Some time ago I (wow, time files!) I suggested that using 0.0.0.0 for host-file based blocklists would be faster than using 127.0.0.1. Above you can see an other reason for using 0.0.0.0: some applications take up port 80 on the localhost and accessing it can (potentially) create havoc.

In the example above TeamViewer (which is quite a nice remote control application BTW – with support for Linux!) has taken it over and thus it displays a mock page instead of the advertisement (which is very courteous).

PS. This was also mentioned in the original article, I just wanted to give an other example.

Knowing that they have some interesting people (and webcasts), I bite. So where should I click? On the subscribe button of course! This takes me (trough a redirector – which fortunately wasn’t blocked by my host file) to this website. Fail no. 1: there is no way to subscribe! The link said subscribe, but there is no email subscription, no RSS feed, no nothing!

Fail no. 2: the underlined titles are not hyperlinks as one would thin! No, you must find the “HERE” link after each listing and click on that, complete a survey (!), after which you get an email with the link (which isn’t working for me at the moment :-().

While some of these things are simply an overshoot of marketing (requiring email address to view the webcasts), but others are just pure incompetence. It is as is people were trying to prevent people from getting to the media.

PS. The one webcast I saw (“DIY Malware Construction”) was quite interesting and I would recommend to people interesting in security related topics to check it out, together with other webcasts.

There is a very nice hosts file over at WinHelp2002’s page. If you don’t know what a hosts file is, check out the Wikipedia entry on it . It is basically a way to override the DNS lookup process and make sure that some domains resolve to a predefined IP address.

What the above mentioned hosts file contains is a list of known advertisement sites and associates it with localhost (127.0.0.1). That is, whenever your browser tries to connect to one of these servers (to fetch ads most probably), it will connect to your local machine and will return an error. You will find that this speeds up page loading considerably (for example it block around 70% of the advertisement in the new Yahoo mail which has the annoying tendency to refresh them every couple of seconds which can be killer on a slow connection).

The above page contains instructions for the different flavors of Windows, so here is the Ubuntu version of the instructions:

1. Download the hosts file (if you downloaded the zipped version, extract it)
2. Open hosts.txt in an editor
3. Open a console and type sudo gedit /etc/hosts. Provide your password.
4. Copy from the first editor to the second editor the list of hosts
5. Save and close the /etc/hosts file

One interesting sidenote: nslookup bypasses the hosts file and it goes directly to the DNS server, so you can’t use it to check if the changes were correct. Use a tool like ping instead. When doing ping [a domain from the list] it should tell you something like PING cc.webpower.com (127.0.0.1) 56(84) bytes of data. If it says 127.0.0.1 then it worked.