Background: my Android is the only source of internet I have - I use it as a hotspot while at home.
I have been noticing strange behavior out of my Desktop PC recently: sites like Amazon were not styled, and Yelp.com wouldn't work at all (as if it didn't exist)! Then, I attempted to use Yelp while I had WAMP running on my PC, and it redirected to my local website.
I soon discovered it was not a hosts file on my PC causing the issue, but the host file of my Android device from which my internet was coming.
I grabbed a terminal emulator from the Play Store and cat'd my hosts file into a text file, then retrieved it from my phone. It was 8.12MB, and it blocks 283,000 websites by redirecting their names to 127.0.0.1.
What is this madness? Most of these sites appear to be spam or inappropriate, but why are they blocked in this manner? Does Google do this? Why is Yelp.com blocked!? And why are Amazon's CDN servers blocked, too?
For now I think I'm going to manually edit the hosts file on my phone to get around this, but I would really like some answers, if anyone has any!
Thanks!