Ever since the days of Win98, I've relied on the hosts file as being the
first defense from viruses and intrusions. You would not be faulted for
thinking that the hosts file would remain constant from one version of Windows
to another, but sadly you would be mistaken.
In the past, meaning WinXP and earlier, the hosts file entries were
written as individual ines beginning with 127.0.0.1, followed by two spaces and
then the URL name. Not so with Win7 and beyond.
Earthlink webmail has this annoying feature of downloading an entire
character set from fonts.googleapis.com every time you refresh the page. It's
been a very easy task to block that, but this morning as I was taking care of
Win7 I saw that it was not being blocked. I checked everything, even cold
starting the machine but to no avail. On a website I discovered that Microsoft
had made a very small change. Instead of following 127.0.0.1 with two spaces,
they now require a right tab. I suppose they did this to render all earlier
hosts files as being ineffective. Nice.
So I edited the one line to replace the two spaces with a right tab, and
it immediately blocked that site. Now what am I supposed to do with the untold
thousands of other entries?
Chris
When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro
- Hunter S. Thompson
--
_________________________________________________________________
Options: http://lists.thomasclausen.net/mailman/listinfo/olympus
Archives: http://lists.thomasclausen.net/mailman/private/olympus/
Themed Olympus Photo Exhibition: http://www.tope.nl/
|