This page contains a list of hosts for various software applications that dial home. It is intended to be introduced in /etc/hosts or in the Windows hosts file in order to prevent applications from contacting various servers that the user does not know about nor has approved the connection for.

The full repository can be checked out from:

• https://svn.grimore.org/dhds

via the command:

svn co https://svn.grimore.org/dhds

and contains both hosts files and registry files in some cases.

After checking out the repository, execute:

cd dhds

in order to change directory into the root of the folder and then execute:

find . -name \*.txt | grep -vi windows | while read FILE; do cat $FILE; echo; done

where:

• windows is one of the DHDs to exclude from the output, which can be a case-insensitive file name

The command creates a combined list of hosts to block that can be inserted into the C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts file in order to block all connections to the servers in the list. On Linux, the generated list can be added to /etc/hosts in order to achieve the same effect.

The hosts file on all operating systems is a *nix relic that is also part of Windows that originally was meant to speed up resolving hostnames as a supplement to DNS. Without lengthy explanations, be aware that blocking these hostnames will make the DNS resolver built into the operating systems fail to resolve the named to IP addresses. The former will work provided that the operating system is programmed to query the hosts file and to then trust the file without following up with a DNS request, ie: as in nsswitch.conf and DNS resolution order. However, nothing stops software creators to hardcode raw IP addresses into the software, and as inconvenient as that might be given IP address changes, the hosts file will fail to block connection attempts. For that reason, you will find that some of the folders, in particular Microsoft-related telemetry also have an additional registry file that is supposed to turn off telemetry by other means without using the hosts file.

Then again, the system is not perfect but it will work for blocking most requests and regardless of whether you pirated the software or not, there is absolutely not reason why a software creator should be entitled to this data, in particular for a one-off transaction without a paid subscription.