And a little info... the HOSTS file redirects the ads to the local machine that sent them (127.0.0.1)! So aside from protecting your computer, you waste their bandwidth,.
I had always thought it 127.0.0.1 and 0.0.0.0 just redirected to your computer, thus you don't actually contact the ad server at all - or something like that. Not that I really care as it blocks the ad servers which are one of the major slowdowns of websites loading slowly or not at all.
If something isn't active or operating, how does it protect you?
Surely something what be watching for it to know when to do something? That sounds really active to me? Like if you are using host files, something must be watching for the system to make domain lookups and then block them if the domain is set to loopback....
And trust me, I know how Spywareblaster and all the other things you mention work (probably better than most of you on this thread), but this whole/active passive thing puzzles me.
Seems to me what you are referring to is using built in windows features like setting activex killbits (spywareblaster), to do this "passive protection". It is built in, so you don't really need spywareblaster running (hence the myth about such protection using zero resources). In fact you don't realy need spywareblaster, you could edit the registry directly really...
Same for hosts files, it is just built into windows.
But this theory fails, when you start talking about adblock plus...Since that definitely isn't part of windows by default. Hack it isn't even part of firefox typically... Why do people think adblock plus is "passive" protection. Because it shares the same memory space as firefox, so people think this protection is "free"...??
I mean why isn't third party firewalls considered passive protection (or is it?). Because people see it appears as a seperate process in the task monitor?
Never mind, I think too much...
If something isn't active or operating, how does it protect you?
As in SpywareBlaster it's the killbits it places in the registry. Similarly some other security software can also do that however as of yet I haven't seen anything that does it as robustly as SpywareBlaster.
You really need to do some research on the subject by browsing written articles, security sites, etc!