The hosts file is not sacred on Windows. Anyone who is administrator can just edit it. I've done it to add domain names to localhost.

For anyone hand-wringing over this, this used to be normal. The hosts file was invented a decade before DNS. The end user, or app, would edit their hosts file purposefully after downloading a master copy from the Stanford Research Institute which was occasionally updated.

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jacobgkau 3 hours ago | parent [-]

> For anyone hand-wringing over this, this used to be normal.

People editing hosts files for other reasons was normal (a long time ago-- and it stopped being normal for valid reasons, as tech evolved and the shortcomings of that system were solved). A program automatically editing the hosts file and its website using that to detect information about the website visitor is not the same thing; that usage is novel and was never "normal."

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wtallis 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

In particular, manually editing the hosts file was a mostly-obsolete practice by the time the first version of Windows shipped, and certainly by the time Windows actually had a built-in networking stack. And it was always a red flag for a local app to mess with the hosts file.

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anvuong 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Obsolete? My team has an onboard document that spells out lines that needed to be add to host file so they can access internal resources. These are machines directly bought/rented and maintained by the team, so we prefer to use host files instead of going through the company DNS, which is maintained by an entirely different team.

	▲	2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		[deleted]

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jeffbee 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> manually editing the hosts file was a mostly-obsolete practice by the time the first version of Windows shipped

This claim strikes me as obviously wrong.

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AnthonyMouse 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Programs adding entries to the hosts file is still pretty normal, e.g. if something that uses a local webserver as its UI and wants you to be able to access it by name even if you don't have an internet connection or may be stuck behind a DNS server that mangles entries in the public DNS that resolve to localhost.

	▲	mikkupikku an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Programs like that should just be shipped with good documentation. And applications built to be used by normies should almost certainly never be built that way in the first place.