On Thu, Apr 13, 2006 at 06:29:15PM +0100, Dave Korn wrote:
Hey, guess what I just found out: Microsoft have deliberately sabotaged
their DNS client's hosts table lookup functionality.
(...) I'd try to block (Windows Media Player) it in my hosts file.
Microsoft DNS client special-cases 'go.microsoft.com' and refuses to look
it up in the hosts file.
I'm running fully up-to-date Windows XP SP2. I don't have any pfw
software that could conceivably be interfering, and the windows firewall is
running with more-or-less the default settings (I've only added a couple of
exceptions, no other changes). I don't think this is a false positive.
On reading through %WINDIR%\system32\dnsapi.dll with 'strings', I find the
following hostnames listed. I assume they are all also singled out for
special treatment:-
www.msdn.com
msdn.com
www.msn.com
msn.com
go.microsoft.com
msdn.microsoft.com
office.microsoft.com
microsoftupdate.microsoft.com
wustats.microsoft.com
support.microsoft.com
www.microsoft.com
microsoft.com
update.microsoft.com
download.microsoft.com
microsoftupdate.com
windowsupdate.com
windowsupdate.microsoft.com
[ I've verified that the same behaviour occurs for office.microsoft.com,
exactly as for go.microsoft.com, but haven't tried any of the others yet.
I'd bet real money on it, though. ]
What's your point? It's not like it's the first piece of software ever
to bypass the hosts file, is it? And if you're a software giant, that's
easy to do at a lower level.
Blacklisting IP addresses by /etc/hosts or equivalent is an extremely
broken way of blocking, anyway; and vague hacks like that need not be
supported. Use a real, non-host-based firewall.
Of course, you might wish to stop certain software from phoning home.
Fine, but use something that works - MS is evil in many ways, but not
because this particular hack happens not to work.
Switching to OSS quite nicely solves all these problems, though.
Joachim
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