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Is there a way on my Windows XP machine to blacklist certain HTTP URLS so that embedded web service calls won't trigger activity from my PC to those URLs?

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Yes, install one of the myriad of personal security suites that do HTTP filtering. – squillman Mar 11 '10 at 18:56
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migrated from serverfault.com Mar 11 '10 at 20:03

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2 Answers

up vote 4 down vote

Firewalls or packet filtering are often a good solution for things like this.

One hack solution would be to specify entries for the hostnames directing to localhost in C:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts.

For example:

127.0.0.1 www.google.com would prevent all access to www.google.com.

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adding those bogus entries to the hosts file didn't seem to have any effect at all. :-( – jeffspost Mar 11 '10 at 19:33
Restart the Web browser. Caching sometimes takes affect. – Warner Mar 11 '10 at 19:42
if it's being pesky, shut down the web browser, then type 'ipconfig /flushdns' to clear your dns cache, then reopen your browser – Roy Rico Mar 11 '10 at 23:16
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up vote 0 down vote

One standard way is to put entries in your hosts.txt file that redirect the offending domain names. Handy for blocking ads for instance.

ie, in \windows\syste32\drivers\etc\hosts.txt

127.0.0.1 youclick2earn.com

for extra credit, install apache locally and capture all URLs so you can display [ad] instead of a broken link.

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