Hosts Warning bug

Hmmm...I've had several warnings from Prevx telling me that "I'm navigating to a website that's listed in my hosts file". Very true. However the entry in hosts is commented out!

As a web developer I am always addding and removing hosts entries for temporary websites, temporary DNS redirection etc. So Prevx is is good in that it's warning me. But why is it overlooking the big hash symbol (pound, for those Americans) - # - which comments the line out?



Jim

EDIT: And to make matters worse, whichever dialog button I choose (Close, Ignore, Fix) I then get an instant "page not found" on ALL my Firefox browser tabs. I have to close the browser and all tabs - very annoying. The only way round it seems to be to disable Prevx or edit the Hosts file to obfuscate the URLs......

 

The hosts file warnings will show if an entry is in the active hosts file - it is possible that it could have been commented out by Prevx itself but it should be ignoring them when they were commented out previously.

You will likely want to add the websites you're developing to the override list in SafeOnline with a wildcard. For instance:

http*://*.prevx.com/*

and set the protection level to "Off" (the farthest left option). This will allow you to continue browsing and developing.

We have to give priority to our consumer users who are more likely to be infected than to be developing a website locally so the blocking process for hosts file overrides isn't as elegant as it would seem when blocking in realtime (as it does prevent the browser from resolving URLs intentionally, but to correct this, you do indeed need to either hard refresh the pages or close the browser).

Let me know if you have any questions with this!

 

Hi

Sure, I appreciate that it errs on the side if caution. But a commented-out entry is as good as having no entry. At least I know no......

Though losing the ability to browse ANY website after the warning is getting a tad inconvenient


Jim