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| Start New | Message Index | Flat View |
| High Speed, Ad-free access |
| Author: | Stuart Cliffe |
| Date: | Friday, 5th Apr 2002 11:18 |
| Views: | 2,296 (excluding Digests and RSS feeds) |
| Category: | Computers and Software | | URL: | http://www.freepint.com/go/b16967 |
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Its amazing that, no matter how familiar you are with a subject, there's at least one fact that seems to be common knowledge elsewhere, but comes as a blinding revelation when you hear it..
I learned about Hosts files recently, a holdover from the early days of the Internet before domain name servers existed, and each computer had to convert the human-friendly www.freepint.com into a system usable 212.250.240.131
In fact at one time it was some person's job to collate all the new /changed computer IDs into one hosts file and circulate it to all the computers on the system.
OK those days are long gone, but when you type a new URL into your address bar, or click a bookmark on your system, you computer still has a quick look at its own hosts file to see if there is anything it should know.
There are two benefits to knowing this information;
1) if you are still struggling with a single dial-up machine, converting your bookmarks into a hosts file will speed up access to the web; and
2) by setting certain addresses to 127.0.0.1 (or 0.0.0.0) pages will not be loaded. Your system will display the well-known 'page cannot be found' error. This is a way of limiting access to certain parts of the internet should you wish to do so - and there are lots of prepared hosts files out there containing lists of servers that publish pop up ads and banners which you will never see again.
-I'm not anti-advertising (much) but I do object to the bandwidth that these often animated pictures use on my dial-up connection.
There are (I now find) lots of sites out there with Hosts file information.
So: for a speed increase, some security and ad-freedom I recommend you search 'hosts file' in your favourite search engine and see whether this might be applicable to you...
(PS for the benefit of Freepint and its sponsors' peace of mind, a hosts file doesn't exclude anything on their pages!)
Stuart
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| Start New | |
| Topic |
Author |
Date |
ID |
 | High Speed, Ad-free access | | Its amazing that, no matter how familiar you are with a subject, there's at least one fact that ... |
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Stuart Cliffe |
05/04/02 11:18 |
16967 |
 | Re: High Speed, Ad-free access | | "Hosts file" looks to be mainly discussed in reference to blocking advertisements (see the pop-up ads thread).
Two directory listings for ... |
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Michael Bluett |
18/04/02 14:04 |
17199 |
| | Re: High Speed, Ad-free access | | The best source of information I found was via http://www.accs-net.com/hosts/ from the folks at Gorilla Design Studios (I didn't ask) ... |
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Stuart Cliffe |
18/04/02 17:21 |
17214 |
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Daniel Hull |
18/04/02 09:03 |
17186 |
Please note: The reply form is not showing because the posting is older than six months or the thread is locked. Please start a new topic or contact the forum administrator.
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