Hmm.. not sure how i missed this last year (well, the thread probably got lost in the flood of other mail I get from mailing lists..) but I found this extremely interesting that MS is basically breaking the RFC standard for DNS and host file lookups.
While their reasons may be "pure" (in the sense that it does prevent a malware utility from adding items into the hosts file and prevent updates to sites like windowsupdate.microsoft.com, it is a fairly egregious breach of standard and the fact that it is never documented anywhere.
It also gives Microsoft anti-malware/update utilities an advantage over competitors who won't have this "feature".
The full thread/article can be found here
edit:
I have verified that the same "functionality" exists in Vista Business (x86) as well and can only assume that it is also a part of over Vista suites (and Longhorn in the future)
While their reasons may be "pure" (in the sense that it does prevent a malware utility from adding items into the hosts file and prevent updates to sites like windowsupdate.microsoft.com, it is a fairly egregious breach of standard and the fact that it is never documented anywhere.
It also gives Microsoft anti-malware/update utilities an advantage over competitors who won't have this "feature".
The full thread/article can be found here
edit:
I have verified that the same "functionality" exists in Vista Business (x86) as well and can only assume that it is also a part of over Vista suites (and Longhorn in the future)
Microsoft have deliberately
sabotaged their DNS client's hosts table lookup functionality.
Normally you can override DNS lookup by specifying a hostname and IP
directly in the hosts file, which is searched before any query is issued
to your dns server; this technique is often used to block ads, spyware
and phone-homes by aliasing the host to be blocked to 127.0.0.1 in your
hosts file.
--- snip ----
but then I found the staggering truth:
Microsoft DNS client special-cases 'go.microsoft.com' and refuses to
look it up in the hosts file.