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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

#61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GAFA is the french-speaking equivalent of FAANG (although they all seem to omit Amazon and Netflix).

GAFA(M) omits Netflix but not Amazon, since it stands for Google Amazon Facebook Apple (Microsoft)

Yes I understand - I was talking more about the ordering of them. English-speaking websites tend to use FA(A?)NG while French-speaking ones tend to use GAFA(M?).

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

#62

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]

Some things are better communicated throughout a video, such as a video howto (my example would be a lockpick video, for example have a look at Bosnianbill's lockpick channel [1]).

[1] https://www.youtube.com/user/bosnianbill

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

#63
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an excellent example of the wealth that is on youtube. As he was going through those knots, I could think of a dozen ways to use each one. They're so simple, but effect -- and with zero waste. He's got a real wisdom in his voice and style.

I have always thought that, out of all the hype and cambrian explosion that was Web 2.0, Youtube was the only site that clearly improved the world. There is an astounding amount of great content on Youtube. Turns out that giving normal people a platform, and a way of sharing, can have results which are utterly amazing. I'm not happy that Google basically has a monopoly on this, but honestly, I consider youtube to be…

"but honestly, I consider youtube to be a force for good."

The comments section makes me think the internet was a mistake.

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

#64

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.

Same here - been using Google Container for 6+ months now and very happy with it. Highly recommended - you can do this yourself with just normal containers in Firefox, but this comes preconfigured with all the non-obvious domains you might not know about. No connection - just a satisfied user.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/google-contai...

Only problem with it is now reCAPTCHA sites are a huge pain to use since you have to answer about 15 challenges before you can get (since you look totally unknown to Google outside of the container). It is often better to just ignore these sites now, but it is not always possible.

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

#65
post #34

Another approach is whitelisting. Like a default firewall rule of "block all" and a set of specific exceptions, I find this approach can be easier to manage. Probably not going to work for everyone but works for me. Figure out what domains I need to access for the content I am after[1] and just allow those. "Block" everything else. For example, I might need something like .googlevideo.com once in a while but I will n…

>Another approach is whitelisting. Like a default firewall rule of "block all" and a set of specific exceptions, I find this approach can be easier to manage.

I tried the whitelisting approach but quickly found out this breaks many websites with shopping cart and credit-card checkouts because they use payments api gateways. Because the url for the card processing gateway is a different company from the ecommerce site you're visiting, it has a totally different spelling so you can't predict what to put in a whitelist beforehand. In turn, if you do whitelist the payment gateway url, you might then find out it makes another api call to a fraud detection url which is another totally different url that you didn't know you had to whitelist.

Whitelisting DNS entries is workable for use inside of a single virtual machine that deliberately restricts a web browser to access a few websites like youtube.

However, I don't see how it's possible to use the whitelisting strategy on a PiHole that globally filters the entire family accessing it with multiple desktops and smartphones. It's not easy to tell if a spinning hourglass or beachball is happening because the a website is slow or whether the whitelist is missing some url entries. The family members would constantly be visiting new and legitimate urls so it seems very cumbersome to try and keep up with adding new whitelist entries for everybody.

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

#66
At the moment things like youtube, twitter have become culture and 'technical solutions' to both unrestrained greed, surveillance and this rich fabric of human communication seem to miss the big picture of their cultural value.

The value of these platforms are not technical, they are entirely from the human element and everybody should be able to participate without opening themselves to surveillance and abuse.

Like everything else to run a civilized society we need laws and its unfortunate that this basic first principle of organizing human society needs to be reiterated and debated right untill 2019 because of propaganda by Koch brothers and their ilk on a self serving libertarianism which is as fantastic as a disneyland version of reality.

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

#67
post #50

The problem is that JS Fonts and other CDNed stuff won't load and websites will hang or work weird - particularly Stackoverflow. Bc it's all over https you can't MITM it and inject your own with OpenWRT/piholes. Decentraleyes (a Firefox browser extension) fixes some of this, but not all. If anyone has any additional suggestions, please let me know (it makes life bearable in China without a VPN)

I use a very similar setup (based on unbound): for Stackoverflow to properly work you need to whitelist ajax.googleapis.com. > it makes life bearable in China without a VPN If you're already a firefox user, you might try the "FoxyProxy Standard" extension to selectively bypass the GFW for the domains you need. Friends in China are reporting a varying degree of success with setting up forwarding on Apache (TLS1.3 with…

[deleted]

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

#68
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have always thought that, out of all the hype and cambrian explosion that was Web 2.0, Youtube was the only site that clearly improved the world. There is an astounding amount of great content on Youtube. Turns out that giving normal people a platform, and a way of sharing, can have results which are utterly amazing. I'm not happy that Google basically has a monopoly on this, but honestly, I consider youtube to be…

"but honestly, I consider youtube to be a force for good." The comments section makes me think the internet was a mistake.

The people making those comments would exist with or without the internet. Don't you think it's better they at least have the chance to watch the video?

There's a little revolution that goes on in the hearts and minds of every geek on a site like this when they really, truly realise and admit that 50% of people have an IQ below 100. We need solutions, not complaints. You can't just kill them all.

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

#69
post #50

The problem is that JS Fonts and other CDNed stuff won't load and websites will hang or work weird - particularly Stackoverflow. Bc it's all over https you can't MITM it and inject your own with OpenWRT/piholes. Decentraleyes (a Firefox browser extension) fixes some of this, but not all. If anyone has any additional suggestions, please let me know (it makes life bearable in China without a VPN)

Are there any extensions that modify external resources and point them towards a "trusted" cdn? e.g. requesting " rel="nofollow">https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/3.4.1/jquery.mi...

Would automatically remap to

https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/jquery/3.4.1/jquery.m...

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

#70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I clear my YouTube search and watch history about once a week. Partly because of privacy, but also because a single binge of, say, metal casting videos does not mean I want them recommend ever again in the future.

They use browser fingerprinting and/or IP addresses as well. Even on a brand new browser session, doing something even slightly related to the previous session brings back its entire recommendation history.

Yeah, the fact that I can clear cookies, open a private browsing window with tracking protection turned on, go to YouTube, and be asked which of my two gmail accounts I want to log in with, is pretty creepy.
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