On Monday 31 August 2020 00:33:33 Stefan Krusche wrote:
> Hi Bill,
>
> Am Montag 31 August 2020 schrieb William Morder via trinity-users:
> > I do know that I see a big difference between using a customized
> > hosts file instead of (only) depending on ad-blockers. As soon as I
> > overwrite the hosts file with my list, I find that my system is more
> > stable. It's not only the ads that get blocked, it seems, but also
> > other unwanted connections.
>
> Sure, that's what I want as well :-)  I'm using a huge /etc/hosts as
> well, but only with 0.0.0.0 so all requests from unwanted domains get
> send to nowhere without my system (localhost) trying to serve them
> before.
>
> The purpose of using 127.0.0.1 in /etc/hosts, AIUI, is to make the web
> server on localhost show some substitute page/image/whatever to
> indicate something has been blocked.  If you don't have a web server
> running on localhost and configured to serve such requests it doesn't
> make sense to put 127.0.0.1 in /etc/hosts to my understanding.
>
> HTH
>
> Kind regards,
> Stefan
>
>

The first hosts files that I found online all put 127.0.0.1, which I blindly 
accepted. It seemed to work okay, but then I heard about using 0.0.0.0. My 
instinct was that the second choice was better; because 127.0.0.1 is also the 
address I use for proxy configuration, so it goes somewhere. 

Better that I should send unwanted requests to nowhere, rather than any 
somewhere. This is why I raised the question about security in my earlier 
post. If proxy traffic is directed there, then there must be somewhere that 
it can go; and if some bad actor knows this -- well, maybe it is a stretch, 
but perhaps it could be used by a malicious intruder. 

0.0.0.0 makes more sense. 

I wonder if there are some situations in which 127.0.0.1 might be preferable, 
or the two variants used in tandem -- for example, you mentioned "if you have 
a web server"? Maybe, then, it would be useful to create a home version and a 
web server version. 

Anyway, I don't want to go through and change items line-by-line, and to run 
find-and-replace will still leave me with a lot of duplicates, and the list 
is already big enough to be unwieldy for kedit to handle. I believe Michael 
mentioned some kind of script? 

Bill