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Windows 8 Changes Host File Blocking
An anonymous reader writes "Windows 8 has been confirmed to not only ignore, but also modify the hosts file. As soon as a website that should be blocked is accessed, the corresponding entry in the hosts file is removed, even if the hosts file is read-only. The hosts file is a popular, cross-platform way of blocking access to certain domains, such as ad-serving websites."
Before everyone gets all excited... the article has already been updated with the fact that this is a feature of “windows defender” (and imo a reasonable one) and can be disabled.
The hosts file is popular for blocking sites, but also popular for redirecting to phishing sites as well. This seems like a very ineffective way of solving that problem, but at least it doesn’t look like there is some evil malicious intent..
In other news, running certain anti-virus products will prevent you from writing to the boot sector while they are running
Enterprise customers will block it at using DNS or using Group Policy, not the hosts file.
What Enterprise IT Manager is using the Hosts file to block web sites? Enterprises use firewalls. I've been blocking doubleclick at the firewall/proxy level for as long as I can remember.
Hell if you are worried about power you can buy one of those little plug computers or my personal favorite the little cheap E350 AMD kits. Those things are cheap, make great mini-servers or office boxes, only draw about 18w under load and less than 6w on average, great little units
Seconded, however you'd best steer clear of the Asus and Asrock boards if you plan on doing anything with the PCI slots on those boards. They all use the ASMedia 1083 pci bridge, which happens to be broken beyond belief. See here and here. TL;DR: the controller has a hardware bug where it fails to deassert its interrupt status, causing IRQ storms which effectively makes connected devices useless.
Hosts was always an unsupported system file hack
Where do you get this idea from? Hosts files are a common part of the IP stack of various operating systems. Microsoft has been using hosts files at least since Windows 95. They are fully supported and documented.