having fun

Having fun with looking at referer’s. Give’s me more information about visitors and what they are interested in. With this I can experiment with .htaccess files.
which I did today. It’s working.

HTACCESS Help needed

I’ve htaccess running at my local server and it’s working
however I do not want others to look into the htaccess file what’s in it. This should be forbidden. But……
CHMOD 644 does not work: i still can read what’s in it.

What do I need to do? To have the htaccess file working and it’s not possible to look into the file? What’s the catch?