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Using Little Snitch, and seeing the amount of phoning-home Chrome was doing was my "straw that broke the camels back". It tipped me over the edge: drove me back

Using Little Snitch, and seeing the amount of phoning-home Chrome was doing was my "straw that broke the camels back". It tipped me over the edge: drove me back to Linux, Duck Duck Go, NextDNS (I'm not confident enough to "roll my own), turning everything off on my phone (location services, search helpers etc), and not using software that checks for updates or does the least amount of telemetry (I went from VSCode to Emacs)... favoring anything that doesn't track/use cdns/anything by default: whatever is vaguely usable (no matter how annoying) and tracks the least, wins. I could block it all with Little Snitch - but it's a technical solution to a political problem. I miss a lot of the convenience, and I miss a lot of the slickness/lovely UIs... but Lil' Snitch taught me that that's the price!

blattimwind 7y ago
> NextDNS (I'm not confident enough to "roll my own) - Install knot-resolver - Done.
- Geezus42 7y ago
  https://pi-hole.net/ https://pi-hole.net/ ?
  - ekianjo 7y ago
    Nextdns does not just block ads.
    - rovr138 7y ago
      A quick look on the site seems to simply be different maintained block lists. You can block anything on pi-hole, not just ads. Am I missing something?
karmakaze 7y ago
Maintaining Lil'Snitch's access list whenever apps get updated reminded me that it goes against the reason why I started using MacOS in the first place. It was especially hard to justify when someone else is casually browsing on one my machines and a new connection request pops up.
m463 7y ago
I found the same thing with little snitch and Firefox. Now I block all the mozilla domains using little snitch and update firefox using Safari. Related, people also complain about Microsoft phoning home, but Apple does the same thing. (Not that apple is as blatant a jerk as microsoft)
- 3xblah 7y ago
  Add Google to the list. It is unfortunate that not even one of these companies can differentiate from the others on this practice. They each assume that the user gives them a free pass to make automatic outbound connections, where no consent from the user is required, for whatever purpose they deem "necessary".
ignoramous 7y ago
> I'm not confident enough to "roll my own" For local net, setting up pi-hole is do-able, whilst setting it up over a VPN involves a bit of additional tooling. A 100% uptime DNS on public internet is tricky, but if you're okay with just DoH [0], the https://workers.dev https://workers.dev free-tier would you give you a 100% uptime "anycast", low-latency DoH enough for a single device's worth of queries for a month. At $5, you'd have enough for a 100 devices. I've one setup with adblock forwarding queries to 1.1.1.1 and I see e2e latencies as low as 50ms regardless of location. This setup is a bit involved: You'd need to convert blocklists (the one I use has a million entries) to either a long-string, custom LZ-compress it (~6 MiB) [1] and do a boyer-moore needle-haystack search on it for incoming questions (v8's native String#index impl uses a variant of boyer-moore) [2], or use a json-map at a cost of higher RAM usage but blazing-fast lookups (~25 MiB), or use succinct radix-trees for optimal RAM usage (~1.5 MiB) but relatively slower lookups, or use bloom-filters with low false-positive but fast membership queries at extremely frugal RAM usage (~200 KiB) [3]. That said, the simplest way to ad-block would be to point the workers instance to adguard-doh. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21598413 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21598413 [1] https://github.com/pieroxy/lz-string/ https://github.com/pieroxy/lz-string/ [2] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5562297/fast-search-in-compressed-text-files https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5562297/fast-search-in-c... [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22017868 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22017868
gpanders 7y ago
I'd not heard of NextDNS until I read your comment, but it looks really promising! I already have a PiHole set up but I'm always looking to simplify and eliminate "maintenance" from my life (although the Pihole is extremely low maintenance). This is a great thing to recommend to friends and family who may not have the technical ability or desire to set up a Pihole.
adultSwim 7y ago
"It's a technical solution to a political problem" !

blattimwind 7y ago

> NextDNS (I'm not confident enough to "roll my own) - Install knot-resolver - Done.

Geezus42 7y ago
https://pi-hole.net/ https://pi-hole.net/ ?
- ekianjo 7y ago
  Nextdns does not just block ads.
  - rovr138 7y ago
    A quick look on the site seems to simply be different maintained block lists. You can block anything on pi-hole, not just ads. Am I missing something?

karmakaze 7y ago

Maintaining Lil'Snitch's access list whenever apps get updated reminded me that it goes against the reason why I started using MacOS in the first place. It was especially hard to justify when someone else is casually browsing on one my machines and a new connection request pops up.

m463 7y ago

I found the same thing with little snitch and Firefox. Now I block all the mozilla domains using little snitch and update firefox using Safari. Related, people also complain about Microsoft phoning home, but Apple does the same thing. (Not that apple is as blatant a jerk as microsoft)

3xblah 7y ago
Add Google to the list. It is unfortunate that not even one of these companies can differentiate from the others on this practice. They each assume that the user gives them a free pass to make automatic outbound connections, where no consent from the user is required, for whatever purpose they deem "necessary".

ignoramous 7y ago

> I'm not confident enough to "roll my own" For local net, setting up pi-hole is do-able, whilst setting it up over a VPN involves a bit of additional tooling. A 100% uptime DNS on public internet is tricky, but if you're okay with just DoH [0], the https://workers.dev https://workers.dev free-tier would you give you a 100% uptime "anycast", low-latency DoH enough for a single device's worth of queries for a month. At $5, you'd have enough for a 100 devices. I've one setup with adblock forwarding queries to 1.1.1.1 and I see e2e latencies as low as 50ms regardless of location. This setup is a bit involved: You'd need to convert blocklists (the one I use has a million entries) to either a long-string, custom LZ-compress it (~6 MiB) [1] and do a boyer-moore needle-haystack search on it for incoming questions (v8's native String#index impl uses a variant of boyer-moore) [2], or use a json-map at a cost of higher RAM usage but blazing-fast lookups (~25 MiB), or use succinct radix-trees for optimal RAM usage (~1.5 MiB) but relatively slower lookups, or use bloom-filters with low false-positive but fast membership queries at extremely frugal RAM usage (~200 KiB) [3]. That said, the simplest way to ad-block would be to point the workers instance to adguard-doh. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21598413 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21598413 [1] https://github.com/pieroxy/lz-string/ https://github.com/pieroxy/lz-string/ [2] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5562297/fast-search-in-compressed-text-files https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5562297/fast-search-in-c... [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22017868 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22017868

gpanders 7y ago

I'd not heard of NextDNS until I read your comment, but it looks really promising! I already have a PiHole set up but I'm always looking to simplify and eliminate "maintenance" from my life (although the Pihole is extremely low maintenance). This is a great thing to recommend to friends and family who may not have the technical ability or desire to set up a Pihole.

adultSwim 7y ago

"It's a technical solution to a political problem" !