Yeah from my intuition it sounds like this file serves as a makeshift firewall / proxy. Allowing software to override it kinda makes this weak and basically useless for a lot of purposes.
It’s a DNS override. DNS is what turns URL addresses (www.Lemmy.org) to IP addresses (127.1.0.42) which are what is used to actually connect to another computer.
Normally your PC asks a DNS server,usually provided by your ISP by default, unless there is an entry in the hosts file.
So authorities often ‘block’ websites by just asking ISP to not return the true IP for a URL. You can get around that by putting the IP in your hosts file. You can also block websites by adding an entry on your hosts file that point to local host (your PC).
Yeah from my intuition it sounds like this file serves as a makeshift firewall / proxy. Allowing software to override it kinda makes this weak and basically useless for a lot of purposes.
It’s a DNS override. DNS is what turns URL addresses (www.Lemmy.org) to IP addresses (127.1.0.42) which are what is used to actually connect to another computer.
Normally your PC asks a DNS server,usually provided by your ISP by default, unless there is an entry in the hosts file.
So authorities often ‘block’ websites by just asking ISP to not return the true IP for a URL. You can get around that by putting the IP in your hosts file. You can also block websites by adding an entry on your hosts file that point to local host (your PC).