I can't get to adobe.com from my mac but can access other sites. I have disabled all firewalls. Ant ideas?

I am following your advise and it seemed to work but, despite changing to read&write my permisisons in the etc folder, I keep receiving a message "you do not have the permission to write in hosts, you can create a duplicate". Any idea how to bypass this? Might be something in two (apparently) related files (named: hostconfig, hosts.equiv, hosts-orig) that are in the same folder?

If your system is allowing you to make a duplicate, maybe you should do just that. I have no idea if this will work, but how about:

Make a duplicate of the hosts file.

Save it under a name like "hosts1"

Remove the original hosts file from the etc folder by dragging it to the desktop.

Rename hosts1 to hosts

The newly renamed hosts file should give you read-write access (I'm guessing here)

You can make any changes you want to the new hosts file.

You may have to restart your machine - don't know.

Let me know if that works.

Copy the original hosts file to your Desktop or any other folder and make the changes there. Once you are done with the modifications delete the original hosts file (for which you will need to enter your Admin password) and then just copy / paste the one you put on the Desktop and you will be done 🙂.

Thank you Jeffrey! I had the same issue and this helped me a lot. Make sure, when you change permissions, that open the lock down in the right and change permissions to "write and read" for ALL voices (non only administrator). Then you leave the lock open and quit the "get info" panel. This may be a silly post, but I wanted to contribute, since when I changed permissions only on the "administrator" voice it didn't seem to work.

thank you all!

Old post, but thank you mr. Jeffrey Souza. I had to modify the hosts file.

Another thanks to Jeffrey. Clearing out the hosts file works, even on El Capitan.