On 2020-08-31 02:52:41 William Morder via trinity-users wrote:
> 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

	I would think that 0.0.0.0 is not really an address at all, whereas 127.0.0.1
(x7F 00 00 01) is the loopback address that lets the computer talk to itself.
I suppose 0.0.0.0 is someone's lazy idea for not having to remember
loopback. :-)

Leslie