hpHosts Second Birthday

At 00:00, approximately 1 hour (give or take 10 mins) from now, will see the second anniversary of my taking over hpHosts from hpGuru.

Last year, I mentioned some changes that were and were still, to be made to hpHosts, including;

1. MX information
2. rDNS
3. IP family
4. WhoIs information

All except one of these have been implemented for some time, with rDNS only being partially implemented (e.g. Host > IP and IP > PTR). Not yet implemented, is full rDNS that would allow you to query an IP and see all of the hostnames that are assigned to it. At present, a query against an IP will only show you the hostnames assigned to that IP, that are listed in hpHosts.

Several other changes have been made to hpHosts during the past 12 months too, such as ammendments to the inclusion policy;

http://forum.hosts-file.net/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=12

And of course, the new hpHosts blog;

http://hphosts.blogspot.com

Indeed, improvements to hpHosts, along with wider use, have also seen several security vendors including the hpHosts database in their own products, including;

FireTrust (SiteHound)
Emsisoft (a-squared Anti-Malware - cookie manager only at present)
Web of Trust
Abelhadigital (HostsMan)

Further improvements, came with the addition of new download mirrors, and re-offering (after hosts-file.info vanished) of the plain .txt file;

http://forum.hosts-file.net/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=6

And of course, the RSS feeds;

http://forum.hosts-file.net/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=220

And allowing others to directly query the hpHosts database from their own applications;

http://forum.hosts-file.net/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=561

These changes however, would mean nothing if it wasn't for the wonderful and much appreciated, work of those that help me identify new hostnames to be added. Whilst I find some of them myself, alot of them are submitted for inclusion by the selfless volunteers - and a huge thank you must go to them.

Of course, without you, the users, there wouldn't be much use in our actually providing this file and service, so to you all, I say thank you - I hope I've done you proud.