Hosts Fail

<quote>Your reaction (priceless by the way) "gives me your tell" you're pissed</quote>
No, what you do to people is called harassment and cyber-stalking. It's not just me, and it's not something that anyone should have to deal with.

<ul><li>The speed considerations of ring0 vs unpriveleged code are irrelevant on modern systems.</li>
<li>The disk cache is not a magic bullet. Either it's caching your entire file in memory, in which case you are wasting shit-tons of memory, or it's not, in which case you take a huge amount of time to read from disk. Probably anything other than your top sites is going to involve a disk read.</li>
<li>It's also not going to <i>index</i> the file, so you're always going to have to do a linear search, which is very slow.</li>
<li>You keep mentioning security issues of DNS servers, which either do not apply to local servers or the same issues affect your hosts file sources.</li>
<li>Hard-coding results at the top of the file is a kludge, the average person should not have to do this.</li>
<li>Other solutions may be more complex but hosts is too simple to work well -- which is why it was replaced in the 1980s.</li>
<li>Your solution is also pretty damn complicated. Disabling windows services, registry edits, and hard-coding results, seriously?</li>
<li>You can however, if you were stupid, use a local name server with the exact same list that your hosts system uses -- so let's not invent security issues.</li>
<li>You have no argument against pattern-matching domains, it would probably eliminate huge chunks of your hosts file.</li>
<li>You're still wrong about ad-blocking, it takes place before name resolution. If there is one thing you need to get through your head, it is this.</li></ul>

I understand that you don't visit many sites, and that most people visit the same sites frequently. It is good to optimize for this case. The problem is that anything that has not been specifically optimized by the end user is going to be insanely slow. Plus, in that situation, it makes far more sense to block everything but a user-defined whitelist, which is flat-out impossible with a hosts file. Also, if we're going to generalize from our own example, I visit dozens of new domains every day -- I hate to think of how much extra time I'd be wasting with your system.

I'm going to repeat myself about pattern matching, because it's important: with a real local DNS server, it is extremely trivial to block entire top-level domains like .ru and .cn. This is completely impossible with a hosts file.

Man do you like hammering on about kernelmode. Context switches take what, 2000 cycles or so? You also need to stop with conflating remote and local DNS servers. That hosts works with all programs is inherent to domain name resolution, and having a local DNS server gives you one place to configure all domain name resolution on your local network -- which is why every systems administrator uses a local name server instead of trying to replicate hosts files.

Basically, we had hosts files before DNS existed, and they were crappy enough that we had to invent something else. You are 30 years behind the curve.