Malfunctioning /etc/hosts file in OS X?

What did you use to edit the file? Perhaps what you used is fucking up the line breaks.

could be; the only editor that allowed me the necessary access was nano.

The /etc/hosts file is not designed for “blocking” access to hosts. While it is used for this purpose occasionally, there are often better, more robust ways of doing so, as /etc/hosts can only be used to “redirect” requests to a local/nonexistant IP address.

If you could paste the relevant lines that are not giving you the desired effect, and what exactly you’re doing to test (visiting a given url in a browser, or something else) that would be helpful in diagnosing the problem. This isn’t for ad-blocking by any chance, is it?

Try flushing your DNS cache…

In Mac OS X 10.4 and earlier type:
sudo lookupd -flushcache

In Mac OS X 10.5 and later type:
sudo dscacheutil -flushcache

These are the malfunctioning lines (beneath the localhost, etc entries):

127.0.0.1 digg.com
127.0.0.1 engadget.com
127.0.0.1 gizmodo.com
127.0.0.1 consumerist.com
127.0.0.1 io9.com
127.0.0.1 slashdot.org

Looks right to me. Did flushing the DNS cache work?

it did seems to work now, but I’ll probably take giovani’s advice and look for a browser-based solution instead.

Thanks everyone!