I'm spying on myself?
So I ran the new MS Anti-Spyware beta (codenamed "Titan") on my laptop this morning after seeing something, well, interesting. While it didn't find anything on my system, it pointed out that was possible a problem with my HOSTS file. Those of you who have done a bit of networking know that this file (located in %systemroot%/system32/drivers/etc/hosts) is useful for overriding host names returned by DNS for legimate reasons (like making a staging host look like a production host to an application). I reguarly tweak this file for just that purpose. Titan noticed that I did that and decided to return that a problem.
The lesson learned here is that you have to pay close attention to what programs like this do on development hosts, and you have to understand the implications of the changes they want to make. In this case, "fixing" that file might have well caused me to treat a production data like it was a staging data. I'd better not be changing the first, where its okay for me to play a bit with the second.