Microsoft Starts Collecting User Data from Windows 7 and Windows 8 PCs

[Costas]

reference
http://news.softpedia.com/news/microsoft-starts-collecting-user-data-from-windows-7-and-windows-8-pcs-490302.shtml
http://forums.mydigitallife.info/threads/24902-Windows-Loader-Support-and-chat/page2107?p=1124797

http://superuser.com/a/166255
It's another syntax: xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx somedomain.com

Some examples to explain it:

127.0.0.1 .com this line will block all outgoing dnsrequests ending with .com
127.0.0.1 somesite.com will block all outgoing dnsrequests ending with somesite.com
12.2.3.1 www.dns.com will lead all outgoing dnsrequests ending with www.dns.com to 12.2.3.1
You block/lead all second (third,fourth...) level urls with the top(second,third...) level url in the hosts file.

http://www.angelfire.com/comics2/fatboy9175/
the list - http://www.angelfire.com/comics2/fatboy9175/MShosts.txt

# NOTE: In WinXP SP2 or later, adding these lines to the HOSTS file won't be fully effective thanks to
# Micro$haft's hidden rules in the "dnsapi.dll" file which override manual settings for certain M$-related
# domains. To completely block Microsoft out of your system, you will have to add these to a third party
# firewall, or hack dnsapi.dll, which I wouldn't advise unless you know what you're doing. You can open the
# dll file with notepad or a hex editor to see all the domains included in Windows' hidden whitelist.
# I recommend Acrylic DNS Proxy. It has its own hosts file that also supports wildcard rules, so instead
# of needing thousands of entries that end in microsoft.com, you can just add *.microsoft.com and kill em all.

Acrylic DNS Proxy- http://mayakron.altervista.org/wikibase/show.php?id=AcrylicHome