Re: [Sheflug] Blocking cookie traffic

[Alex Hudson <home [at] xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, 2004-03-15 at 10:59, Chris Johnson wrote:
> One of our windows PCs has been contacting 'strange' websites.

"Strange" in what way?

> Further investigation suggested that its tracking cookies that are at
> work contacting the outside world through the svchosts service.

Nonsense, I'm afraid. 

> However the website it accesses are not
> always the same, but most end in akamai.com or akamaitechnologies.com.  This
> workstations software firewall blocks these now but I want something network
> wide.

Akamai are load balancers, so it's likely that if you're blocking them,
you've just blocked some very large site, or at least made access to it
highly problematic.

> Is it possible to add a wild card to the hosts file so
> absolutely.anything.offendingwebsite.com is blocked?

No, you would need to use a real DNS server for that.

> Is there a list of "bad cookie" sites that can be added to a hosts
> file to save me doing them all one by one?

There's no such thing as a "bad cookie", contrary to popular belief.
Cookies do not track you and do not stop you being tracked, it's that
simple.

Cheers,

Alex.

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