2 ms·
> If you figure out a way to solve this problem, please let me know - as someone who works from home, internet distractions are the biggest thing that stand bet
by datenwolf 8y ago
> If you figure out a way to solve this problem, please let me know - as someone who works from home, internet distractions are the biggest thing that stand between me and success.
I second that request and opinion.
Nostalgia isn't anymore what it used to be, but I quite fondly think back to the time where I really dove deep into learning computer science and technology. That was 20 years ago, and already back then I considered myself to be quite active on the internet:
Back then it was still dial-up – well for me ISDN, but still dial-up, with the connection metered by the second. Most "consumers" back then just installed their ISPs software on their machine and actively chose to "go online".
For me it was a little bit different. I had a small Linux box running in the cellar (which also worked as a Fax gateway for my mothers small business (thanks HylaFax)), which was essentially a communications hub. It ran an MTA+IMAP (somehow SuSE made creating a sendmail.cf manageable, on that box I never touched that part directly), a NNTP cache (Leafnode), Squid HTTP proxy. And a little script that would actively pull a set of predefined URLs (news sites) and domain local followup links into the Squid cache.
Dial-up happened on demand whenever a request could not be fulfilled from the local cache. And if a connection to the internet was made, all the caches got refreshed and mail fetched and sent out. The upshot of this was, that while you were working on your computer with an open browser, MUA and Usenet client, you might have the impression, that you were actually "online", but as a matter of fact, actually getting connected to the internet happened only sporadically.
But for this to work, you had to predefine, what you'd be interested in, so that it would be cached. For anything outside of the cache you'd hit by the time-it-took-to-dial-up penalty, which kind of discouraged mindless browsing between work.
So maybe that's a way to tackle this problem: Instead of blocking "harmful" websites, just add some significant delay to loading them and make them load slow.