I use a program called “ColdTurkey” to help me block social media during work or study hours. This program typically works well in Internet Explorer however I find that sometimes in Chrome that the page I want to be blocked will sometimes be accessible.
What’s going on with the program?
The Cold Turkey program blocks your access to the websites using your “Hosts” file. It adds a bunch of options to the host file that basically says:
If you want to go to Facebook… Instead of looking up its address through your Internet Service Providers name server, look it up using your locally created host file.
All the sites you block actually get pointed to the Cold Turkey servers instead of the real address of the blocked websites.
Your computer will always look to your host file instead of looking up the name from the name server so it just always seems to work with Internet Explorer but not Chrome.
When troubleshooting the issue I noticed the system was going to the host file (Cold Turkey) location… However, I noticed Chrome was going to the legitimate location. This meant the website could still be accessed.
Because of this troubleshooting, I knew the “issue” was with chrome. It was not with the system or the Cold Turkey software.
After trying several things nothing seemed to work. I did find however a chrome command that seemed to do the trick. If you are using Cold Turkey lots you might want to bookmark the command page for easy access.
In the Chrome Browser you will need to type:
- chrome://net-internals/#dns
The page will look like this:
You will need to click the “Clear host cache” button. Once you do this the pages that you had blocked using Cold Turkey will actually be blocked!
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