[jacobgkau]

> 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."

[AnthonyMouse]

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]

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.

[AnthonyMouse]

That seems like a pretty reasonable way to write a small cross-platform application which is intended to be a background service to begin with. You only have to create the UI once without needing to link in a heavy cross-platform UI framework and can then just put an HTTP shortcut to the local name in the start menu or equivalent. Normies can easily figure that out specifically because you're not telling them to read documentation to manually edit their hosts file.

There are also other reasons to do it, like if you want a device on the local network to be accessible via HTTPS. Getting the certificate these days is pretty easy (have the device generate a random hostname for itself and get a real certificate by having the developer's servers do a DNS challenge for that hostname under one of the developer's public domain names), but now you need the local client device to resolve the name to the LAN IP address even if the local DNS refuses to resolve to those addresses or you don't want the LAN IP leaked into the public DNS.

Or the app being installed is some kind of VPN that only provides access to a fixed set of devices and then you want some names to resolve to those VPN addresses, which the app can update if you change the VPN configuration.

[wtallis]

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.

[anvuong]

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.

[Dylan16807]

That's dysfunctional enough to qualify as "obsolete" in my book.

[rswail]

You should get the company DNS to delegate a subdomain at my-team.example.com to you and then have an authoritative DNS server for it.

[wpollock]

Your post reminded me when Yahoo IM updated their chat protocol to an incompatible version with a gradual rollout! Half their eight servers used v1 and half v2. A v1 only client would connect half the time depending on which server the round-robin DNS sent you to. This took me forever to figure out, but the fix was to put the IP address of the four v1 servers in the hosts file. (Until the client updated its support for v2.)

[jacobgkau]

The person you replied to said mostly-obsolete. They were speaking in the same context as the earlier commenter claiming it's a normal practice because everyone used to have to update their hosts files all the time before DNS existed at all.

Your shadow IT example is perfectly valid, and also isn't a 1:1 comparison with a company doing it automatically for a much larger number of external users.

[jeffbee]

> 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.

[rnd0]

Particularly since the first version of Windows shipped in what -1985? Contemporary with 4.2BSD? Did 4.2BSD even use /etc/hosts the same way or DNS?

[kbelder]

Yeah, I've had to manually edit hosts for every work and personal windows machine I've had in the last 20 years, I think. At least desktops.