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I was setting up an ad-blocking hosts file on my machine (using hostsblock). As suggested, I also set up kwakd to serve any requests coming to 127.0.0.1 with a blank HTML page. However, I noticed kwakd caused some delays when browsing to some very ad-heavy sites as it had to serve many requests during a short duration. It even seemed to miss some requests and/or crash sometimes.
As an experiment, I created a similar simple server using node.js, which is, by its asynchronous nature, good at serving many requests in a short time. And indeed, it seems to be serving the content somewhat faster (usually only a few ms) than kwakd (some 10 of ms). Haven't yet experienced any crashes either.
The script is pretty trivial, but I added an AUR package with a systemd unit file for convenience. The server can be set to start at boot by
# systemctl enable blank-html-serverSome might argue node.js is a heavy dependency for this kind of an application. I'd like to agree, but this suits people like me who already have node installed and are using it anyway. If kwakd or any other lighter alternative works for you, by all means use that. This package is provided as an alternative for people who might find it useful.
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