News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Using a Hosts File To Make The Internet Not Suck As Much. Parent comment

Re:Using a Hosts File To Make The Internet Not Suck As Much by fwr on Friday February 22, 2013 @11:03AM (#5264878)
If every entry routes to 127.0.0.1, what's the worst that could happen?
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Using a Hosts File To Make The Internet Not Suck As Much by yareally on Friday February 22, 2013 @11:52AM (#5265187)
One can also null route them as well via 0.0.0.0. Hosts tend to die instantly that way versus timing out with 127.0.0.1
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Using a Hosts File To Make The Internet Not Suck As Much by drzaiusapelord on Friday February 22, 2013 @02:44PM (#5266273)
Years ago I maintained a popular ad blocking hosts file. I got a lot of complaints when I switched from 127.0.0.1 to 0.0.0.0. Some TCPIP stacks just didn't like it. Others had little webservers running on 127.0.0.1 that quickly served up 404's for speed or black jpegs to make things pretty. Someone out there maintained a little httpd for windows that did just that. If it saw a GET for blahblah.jpg it would serve up a black graphic of some random size. It sure beat the default FF or IE error message.

Honestly, there's no need for this stuff in the age of browser based ad blocking. I gave up on it when I saw how easy it was to write rules and wildcards in ad block plus. Interest in it fell. I'm surprised to see one still maintained.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Using a Hosts File To Make The Internet Not Suck As Much by TazeTSchnitzel on Friday February 22, 2013 @12:30PM (#5265387)
Routing to 127.0.0.1 is dumb for this reason, especially since you may be running something on port 80.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Using a Hosts File To Make The Internet Not Suck As Much by thwarted on Friday February 22, 2013 @12:41PM (#5265447)
Unless you have something listening on the ports that doesn't respond or a firewall that is dropping packets on the loopback interface, "connection refused" is returned right away.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Using a Hosts File To Make The Internet Not Suck As Much by gbaygon on Friday February 22, 2013 @02:10PM (#5266031)
Here is the 0.0.0.0 version: http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/zero/
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Using a Hosts File To Make The Internet Not Suck As Much by Zuider on Friday February 22, 2013 @12:02PM (#5265232)
If you were malevolent and stupid enough, you could 'remotely' hack yourself (and set your own HP printer on fire).
[ Parent | on HN ]