alt Hacker News> 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."
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wtallis • yesterday at 6:47 PM
In particular, manually editing the hosts file was a mostly-obsolete practice by the time the first version of Windows shipped, and certainly by the time Windows actually had a built-in networking stack. And it was always a red flag for a local app to mess with the hosts file.
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Programs adding entries to the hosts file is still pretty normal, e.g. if something that uses a local webserver as its UI and wants you to be able to access it by name even if you don't have an internet connection or may be stuck behind a DNS server that mangles entries in the public DNS that resolve to localhost.