silence a custom list of hosts (domain URLs) on a local machine.
- Clone or download this repository
- Enable read and write file permissions for the user that will use this, on the hosts file of the computer that will use this. Every computer OS has this file.
Location on Windows: C:\\Windows\\System32\\drivers\\etc\\hosts
Location on Linux: /etc/hosts
The host file on your computer tells your computer if it needs to re-route to a specific IP address for a given domain name, and it's typically used to add aliases to locally networked devices. What riot-shield.py does, is it uses Python to quickly and easily toggle the contents of that file between the default file and a custom file filled with aliases that you define (targets.txt), and in our case, re-routes any websites you list there to 127.0.0.1, so nowhere. This effectively blocks any feature of your OS from those websites, without messing around with browser extenstions or firewalls. This will not affect your web browsing for any websites you do not specify. The file titled default.txt is a copy of Microsoft's default host file. It is recommended to leave this file alone. For Linux users, this won't affect you as Linux's default host file is empty, or close to it, and both operating systems use the file the same way.
Fill the contents of targets.txt with a list of websites you wish to be able to block. The contents of that file in this repository are just examples, but frankly, a decent list to start with.
Now, riot-shield.py is responsible for turning the switch. Because all the program does is update the contents of the hosts file, the effects last until you switch it back. There's no software running in the background. There are multiple ways to run the script.
Run python riot-shield.py enable to turn on, python riot-sheild.py disable to turn off. (python3 on some Linux machines).
I personally recommend creating cmd or shell scripts to run these commands, and I've included examples in the repository.
Written by telekrex under GPL-3.0 license.