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PiHole-Google: Completely Block Google and Its Services

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Re: PiHole-Google: Completely Block Google and Its Services

#11

Post by morganvachon »

oil25 wrote: post #8
ravenstine wrote: post #2

This is a nice idea, but the one thing I haven't been able to divorce myself from is YouTube. I really hate how Google has allowed such a wealth of constant information that completely dwarfs alternative video hosting sites. As censorious as Google can be(now "up next" is always some video from CNN or Fox), blocking YouTube from my network would mean cutting myself off from a large portion of the world.

YouTube and Maps are one of the few Google services left which are still available over Tor. You can proxy youtube-dl and retain some of your privacy this way.

I've been thinking of setting up a super-tiny (about $15/year) VPS as a youtube-dl proxy for a while now. It's the only Google service that still remains valuable to me; I enjoy channels like Bad Obsession Motorsports and various indie musician channels, and Vimeo just doesn't have enough of that type of content, sadly. I know proxying through a VPS that I pay for doesn't 100% divorce me from Google's watchful eye, but it's enough abstraction that hopefully they don't get enough info to build a profile of the real me.

Re: PiHole-Google: Completely Block Google and Its Services

#12

Post by mkl »

ggg2 wrote: post #3
ravenstine wrote: post #2

This is a nice idea, but the one thing I haven't been able to divorce myself from is YouTube. I really hate how Google has allowed such a wealth of constant information that completely dwarfs alternative video hosting sites. As censorious as Google can be(now "up next" is always some video from CNN or Fox), blocking YouTube from my network would mean cutting myself off from a large portion of the world.

pleroma (and i think maybe mastodon) provide media proxy that i think work for youtube. so when one person shares a video, one instance serves it to all the other users

Wouldn't that just be sharing a link to YouTube? I.e. not re-hosting the video (which would probably violate copyright).

Re: PiHole-Google: Completely Block Google and Its Services

#13

Post by loudtieblahblah »

ravenstine wrote: post #2

This is a nice idea, but the one thing I haven't been able to divorce myself from is YouTube. I really hate how Google has allowed such a wealth of constant information that completely dwarfs alternative video hosting sites. As censorious as Google can be(now "up next" is always some video from CNN or Fox), blocking YouTube from my network would mean cutting myself off from a large portion of the world.

[flagged]

Re: PiHole-Google: Completely Block Google and Its Services

#14

Post by kalleboo »

ravenstine wrote: post #2

This is a nice idea, but the one thing I haven't been able to divorce myself from is YouTube. I really hate how Google has allowed such a wealth of constant information that completely dwarfs alternative video hosting sites. As censorious as Google can be(now "up next" is always some video from CNN or Fox), blocking YouTube from my network would mean cutting myself off from a large portion of the world.

It’s fascinating how differently the YouTube algorithm treats people. I've not once seen a Fox or CNN video recommended, I didn't even know they had a presence on YouTube

Re: PiHole-Google: Completely Block Google and Its Services

#15

Post by jedberg »

julianlam wrote: post #5

I find Google Container to be an excellent plugin to segregate my Google account from the rest of my browsing. It's not an official plugin from Mozilla, but it is forked from the Facebook container plugin.

I just use Firefox containers. It puts every site into its own container. Then I made a "Google" container so that at least my login will hold across the various Google services.

Re: PiHole-Google: Completely Block Google and Its Services

#16

Post by jedberg »

fnord77 wrote: post #10
kyrra wrote: post #6

If you don't mind blocking everything hosted on GCP as well: > dig TXT +short _netblocks{,2,3}.google.com | tr ' ' '\n' | egrep "(ip4:|ip6:)" Gives you a full list of all of Google's IP blocks. You can just blackhole those.

how come this seems to only work with ".google.com" tld? I tried .apple.com, .yahoo.com, etc. and got nothing.

It's not a shortcut or anything, those are just Google's SPF records (which as noted above are drastically incomplete, they are only the IPs from which Google sends email).

Re: PiHole-Google: Completely Block Google and Its Services

#17

Post by jedberg »

kyrra wrote: post #6

If you don't mind blocking everything hosted on GCP as well: > dig TXT +short _netblocks{,2,3}.google.com | tr ' ' '\n' | egrep "(ip4:|ip6:)" Gives you a full list of all of Google's IP blocks. You can just blackhole those.

That's just their SPF record. It's only a list of IPs that google.com email might come from (or any domain that imports those records)

Re: PiHole-Google: Completely Block Google and Its Services

#19

Post by citruspi »

ravenstine wrote: post #2

This is a nice idea, but the one thing I haven't been able to divorce myself from is YouTube. I really hate how Google has allowed such a wealth of constant information that completely dwarfs alternative video hosting sites. As censorious as Google can be(now "up next" is always some video from CNN or Fox), blocking YouTube from my network would mean cutting myself off from a large portion of the world.

I've got Little Snitch configured to block Youtube (and most Google services) when my browsers request them, but if there's a YouTube video that's interesting enough to warrant the extra effort, I just switch to my terminal and use youtube-dl to grab it and play it back locally.

Re: PiHole-Google: Completely Block Google and Its Services

#20

Post by heartbreak »

loudtieblahblah wrote: post #13
ravenstine wrote: post #2

This is a nice idea, but the one thing I haven't been able to divorce myself from is YouTube. I really hate how Google has allowed such a wealth of constant information that completely dwarfs alternative video hosting sites. As censorious as Google can be(now "up next" is always some video from CNN or Fox), blocking YouTube from my network would mean cutting myself off from a large portion of the world.

[flagged]

This is Scott Wadsworth’s latest video. It’s not narcissism, it wouldn’t be better as a blog post, it doesn’t drag on to run more ads, and it isn’t low brow or toxic.

There are billions of hours of content on YouTube. You haven’t seen a representative sample.

https://youtu.be/cv6BdwMe560

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