Get Category from Steven Black's Host List

Classifies domains based on Steven Black's unified host list which blocks ads, malware, and tracking domains. The function checks if a domain appears in the blocklist and categorizes it accordingly.

stevenblack_cat(domain = NULL, use_file = NULL)

Arguments

domain

domain names as character vector

use_file

path to a local Steven Black hosts file. If NULL, downloads from GitHub once per session and reuses it

Value

data.frame with the original domain name, the category, and the date of the list that supplied it

Details

Steven Black's host list is a consolidated list from multiple sources including adaway.org, mvps.org, malwaredomainlist.com, and someonewhocares.org.

Unlike the Shallalist and DMOZ lookups, this list is actively maintained, so the returned source_last_published is the fetched file's own modification date rather than a constant. See source_vintage.

References

https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts

See also

source_vintage for the provenance of every category source

Examples

if (FALSE) { # \dontrun{
stevenblack_cat("doubleclick.net")
stevenblack_cat(c("google.com", "googleadservices.com", "malware-example.com"))
} # }