alt Hacker NewsThe hosts file is not sacred on Windows. Anyone who is administrator can just edit it. I've done it to add domain names to localhost.
For anyone hand-wringing over this, this used to be normal. The hosts file was invented a decade before DNS. The end user, or app, would edit their hosts file purposefully after downloading a master copy from the Stanford Research Institute which was occasionally updated.
> For anyone hand-wringing over this, this used to be normal.
People editing hosts files for other reasons was normal (a long time ago-- and it stopped being normal for valid reasons, as tech evolved and the shortcomings of that system were solved). A program automatically editing the hosts file and its website using that to detect information about the website visitor is not the same thing; that usage is novel and was never "normal."