Testing for Overly-Aggressive Spyware Blockers

Stephen P. Morse, San Francisco


You will be receiving one of the following two messages:
You should be be able to access all the features of my website without being blocked
You are being blocked from accessing XXX which I make use of
If you've received the second message with XXX being some specific site, you will have to remove the line for that site from your "hosts" file. The "hosts" file is a file with the name "hosts" and no suffix. It is located in one of the following places depending on the flavor of the Windows operating system that you are using:
C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\DRIVERS\ETC\HOSTS -- Windows XP
C:\WINNT\SYSTEM32\DRIVERS\ETC\HOSTS -- Windows 2K
C:\WINDOWS\HOSTS -- Win98, ME
You might be lucky and find that simply disabling your spyware blocker will cause the line to be removed. If that doesn't work, or if you didn't even know that you had a spyware blocker, then you can use a text editor such as notepad to modify the "hosts" file. CAUTION: Don't use a word processor (e.g., Microsoft Word) or an html editor (e.g., Frontpage) to do the modification -- that won't work. With the editor, first open the file named hosts, then find the indicated line and delete it, then save the modified hosts file.

Another way to remove the line is to use a program that I wrote just for this purpose. The program can be found at
http://stevemorse.org/fixhosts/fixhosts.html

© Stephen P. Morse, 2004