Comment by 0x12 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 0x12 | Hacker News Reader

Funny, my hosts file seems to interrupt the flow of this prank slightly.

We'll see how my s.o. reacts to it, but on my machine it does absolutely nothing.

In case you're wondering what is in my hosts file:

  127.0.0.1 www.facebook.com
  127.0.0.1 facebook.com
  127.0.0.1 connect.facebook.net
  127.0.0.1 facebook.net
  127.0.0.1 fbcdn.net
  127.0.0.1 www.fbcdn.net
  0.0.0.0 badge.facebook.com
  0.0.0.0 blog.facebook.com
  0.0.0.0 en-gb.facebook.com
  0.0.0.0 developers.facebook.com
  0.0.0.0 touch.facebook.com
  0.0.0.0 de-de.facebook.com
  0.0.0.0 stories.facebook.com
  0.0.0.0 it-it.facebook.com
  0.0.0.0 hu-hu.facebook.com
  0.0.0.0 peace.facebook.com
  0.0.0.0 et-ee.facebook.com
  0.0.0.0 az-az.facebook.com
  0.0.0.0 0.facebook.com
  0.0.0.0 apps.facebook.com

A nice side-effect of this seems to be that the web has become a lot more responsive. No more 'like' buttons popping up all over the place.

edit: regarding my s.o. it's been an interesting morning, this app seems to have opened her eyes to facebook in a different way. No more apps.

You can achieve a similar thing with the ghostery extension.

http://www.ghostery.com/

Wow cool thanks for the link. Just installed it.

Ah that's why I see nothing. Nice!

thanks, also didnt know about this one - was using 'abine' which is similar. I like the ghost icon though :-)

Is it actually funny or surprising to you, given your hosts configuration, or did you just want to mention it?

Surprising, because I'd totally forgotten about it and really wanted to see what this was all about (after reading some of the comments here).

So I thought to myself 'ok, this once' knowing I'd be sticking my head out. It took me a minute or two to realize the cause and I thought that was a nice side-effect of solving this at the DNS layer, even when you're momentarily stupid this will still create enough of a barrier that you'll stop to think a bit longer.

I didn't know about the ghostery extension, so thanks to the person that posted that, that's another good solution.

FB has had its use for me (it found a bunch of long lost people), I haven't been back since.

i'm guessing that you actually have a bunch of other sites blocked in your hosts file, as well. on the assumption that you do, do you ever see any network performance issues related to this? i used to maintain a rather large hosts file for this purpose, but eventually gave it up because i suspected that it had started doing more harm than good.

No, facebook has a special place in my heart, which is why they got 'special treatment'.

Other than the usual suspects and FB my host file is empty.

I can see how a huge hostfile would impact performance, and I would advice against using it to block a very large number of hosts.

Some of these hostnames are quite arcane to me (peace.facebook.com); did you get them from a list somewhere or did you identify each one of them yourself?

You're better off using a browser extension or other technique.

Facebook uses a lot of subdomains like static.ak.fbcdn.net and there's no way you can include them all in your list.

Good point. I'm pretty old school so the hosts file was my first line of defense. I didn't know about ghostery until this thread so that's installed now as well.

Just point your dns cache to an instance of tinydns that is configured to be authoritative for fb's domains.

There was another discussion on this point, where a few others were added:

0.0.0.0 static.ak.fbcdn.net 0.0.0.0 www.static.ak.fbcdn.net 0.0.0.0 login.facebook.com 0.0.0.0 www.login.facebook.com 0.0.0.0 fbcdn.com 0.0.0.0 www.fbcdn.com 0.0.0.0 static.ak.connect.facebook.com 0.0.0.0 www.static.ak.connect.facebook.com

on Opera it just shows a 'like' button. Any ideas on that?

Actually no one really cares what your host file looks like.

I'm quite interested. Mostly because I use similar Facebook blocking techniques so its nice to know what others do too.

One of the problems with speaking for everybody on a forum with 10's of thousands of active users is that invariably you don't.

Your opinion does not equate to everyone's opinion. I'm quite interested in his hosts file (because of blocking like buttons).

This reminds me of a really good bash.org quote: bash.org/?99060

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