ISP's to police your downloads

[woodsmoke]

Re: ISP's to police your downloads

Steve posted:

I still don't see the RIAA case as precedent for the government stepping in to protect Microsoft's revenue stream.

i agree that it may not seem to "directly" apply but...we can only wait to see what might happen if the world economy goes further in the tank.

woodsmoke

[ScottyK]

Re: ISP's to police your downloads

I use this hosts file with a little over 16000 hosts blocked...

Does this approach have any advantage over using Adblock Plus in firefox, or equivalents? I see ads so rarely with it.

Would there be anything wrong in running both methods? I also run the adblock add on for Firefox, but I'm interested in using the hosts file method.

Or is it best to just pick one over the other?

On a side note I'm using OpenDNS for the kids' linux box, with google blocked. So far no complaints about the service.

[GreyGeek]

Re: ISP's to police your downloads

......
Would there be anything wrong in running both methods? I also run the adblock add on for Firefox, but I'm interested in using the hosts file method.

Adblock only works when FireFox is running. /etc/hosts works all the time at the gateway level. Ping a listed URL in a Konsole and you'll get a response from 127.0.0.1 (lo), not the URL. Calls to the gateway made by FireFox and other applications get an echo from lo, bypassing any annoyances that might be waiting on the URL site.

Adblock is slower. If you keep your /etc/hosts file updated, AND, if you encounter a site that isn't blocked by the hosts file you can make a note of the URL and add it to the end of the hosts file yourself. If you accumulate several new sites you can post them to the site where you got the hosts file and everyone benefits.

[ScottyK]

Re: ISP's to police your downloads

Note to future users: (Including myself when I forget in six months)

Don't just copy and paste the hosts file over the existing file and think you're ok. You have to add the IP and name of your computer!

You'll need the two lines....

127.0.0.1 localhost
127.0.1.1 (name of computer, found in /etc/hostname)

Found out the hard way when I just copied the file over the existing hosts, rebooted, and wondered why I had no internet.

If I understand correctly, if you have a static IP, you replace 127.0.1.1 with that IP, correct?

[GreyGeek]

Re: ISP's to police your downloads

No.
See http://www.tech-faq.com/127-0-0-1.html

The address 127.0.0.1 is defined by the TCP/IP protocol as a reserved address that routes packets back to the host. Thus, no computer connected to the Internet, or any other TCP/IP compliant network, can identify itself as 127.0.0.1. The Internet Engineering Task Force's RFC 3330 defines 127.0.0.1 and 12 other special-use IPv4 addresses. Any public router or gateway that receives a packet destined for a special-use IP is required to drop it, without logging it's contents. Thus, if such a packet is accidentally forwarded outside of it's host, the packet will not accidentally arrive at another location that is willing to accept it and answer. This requirement helps provide network security, as even a machine that is configured to appear invisible on a network will likely answer packets addressed to it's loopback address. Additionally, some services may be unexpectedly activated by responding to such a stray packet.

[oshunluvr]

Re: ISP's to police your downloads

I have a multi-user system with different hosts file needs (one user under 18!) so I keep a set of files for each user and recreate a hosts file each login.

~.hosts.base = local network host definitions
~.hosts.bad = this user's blocked hosts

"cat"ed together to make /etc/hosts

[woodsmoke]

Re: ISP's to police your downloads

I quite realize that my discussion of "the Commerce Clause" has been left way behind, but the general idea of my post is that the "congress" or the "president" have often used the clause in "creative" ways to get what they want, as opposed to what may seem logical to the rest of the country.

"Apparently", in reportage today, the "justification" for the "individual mandate" in Obama Care was the Commerce Clause.

And for people who haven't read that part of the thread:

Please consider that during WWII the "government" sued a farmer because he was growing his own crops and feeding them to his own animals and selling leftovers to neighbors and the government said that was illegal because it was removing "possible income" from the national distributors(who sold across state lines).

"Apparently" the use of the commerce clause is "one reason" why the Supreme Court chose to hear the particular case as announced today.

So this will be interesting to watch be played out.

Chief Justice Alito was appointed "particularly" because he was considered to be, in most cases, an "originalist".

books.google.com/books?isbn=1596980508...

The salient point being that the commerce clause is an "enumerated power" of the federal government and being "enumerated", as opposed to being "added in later", usually carries a lot of weight.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enumerated_powers

A discussion of the use of the clause appears at the bottom of the Wikipedia page.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commerce_Clause
woodsmoke

[SteveRiley]

Re: ISP's to police your downloads

Mod note:

I have moved my hosts script and the subsequent posts to the Coding/Scripting board. Please see the thread Script to automate building an adblocking hosts file for the script and to continue the conversation.