Windows hosts file to protect vs just about anything

[Forboding Angel]

Ok, so, I've been getting increasingly upset at firefox. On windows, FF is sluggish. With ff8 it got better, but chrome works instantly and is ready for business right away.

The two things holding me back were:
Adblock plus just hides the ads on chrome, the content is still loaded, just hidden.
No master password function.

Now, with adblock plus, that is a big deal to me, so I decided to be smart and use the windows hosts file to cut out the middleman.

Obviously, this has the downside of not being something you just lolclick and maek update, but the upside of hardcore lolblock.

This hosts file is almost 1mb large. It blocks all known ad servers (as of yesterday night), adobe's draconian activation servers (trust me on this one, never buy an adobe product, it sucks balls), and has a current list of spybot S&D immunization listings. So, basically, it's pretty comprehensive.

It occurred to me today that it might be useful to some of you.

Suggested edits (things I did to make my life easier):
Google ip address hardcoded for when your dns servers fail. You can do this with other sites too, but I don't recommend it as those sites IP addresses may actually change on occasion (like when the spring site switches servers), while google's ip is unlikely to ever change. This is the advantage of owning server farms all over the world.

The other thing is already in here, and that is to map "mycomputer.com" to 127.0.0.1. Yes of course localhost works just fine, but having a more typical "domain" name for it comes in handy. Especially for web apps that whine about "localhost". I use WAMPserver locally for php development, so for me this is a nice addition.

I have blathered on enough. Hopefully some of you have use for this. If you don't know how to edit your hosts file: http://helpdeskgeek.com/windows-7/windows-7-hosts-file/

Remember that the hosts file is marked as read only, so you need to remove that flag first (right click > properties). Remember to set it back to read-only when you are done editing!

Also, make a backup of your original hosts file as a just in case measure. It should be fine to simply copy and paste the contents of the attached file directly over your existing hosts file.

[Das Bruce]

FF8? I'm still on 3.

Also I've never noticed a problem with a browser being sluggish, what does this manifest as? Slow loading or scrolling or ?

Is there any reason to upgrade to FF8?

[SpliFF]

FF8 will give you WebGL and Video tag support with WebM which are pretty nice features for sites that support them (not many I admit). There's probably important security and rendering fixes. I've never seen a good reason not to keep FF up to date.

I run FF8 on linux and it is not sluggish at all. Having a 1MB hosts file is going to kill performance more than any browser choice.

[Das Bruce]

There's probably important security and rendering fixes. I've never seen a good reason not to keep FF up to date..

I don't like change. Everything works fine at the moment and I'm perfectly comfortable with it's appearance.

[BaNa]

FF7 (?) was a disaster for me, it started crashing and freezing up randomly. The new version fixed some of that, but I am taking a long look at opera now. I just have all adobe-related shit in my hosts file :D. mofo still manages to connect to update server tho .

[knorke]

downloading a hosts.txt from some forum attachment, sounds legit.

[AF]

There's probably important security and rendering fixes. I've never seen a good reason not to keep FF up to date..

I don't like change. Everything works fine at the moment and I'm perfectly comfortable with it's appearance.

Security?

8/7 bring with them dramatic memory and speed improvements. It also prevents forum users from posting various images and media known to exploit pre-FF7/8 knowing full well that you are vulnerable.

[Jools]

FF 7 is nice imo, I just hate the version numbering and the fact that my extensions (addons) never have time to catch up to the current release of it.

If you add apple.com to your hosts file, remember to remove it when you are upgrading your iPhone, or otherwise it won't be able to verify the iOS with apple. Happened to me and had forgot about the hosts file.

Chrome is nice I guess but imo google gathers too much info from me. Opera is nice too but I hate its silent update feature (you know it has updated when your firewall asks new permissions). What's with software companies these days, why are they committing suicide?

[koshi]

Having a 1MB hosts file is going to kill performance more than any browser choice.

I see no difference in browsing between a 10 or 30k line hosts file on my linux box. Got suggestions for a more 'proper' benchmark?

[SpliFF]

No. That comment was based on known issues with Spybot hosts file and Windows DNS - in particular it was a known issue with IE. I can't find the details now but it all boils down to whether the DNS implementation is doing sensible hashing and caching or just reading the file line by line with a pattern match. If your CPU and filesystem are modern though this is obviously going to be less of an issue.

On another point I'd suggest if you want to do this you should do it via Spybot rather than by hand. When bad hosts get blocked they just move to new domain and the only way to keep up with that is to regularly update the list.

Or run linux where your chance of getting website malware is effectively zero.

[Forboding Angel]

Spliff, the spybot headers and footers are intact, so you can just download spybot immunization updates and apply them. They will play nice with this.

Knorke, you can just keep an eye on the left column and scroll quickly down the file. You will notice that all is 127.0.0.1 or 0.0.0.0

This is a copy pasta of my own hosts file (a few things omitted).

FF7 and previous versions have a fairly bad exploit. It is a bad idea to not keep FF up to date.

Jools, the info gathering is easy to turn off. Both on your google profile and in the browser. You're unwittingly spreading what is essentially FUD. Google has had these controls in place for many many years.

[hoijui]

i was on FF3 for a long time too, then updated but.. really did do me no good. it added some features i do not need, and got more buggy and slow. bugs get fixed in versions quite often, and speed increased, but it is still not better then FF3 to me.