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Editing your HOSTS file to *completely* block bad sites:

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Hubbard

Hubbard

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Clarity said:
http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm

I've done this myself, it significantly speeds up 90% of my browsing experience. Basically any site that serves ads will be faster, as your computer won't even try to load them. It also prevents a major cause of site lockups. When you connect to the Bucknuts front page, you're also silently connecting to like 10 other machines around the web. If any of those are down, the whole page could stop loading completely and you could be looking at dead space. This is totally unnecessary and preventable on the server side, but that's not always done. This very easy change to Windows is entirely reversible, it's effectively impossible for you to break anything or screw anything up, you're literally just copying a text file to a folder on your computer. I personally recommend making a backup of the original by just renaming it from HOSTS to HOST_orig or something similar.
Click to expand...



So I uhhh did this and wanted to undo it, not sure if I can just clear everything from my HOST file or not. And no I didn't take Clarity's advice on saving original, but *if* I remember correctly the original was blank. Any help here would be great, such as a paste of someone's unedited HOST file or telling me to just delete everything in there :p.
 
Hubbard;611642; said:
So I uhhh did this and wanted to undo it, not sure if I can just clear everything from my HOST file or not. And no I didn't take Clarity's advice on saving original, but *if* I remember correctly the original was blank. Any help here would be great, such as a paste of someone's unedited HOST file or telling me to just delete everything in there :p.
Click to expand...

Wow. So much for that BS in Chem.

:biggrin:
 
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This is all that is in my hosts file for now, I'm going to start editing it to remove annoying hosts. The only line you need is the localhost, everything else is commented out.
# Copyright (c) 1993-1999 Microsoft Corp.
#
# This is a sample HOSTS file used by Microsoft TCP/IP for Windows.
#
# This file contains the mappings of IP addresses to host names. Each
# entry should be kept on an individual line. The IP address should
# be placed in the first column followed by the corresponding host name.
# The IP address and the host name should be separated by at least one
# space.
#
# Additionally, comments (such as these) may be inserted on individual
# lines or following the machine name denoted by a '#' symbol.
#
# For example:
#
# 102.54.94.97 rhino.acme.com # source server
# 38.25.63.10 x.acme.com # x client host

127.0.0.1 localhost
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EDIT: Upon further review I would be careful using this method. The linked site notes that a hosts file over 135kb could cause some system slowdown. The file they have made up for download is over 400kb. I'm probably going to do this, but I'm going to do it by hand, every time I find an annoying cookie or ad that I can't block otherwise.
 
Last edited:
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Hodge;612303; said:
EDIT: Upon further review I would be careful using this method. The linked site notes that a hosts file over 135kb could cause some system slowdown. The file they have made up for download is over 400kb. I'm probably going to do this, but I'm going to do it by hand, every time I find an annoying cookie or ad that I can't block otherwise.
Click to expand...

The problem is that they're not blocking an obvious mass host, but rather specific sub-sites. For example, say the hosts file contains these entries:

ad1.spam.com
ad2.spam.com
ad3.spam.com
ad4.spam.com
ad5.spam.com

They could block all these sites with this single entry

*.spam.com

Now, my theory is that some spam sites could reside in a otherwise valid domain. For example spamserver.footballfan.com would be in the same domain as www.footballfan.com (both in the footballfan.com domain) and thus the entry *.footballfan.com would block the valid www site while block the spamming spamserver site.
 
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