Blocking Para Sites

My week hasn't gone particularly well. Firstly, my computer blew up in blue smoke. Then, my replacement computer ended up not being all that compatible with software I need to run for projects. There is also a distinct possibility that I may have swine flu. Some members of the Illiterati tried to mug me three times this week. I say try because there is circumstantial evidence that implicates me in assault and propagating hate speech. The lesson you learn from this is don't fuck with me. In more diplomatic terms, this rule is expressed as do unto others as you would like to be done unto yourself. Same thing, if expressed with more syntactic sugar. I don't like being fucked with, so I do my best not to fuck with other people. You get the idea.

What to do if a website fucks with you

Suggest that you have a particularly shitty ISP. Suggest that this ISP is called isturb. Suggest that isturb decided it's an anurism inducing brainwave idea to hijack your browser and redirect it when you've reached your cap. Suggest that it doesn't help to try and reason with their technical support because they are shaved apes trained to answer: "Eish hauwa I duno maybe you should buy more bandwidth?" to every query they get. The lives of homo habilis must be eventful, going from one angsty, vengeful, ranting nerd to the next, interspersed with the erratic lunch break or two.

Stop spam websites from hijacking your browser

Enough pointless rage for one day. Let's look at an amazingly blunt way to stop any website from hogging your precious bandwidth. The answer lies in your hosts file. More classy nerds than I have figured out bigger and better tricks by now. But seriously, my computer is just a fancy mp3 player, so this is what you and I can do to stop these cretins from fucking with us:

1. Find your hosts file. This is not as hard as it sounds. Unfortunately, suggest that your ISP is so shitty that it doesn't provide software that runs on Linux. It claims that it supports Linux, but those half-baked jackasses would probably suggest to you to install wine and run an exe. Suggest that you are vendor-locked on Windows, find your hosts file here. Linux nerds will find their hosts file in the /etc/ directory.


2. Ensure that you have the righs to edit your hosts file. Windows users: this means right clicking on the file, clicking on properties and unticking the box that says Read only. Open the hosts file in notepad or something similar. Linux nerds need no lecture on rights or where to find the hosts file on Linux.


3. Edit your hosts file. After you identified the source of your peril, simply tell the source of your peril to redirect to your ass so it may kiss your ass. Your ass naturally lives in your home. In PC speak, home is 127.0.0.1. Suggest that the source of your ISP peril is www.isturb.co.za. This means you add the following line to your hosts file:
   
   127.0.0.1 isturb.co.za
   
   This line says home is the place where isturb may find your ass to kiss it. By the way, the first line in your hosts file is generally:
   
   127.0.0.1 localhost
   
   This wasn't in my hosts file, so I put it there. Seems to work better with this line.


4. Save and close your hosts file. Don't be a bright spark and save it as a text file. The hosts file should have no extension. It should be hosts. Period.


5. For the paranoid: Ensure that you don't have the rights to edit your hosts file. After you edited the hosts file, right click on it, select properties and tick the read only box again. This is probably not necessary until it's too late.

From now on, isturb will no longer redirect your browser to their spam infested hades. Nay, nay, from now on, whenever isturb tries to do that, your browser will redirect to some arb place hosted on your local computer. My other computers on the home network sometimes do funky google searches, or they simply give a 404. Bitchin. No more hogging my browser, hypothetical fucktards.

Update

Some websites, like the hypothetical isturb, might use slightly different URLs to try and spam you with their malware. To counter this, you might have to add the different URLs to your hosts file. In theory, you can add all the aliases for a particular IP address next to it in the hosts file, like this:

127.0.0.1 isturb.co.za www.isturb.co.za http://www.isturb.co.za/whatever.html

However, I found that it works better to use all the variants on separate lines in Windows XP, like this:

127.0.0.1 isturb.co.za
127.0.0.1 www.isturb.co.za
127.0.0.1 http://www.isturb.co.za/whatever.html

Note that there should be a space between the IP address and the URL. I use tabs just to make things neater. That seems to do the trick.