Slashdot Mirror

YT, part 2

Edge cases
5.) Dynamic Name Service down - I have no idea of how bad your service is, but for most people this doesn't 'go down' often enough to need to hard code names
6.) poisoned - Infrequent and better addressed by digital signatures, either DNSSEC or confirming that the sites certificate matches.
9.) blocked - Only if you are visiting so many dodgy websites that you can't remember all the IP addresses.
7.) trackers (dnsrequestlogs/.../transparent ISP proxy) - Only if you live somewhere where the sites you visit are being logged and/or are something that you are worried about. This information is much more likely to be constructed from the actual _connection_ you make. Who cares if I tried to find the address of google.com? Anyone logging my usage is going to check to see if I connected to it. This is just padding your list.

Overstated or misleading
4.) DGA C&C - Bullshit. The only way you can block DGA is to exhaustively list every domain it can generate. You can only do this after it's been identified and analysed to discover either the algorithm or list. At that point, it's no longer 'dynamic' and is just another list of known bad names. If you want to block something 'dynamically' you need to use something that can block by pattern - wildcards, regex expressions etc. Like most add-ons allow.

---

The 'DNS bennys' you mention are protection against low-probability faults or failures. If you live in a 3rd world (internet provider speaking) and have outtages or are visiting sites that are illegal, then maybe you want a host file pinning those incriminating IPs in your 'favourites' section. I'm having trouble working out when you would visit a site so dodgy that it's blocked by Name Service, but that you'd want to have listed for the authorities to find.

To summarise. The only clear win a host file has over add-ons is in resources used. Using your figures, a host file uses ~60MB less memory than uBlock. On a modest system with 4GB of memory, for eg, that represents 1.5% of total. And is similarly trivial for CPU and IO. In return for this overhead, I get a range of features that your solution cannot provide and I save the most precious and constrained resource - my time.

Other than that, add-ons are as good (draw) in four of the cases you list, win four and only lose on the three mentions of resource savings - which as I have said, is so slight as to be all but imperceptible.

As time has passed and systems grown more powerful, the main advantage of a host file has become less relevant. At the same time, as sophistication of threat has grown, blacklisting has proven less and less useful.

This is not a solution to anything except edge cases.

Extras
ClarityRay - Bullshit. You've been making this claim for years with nothing to back it up. You make your claim based on _their_ claims. I cannot find a single site that uses it, detects an ad-blocker and restricts content. The ClarityRay webpage doesn't react to my use of uBlock Origin. The only site I could find that is/was supposed to use it is a French TV network and it didn't react to my use of uBlock Origin.

Adblock Plus - yes, the author of the software chose to do something that undermines the entire point of the software. It says nothing about ad blockers, specifically, that doesn't apply equally to any software, including yours.

From the superuser.com link

Blocking via the host file is almost certainly going to be faster just because it's much more limited in capability ...

A reasonably powerful computer probably won't have much of a problem with a real ad blocker ...

The host file is almost certainly faster seeing as it is baked into the OS and is doing something quite simple. On the other hand, Adblock probably stops more ads and requires less upkeep.

I

Draw with ad blocker
1. bad sites
2. fastflux
14. Multi platform

Loss to add ons
7. Trackers - only cross site; privacy extensions can block trackers from the sites you allow
8. Spam payload - only downloads if scripts allowed; hosts blacklists, script blocking whitelists
9. Phish payload - double counting; same as 8
15. Easy data edit - extensions are even easier to use (auto update, real time modification, within the browser)
17. What? uBlock Origin has the option of using hosts; clear win over your tool

Wins to hosts
16. More efficient
18. Less resources - double count, see above

Edge cases that involve replacing Domain Name Service with a host file
3. DynDNS - how do you populate your host list? Lookups. Still vulnerable. Use OpenVPN, properly configured.
5. Downed - most people don't live in the internet equivalent of the third world
6. Poisoned - as above
11. Trackers - there might be some cases where people don't want requests logged and aren't otherwise anonymising their requests
12. Blocks - yeah. If you need to get to illegal sites.

Overstated or misleading
4. DGA - utter bullshit. You can only block a DGA by exhaustively listing every file it generates, an then only after it's been found and analysed. uBlock Origin, for eg. can use regex so you can block the domains a DGA may generate based on a few samples.

No idea
10. No idea what 'caps' is supposed to be
13. What?

That's three draws, five losses, two wins and five edge cases. You have one false/misleading claim and two that I have no idea about (I've ignored where you've padded the list by claiming the same thing more than once).

Your 'wins' refer to saving ~60MB of RAM. On a system with 4GB of RAM, that's 1.5%. On 8GB and up it's less than 1%. For most people, under most circumstances the resource difference is utterly trivial and has been for years. You are stuck in the past where saving 60MB was a significant performance gain. These days, my time is more constrained than memory. I'll happily trade a couple of per cent of my system resources for a saving in time and usability. I do not care that your method uses less resources. The difference stopped being meaningful years ago.

A host file is useful if there are problems with the Dynamic Name Service. But, again, for most users this is simply never an issue. It's an edge case at best.

Extras
ClarityRay - Bullshit. You've been making this claim for years with nothing to back it up. You make your claim based on _their_ claims. I cannot find a single site that uses it, detects an ad-blocker and restricts content. The ClarityRay webpage doesn't react to my use of uBlock Origin. The only site I could find that is/was supposed to use it is a French TV network and it didn't react to my use of uBlock Origin.

Adblock Plus - yes, the author of the software chose to do something that undermines the entire point of the software. It says nothing about ad blockers, specifically, that doesn't apply equally to any software, including yours.

superuser.com link

Blocking via the host file is almost certainly going to be faster just because it's much more limited in capability ...

A reasonably powerful computer probably won't have much of a problem with a real ad blocker ...

The host file is almost certainly faster seeing as it is baked into the OS and is doing something quite simple. On the other hand, Adblock probably stops more ads and requires less upkeep.

I agree completely with the sentiments expressed, above. Thanks for the link. (You didn't really read them, did you? You just saw a couple of people saying 'using a host file is faster' and stopped there?)

YT

"Drivers penalized for drunk driving can be subject to mandatory killswitch breathlayzers equipment."
http://lci.tf1.fr/france/societe/alcool-au-volant-pour-demarrer-il-faudra-d-abord-souffler-6678392.html

Mr. Donnedieu persiste...

http://news.tf1.fr/news/multimedia/0,,3275091,00.h tml

If you had read the other story, you read that:

Selon LCI, le conducteur avait déjà été condamné pour état d'ivresse et excès de vitesse, son permis lui avait été retiré durant 4 ans.

Translation:According to LCI [a TV Channel], the driver has already been prosecuted for drunken driving and over-speeding, and his license cancelled for 4 years

This guy sounds like a dangerous idiot who is trying to protect his but with a fake story.

It also sounds like the media picked up HIS story first without fact-checking. Same thing happened with a woman in the Paris subway who claimed she and her baby were attacked by "anti-semites". Her story went first page in most of the newspapers, people started shouting against the insecurity in France, "anti-semitisme" and all sort of non-sense. It turned out she was mythomaniac and made up the whole story.

Mine goes :

"
the following components are required:
html

URL:
mem://http://videos.tf1.fr/video....
"

trying to watch any of the videos from the TF1 site. I want to train my french.

I'm not very interested in improvment in this domain, as the first one who will benefits from this kind of research will be advertisers.

The TF1 (main private TV channel in France) president recently said he's "selling available brain time". The TV programs are specially designed for good reception to advertisments.

I haven't been there myself but I saw on the news (both TV, online and printed) that the Virgin Megastore here in Paris had 200 PS2 and opened at midnight that day. 2 people got injured in the "fight" and many people had been waiting for hours... They just did something grand like with a giant PS2 dome opening, the boxes being underneath the dome surrounded by spotlights... There were 70 000 PS2 for France, and 50 000 were only available for people who reserved one earlier so 20 000 Playstation 2 have been sold yesterday in stores all over the country. pfew!

Personnaly I wouldn't go through all that troubles for a console that still lacks a lot of great games (something else than arcade) and wait for the system to be a few months older...