nickspaargaren / no-google

Completely block Google and its services
The Unlicense
1.27k stars 101 forks source link

Bunch of impressions and suggestions from the Hacker News Publication. #21

Open PoorPocketsMcNewHold opened 5 years ago

PoorPocketsMcNewHold commented 5 years ago

If you ask yourself this huge lot of stars on the repo, We got quite a bit of attention on Hacker News.

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 will test once again if adding all the list, except the YouTube one let you access and use it. For myself, I’ve had no issues since when using it with invidio.us. Maybe that person didn’t noticed that we have separate lists.

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)

If we can extract some specific domains from those, this can be useful indeed. I mainly block all the JS fonts, and mostly other CDN´s, But I do agree that sometimes, You can't even have a slight usage of the website. So, possibly for another list.

Does the author mention avoiding using Google as a third party DNS service.[?] In the beginning, PiHole, i.e., preconfigured dnsmasq, was pointed at some third party DNS service, maybe Google. Not sure what the default configuration is today. If it was Google, then is there any irony in that a project designed to blocks ads is by default having its users send their IP and ISP location to an advertising company probably hundreds if not thousands of times over in a single day of web use.

Nice idea, even if we do block their DNS servers itselves, it might be great to suggest people to directly think of using an alternate one, or a way to bypass it if they are on some android phones for example.

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.

Maybe create some sorts of ¨Other things that we recommend to use with pihole-google¨ on the read-me page.

GAFAM Never seen it listed out like that, I thought it was FAANG. Or is FAANG only used in reference to top salaries in the Bay Area? GAFA(M) omits Netflix but not Amazon, since it stands for Google Amazon Facebook Apple (Microsoft)

Well, That's due to me being french obviously. Should I remove or ¨rename¨ all of that? Also, I could also add some new little ones, but they still have a much smaller importance compared to the principal ones, so I don’t think Netflix could be useful.

Nice idea, but you're better off accomplishing it with TLD wildcards or AXFR transfers than a hosts list, since new sub-domains are always being created and rotated.

Suggestion for creating some wildcards lists.

Hosted by Microsoft, suggests blocking Microsoft, too.

If you care about that detail, we can move that project elsewhere, or host a backup/copy on a local gitea instance. I think I can do that on my raspberry pi without much issues. I’ve created a mirror of the project on my Gitlab account, to the FramaGit Gitlab instance (Hosted by FramaSoft, a French FOSS association) and added its link to the README.md. As this from my account, If you wish to still have a control over this mirror as well, Feel free to create a mirror on another service, but until then, I’ll maintain this mirror. Note that the gitea self-hosted instance is still being considered.

PoorPocketsMcNewHold commented 5 years ago

I´ve created an throwaway account just for this post, (https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=CreatedForThis) if you want to answer to some of them despite having an account, just pm me @nickspaargaren