /system/etc

Then you can rm the hosts file

Code:

rm hosts

Then grab the hosts.txt file

Code:

wget http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.txt -O hosts

Always more than one way to skin a cat, but the above works for me(tm)

Dark X Dragon · May 2, 2009

lbcoder said:
Actually, /etc is a symbolic link to /system/etc, so your hosts file is really at /system/etc -- however, accessing the file through either path is equivalent.

Ugghh, I read that ages ago but really didn't commit it to memory. It is now. =)

There's a fair chance I won't get around to it but I'm tempted to take this ad blocking further. Namely an automatic app but there might be more to add to it.

ShatBag1105 · May 2, 2009

Thanks for the help delta. I figured it had to be done in terminal. And you know, this would definitely become very popular as an app.

ShatBag1105 · May 2, 2009

I'm a dummy its etc not ect

nyayo99 · May 2, 2009

delta_foxtrot2 said:
Then grab the hosts.txt file

Code:

wget http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.txt -O hosts

Always more than one way to skin a cat, but the above works for me(tm)

(I am using the terminal program on the phone)

Until the above step, no problems
After typing in the above I get the following message:

"bad address "www.mvps.org"

I checked for typing errors, tried it 3 times but get the same error message

Any suggestions please?

thanks

ShatBag1105 · May 2, 2009

nyayo99 said:
(I am using the terminal program on the phone)

Until the above step, no problems
After typing in the above I get the following message:

"bad address "www.mvps.org"

I checked for typing errors, tried it 3 times but get the same error message

Any suggestions please?

thanks

Try it without the http://www. It might work like that. This is a lot harder than it should be lol. The g1 is putting up a fight!

nyayo99 · May 2, 2009

ShatBag1105 said:
Try it without the http://www. It might work like that. This is a lot harder than it should be lol. The g1 is putting up a fight!

Thanks, but this didn't work either.
Some googling indicated a possible DNS issue.
So I looked up the IP address (209.68.48.119), substituted that into your instructions and presto, everything worked!

Many thanks for the ad killer option for the G1

ShatBag1105 · May 3, 2009

Aah beautiful work. Just to clarify for newbs like me. The last line is (# wget http://209.68.48.119/winhelp2002/hosts.txt -O hosts). Make sure that -O hosts is a captialized O.

delta_foxtrot2 · May 3, 2009

ShatBag1105 said:
Aah beautiful work. Just to clarify for newbs like me. The last line is (# wget http://209.68.48.119/winhelp2002/hosts.txt -O hosts). Make sure that -O hosts is a captialized O.

Yes, capital letter o, lower case o stores the output of wget into the file which isn't the desired outcome

delta_foxtrot2 · May 3, 2009

I plan on suggesting the following URLs to the hosts.txt guy to block admob ads in apps

p.admob.com
analytics.admob.com
r.admob.com

In the mean time you can manually add it to the hosts file yourself, just copy and past from another line.

After updating the hosts file you may need to reboot or wait for the hostname to expire from the internal lookup cache, unless someone knows a quick way to flush the cache to speed up the process that is.

JackD3ath · May 3, 2009

Thanks for this. Worked great for me. Very helpful tutorial.

delta_foxtrot2 · May 3, 2009

Just uploaded "AdFree" to android market, this does all the steps I laid out manually at the touch of a button.

andonnguyen · May 3, 2009

Its funny how

127.0.0.1 localhost

is the only thing blocked in the /system/etc/hosts file. lol.

delta_foxtrot2 · May 3, 2009

andonnguyen said:
Its funny how

127.0.0.1 localhost

is the only thing blocked in the /system/etc/hosts file. lol.

That isn't "blocked" and in fact nothing gets blocked by the hosts file it just points hostnames to the local system, which usually has no web server running so the connection fails immediately.

However you MUST have localhost listed or various things will fail and cause all sorts of issues.

delta_foxtrot2 · May 3, 2009

New version of AdFree is now up, I have the app adding the admob hostnames to the bottom of the list.

How to filter ads on your G1

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