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I have a pretty long list of time-wasting sites in the hosts file and it is working just fine, however I'm experiencing a very strange behavior - every day or two (my PC turns on automatically every day) from the file disappear two lines:

127.0.0.1 youtube.com
127.0.0.1 www.youtube.com

Even the line-breaking symbols stay there. I am using the latest stable Chrome and two Youtube-related extensions - FancyTube and YouTube Ratings Preview. I don't remove them because sometimes I need to visit YouTube and I don't want to deal with advertisement or rickrolls. The interesting part is that I tried to make the file read-only and to remove write-rights from everything except me, but it didn't help (flags haven't been reset). Is it one of the extensions or something else? Or maybe Flash?

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YouTube has become self-aware. – iglvzx Feb 5 '12 at 7:29

2 Answers

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Try giving write permissions to "administrators" only, rather than yourself, and turn on UAC. As long as you run programs as a regular user, they should not have access to the file.

If a program asks for elevated permissions, check the file before accepting - it might give you a clue.

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Okay, I'll try this later today. – Olegs Jeremejevs Feb 5 '12 at 8:24
Sorry for the... um.. delay. Recently gave it a try, no success. Over some time I've noticed, that Youtube isn't the only one, who disappears. A week before I've switched to the StayFocusd extension. It takes a bit less time to simply disable it than to find the hosts file and remove a line, but I've done that just once, the productivity seems to be fine. – Olegs Jeremejevs Mar 23 '12 at 15:26
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Do you have Microsoft Security Essentials? Sometimes it detects a threat and changes file back to default.

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Yes, but only the YouTube entries‽ o.O – Synetech Feb 5 '12 at 7:23
No, I don't have any anti-virus products installed, and my file isn't being changed to default, just two lines, with youtube in them. – Olegs Jeremejevs Feb 5 '12 at 7:25

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