That's unfortunate because, as others have noted, the hosts file "feature" is indeed a relic of a bygone era that should be laid permanently to rest rather than being broken for certain use cases. You'll still be able to add your and it will still work. Yes, a nightmare on the same scale as the Dairy Queen across town being out of my favorite flavor. If you're an enterprise IT sysadmin, this is a nightmare.
#MODIFY HOSTS FILE IN WINDOWS 8 WINDOWS#
If you do happen to work for facebook, and you do happen to use your hosts file to point at internal development servers and you happen to use Microsoft's Windows Defender on your development pc, then things got ever so slightly more complicated. Unless you happen to work on small handful of high profile websites that are commonly attacked by phishing/url redirection attacks, nothing has changed. I guess you could add it to the hosts file the way you always did.Īll they did was block redirecting certain high profile domains that were commonly attacked by phishing and url redirection attacks by malware writing to the hostsfile. How can I check a site is up on a server with a certain domain name before I point DNS to it? Nice way to remove a useful tool that's been around for decades. And it will probably cause more issues in the future as 3rd party developers have to work around not having the hosts file as a reliable option any more. So this is the wrong solution to the wrong problem and it is implemented in the wrong way. That way it would never show up in the hosts file which means that it would be that much harder to spot. If a phisher really needed to redirect traffic like that he'd have an easier time just getting the information in the local machine's DNS cache. So, again, at the enterprise level this kind of phishing would not be an issue. The phisher is publishing the IP addresses that need to be blocked. Which one(s) you choose depends upon how you've organized Active Directory and your network.īut a different point is that this is an OLD way of phishing. At the enterprise level there are multiple different ways of handling situations such as this. If you are an enterprise IT manager this is your dream come true. But for a single machine who needs to set up certain private domains locally it seems the best option. The problem with HOSTS files were they needed to be synchronized, distributed and maintained. Or is there a better way that I'm missing ? ( (and running your own DNS server, even locally, and especially on a Windows machine, seems way overkill and no where near "better" IMO).
![modify hosts file in windows 8 modify hosts file in windows 8](https://www.sysprobs.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/opencommandpromptasadministrator_thumb.jpg)
![modify hosts file in windows 8 modify hosts file in windows 8](https://www.thinkalso.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Edit-DOS-command-in-windows-10-min.jpg)
![modify hosts file in windows 8 modify hosts file in windows 8](https://tipsmake.com/data/images/how-to-reset-hosts-file-on-windows-78-81-and-windows-10-picture-1-arMRwhnGR.jpg)
But it's still an example of a legitimate reason someone might rely on the hosts file, and why it could be a major PITA to have it messed with by the OS.
#MODIFY HOSTS FILE IN WINDOWS 8 WINDOWS 8#
I also realize that the issue apparently here is blocking only.īut with that said, what about independent developers running their own web application on their machine ? If you're a web developer and you do your coding locally, it makes sense to use your host file to send a domain like to 127.0.0.1.Īgain, I know it looks like Windows 8 won't interfere with that. I agree that for blocking or for network-wide control using HOSTS is a horrible idea.
![modify hosts file in windows 8 modify hosts file in windows 8](https://geeksite.net/posts/alias-in-windows-hosts-file.jpg)
I don't fucking CARE that it's used for malware. Whatever the user puts in there, should work as intended. Hosts was never meant to be used for blocking sites, but it works well enough as a consequence and the behaviour should be left alone. THIS is a prime example of why the hosts file still exists and the behaviour should not be fucked with by those assclowns at Microsoft. I make use of the hosts file for various purposes, including getting my forum users set up with hosts file entries to the new server, beforehand, whenever our DNS entries are changing so they can still reach the forum while changes are propagating. We expect implementations of the TCP/IP protocol in clients to behave in established ways and Microsoft has no right to change that. Microsoft can't "kill the hosts file off" because the behaviour is part of the IP specification (defined in the RFC's) These people defending MIcrosoft's behaviour are just tools.