Disclaimer: This article may be extremely geeky, and some links may not work unless you have specially-modified system settings.

Hoodwink’d, the self-dubbed “underground mumbler’s club“, is very geek. Until recently, the only way to access the main part of the site was by manually editing your hosts file (a settings file that is unknown to most users, and very hard to find for Windows users).

Recently, _why, the founder/head-hancho of Hoodwink’d, set up a DNS server that allows the registration of domain names that do not exist (such as hoodwink.d and _.singpolyma). As long as you have a simple settings change done on your system you can access all of these ‘bogus’ domain-names the same as normal websites, and if you’re a member at Hoodwink’d you can create as many new ones as you want for free at nic.d (blog announcement, forum thread).

For more information on Hoodwink’d itself see Johan’s article. To get access to Hoodwink’d and nic.d domains on Windows XP follow these steps (linux and other users, just add 72.36.180.123 as your primary DNS, you likely know how):

1. Open your network connections pane (Start > Connect to > Show all connections).
2. Right-click on the connection you use to get on the Internet (the dial-up connection for dial-up users, and the Wireless Network Connectin or Local Area Connection for broadband, usually) and select ‘Properties’.
3. Select Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) from the list box and click the ‘Properties’ button.
4. Select the ‘Use the following DNS server addresses’ radio button if not already selected.
5. If there is anything in the first box, move it to the second, otherwise find the automatically assigned DNS address from the status window for the connection and enter that to the second box.
6. Enter 72.36.180.123 into the first box.