HOSTS file and spam-ad-fish avoidance

[Dariusz Piatkowski]

Team!

I have been using the modified HOSTS file for a while now. Previously I was using Privoxy as well, but eventually dropped this in favour of just HOSTS and the FF add-on 'NoScript'.

The other day I came across a Unified HOSTS distribution, which is actually a tad over twice as big as the one I have been using, so about 1.1M vs 450K. Having deployed this on my OS/2 box I wanted to report that despite it's size (is there a real limit to this on our aging TCPIP stack?) it appears to work fine.

Now what is the benefit of using this 'Unified HOSTS'? Well, it is a GitHub project which assembles numerous individual HOSTS distros, scans them over to remove duplicates and produces a single file with some 40K entries.

I deployed this on my Win boxes as well, and the difference is tremendous, so I give that unified HOSTS approach a pretty good quality rating.

Anyways, if you want to try it out here are the links to the two releases:

1) HOSTS - http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.htm
2) UNIFIED HOSTS - https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts/blob/master/hosts

[Daniel]

I've been using the winhelp2002 hosts file for years. I'll have to try the other one. Thanks

[Sean Casey]

I have been missing out on this little gem.  Will install this evening.  Thank you!