Wednesday, September 9, 2020

De-Googling My Life, Day 7 - sad interdependence

 If you're truly serious about removing certain very large internet companies from your life, blocking them at a DNS level with a blackholing mechanism such as pi-hole, you're going to start seeing this a lot in the browser: 

Site can't be reached

The sad fact is many of the big players provide DNS service - Amazon, Google, and in this case, Yahoo have infested the entire internet stack from top to bottom. If you block all of Yahoo, you end up cutting a large swath out of the internet, since a lot of people still use yahoo DNS servers. If you're serious about it, wouldn't you block DNS from certain companies? If you can't trust them not to track you at a cookie/fingerprint browser level, should you trust them not to track you at the DNS level? Imagine trying to avoid CloudFlare's front-end or dns service.

And even if you go as far as blocking the big named companies by-name in dns (ex: *.google.com) someone may not be using google's DNS but their cloud services otherwise, so your traffic is still traversing into the googleplex.

Is it hopeless to avoid them?

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