Disabling access to Facebook 2 —09 August 2014

A while ago I wrote about disabling access to Facebook on Windows, by editing the %systemroot%\system32\drivers\etc\hosts file.

I didn’t mention about Mac OS X and Linux. It just seemed too obvious: edit /etc/hosts, duh! Until I received a comment asking specifically for Mac OS X. When I checked on it, I realized my setup was no longer working! Despite having 127.0.0.1 facebook.com and ::1 facebook.com in /etc/hosts, facebook.com was loading happily in Chrome. What the hell!

So I started digging, and found many other users with similar issues:

Why can’t I block Facebook using /etc/hosts on Mountain Lion?

Apparently, at the time of this writing there’s a bug in Mac OS X (10.9.4), and the ::1 shortcut for the IPv6 loopback interface doesn’t seem to work, so you have to replace that with fe80::1%lo0, like this:

fe80::1%lo0 facebook.com www.facebook.com connect.facebook.net

Worst of all, testing this was a nightmare, because I didn’t realize that Chrome uses a DNS cache of its own: changes to /etc/hosts are not visible immediately, it takes a couple of minutes until they take effect. The workaround is to open a new Incognito Window after every edit.