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FiremanMike

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Jan 26, 2011
263
9
I came home today to find that my iMac had not gone to sleep and was extraordinarily sluggish. Coincidentally, activity monitor was loaded and showed 1 garbage news site eating almost a gig of ram and a good chunk of my CPU. I also found 3 sites laundry.reviewed.com, vacuums.reviewed.com, and laptops.reviewed.com which are running in the background and eating about half a gig of ram and about 23% of my CPU when combined.

How can I effectively block these tracker sites from loading again. Is it possible to do it without adding clunky adblocking software?
 
The first thing to do is to download and run the free MalwareBytes for Mac: https://www.malwarebytes.com/antimalware/mac/ It sounds like you have some malware which is causing these sites to pop up.
[doublepost=1481150519][/doublepost]You can also block the sites by modifying the /etc/hosts file:


To do that, download and install the freeware TextWrangler:

http://www.barebones.com/products/textwrangler/download.html

Once you have downloaded it and installed it in your applications folder, click on the desktop to make sure you are Finder, then pull down the Go menu to Go To Folder.

In the Go To Folder window, enter

/etc

and then hit return. This should open the hidden /etc folder.

In that folder you will find a file called "hosts". Right-click on hosts and choose Open With, then Other, then TextWrangler.

It should open a file that looks like this:

##
##
# Host Database
#
# localhost is used to configure the loopback interface
# when the system is booting. Do not change this entry.
##
127.0.0.1 localhost
255.255.255.255 broadcasthost
::1 localhost
fe80::1%lo0 localhost​

You need to add three lines to the hosts file so that it looks like this:

##
##
# Host Database
#
# localhost is used to configure the loopback interface
# when the system is booting. Do not change this entry.
##
127.0.0.1 localhost
255.255.255.255 broadcast host
0.0.0.0 vacuums.reviewed.com
0.0.0.0 laundry.reviewed.com
0.0.0.0 laptops.reviewed.com
::1 localhost
fe80::1%lo0 localhost​


Save the file and reboot your computer. Your computer should now no longer be able to access those two sites. You can add similar sites you want to block in a similar manner.
 
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