HackyourWindows[dot]com

Block specific programs from accessing internet in Vista

In this video you will learn to use Windows Firewall with Advanced Security (a default feature of all Vista editions). Windows Vista offers many major security improvements, one of them is how the firewall is integrated into the system. It is not available in Windows XP or any other version of Windows until Windows 7 comes out.
Some programs do not have a valid license, and by accessing the internet they will become trial versions. Learn how to avoid this. Good luck!

How To Block Websites - XP / Vista / 7

This tutorial shows you how to block any site, same steps apply for Windows XP, Vista and 7. Enjoy!

How to Unblock a website - Open DNS

This tutorial shows you how to change the DNS ip at Network Configuration. Same steps apply for Windows XP, Vista or 7.Enjoy!

Editing Hosts files - how to block or redirect websites!

Let's learn today about Hosts files and how to use them to block or redirect websites.
For a more detailed explanation visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hosts_file and read about it. You can find there also the location of the hosts file in the system files, since it depends on your operating system. In Windows 7 click Start - Run then the path is: c:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts
To explain it briefly, a hosts file is a computer file used in an operating system to map hostnames to IP addresses and it's a plain text file.

# This is an example of the hosts file
127.0.0.1 localhost loopback
::1 localhost


In the video you will see how you can block access to a site or redirect it using the hosts file. To redirect a website you will need the IP of the site you want to be redirected to. An easy example is to redirect yahoo.com to google.com. But how do you find google's IP? Click Start, type cmd - this will open command prompt. Type ping google.com. This will show you Google.com's IP; all you need to do now is to type it in the hosts file like this:
127.0.0.1 google's IP www.yahoo.com
Don't forget to save the file.
To see a video tutorial about how to find out the IP adress of a website, you can check out this tutorial.
In the tutorial, instead of ping we have used tracert command, these are both ways to find out a website's IP.
Coming back to our example, when you type in your internet browser www.yahoo.com, you will be redirected to google.com.
You can change it back anytime by opening the hosts file again and deleting the changes you have made.
You can search our site and find also a tutorial on how to open blocked websites. Good luck!

How to block a custom website in Windows 7

This is a simple and quick tutorial on how to block a webpage. You can use it to block a webpage you don't want your kids to visit or stop visiting your ex her/his friendpage like Facebook or something. So use it anyway you like.

The location of the "hosts" file is "C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc".

Now in the video you can see this guy editing some permissions, but when you browse to that location you can first try to edit the "hosts" file directly and fix the permissions only if you're not allowed to open that file.