4 ms·

As someone with more time, I prefer to maintain a massive whitelist for my router. Daily websites receive permanent privileges, incidental websites (such as peg

As someone with more time, I prefer to maintain a massive whitelist for my router. Daily websites receive permanent privileges, incidental websites (such as peguero.xyz) receive temporary privileges (e.g. allow traffic for the next minute), everything else is dropped. I don't have to worry about what chicanery advertising companies are up to when they can't reach me even if they tried. "So the fourth herd of deer took up residence where the poison-grass sower & his followers couldn’t go and—having taken up residence there—ate food without venturing unwarily into the poison-grass sown by the poison-grass sower. By eating food without venturing unwarily into the poison-grass sown by the poison-grass sower, they didn’t become intoxicated. Not being intoxicated, they didn’t become heedless. When they weren’t heedless, the poison-grass sower wasn’t able to do with them as he liked on account of that poison-grass."

MrWiffles 5y ago
I have no idea where that literary quote is from but it’s pertinent here. In related news, what software or tools do you use to manage that whitelist? I’ve been considering stunting similar.
- danuker 5y ago
  Not OP, but I am using uBlock Origin. Here's how I do it: https://danuker.go.ro/how-to-protect-your-personal-data.html#what-you-can-do-as-a-user https://danuker.go.ro/how-to-protect-your-personal-data.html...
omnicognate 5y ago
How do you implement that? I have a whitelisting transparent proxy for my kids (contrary to the popular meme around here that all kids are NSA grade hackers determined to defy your every attempt to protect them, it's uncontroversial in my house and works very well). I use squid for that and have a shonky web UI I made to access the logs and update the whitelist acl. I'd like to make it more capable (stuff like temporary unblock like you mention). AFAICT the only way to do such things is writing a squid "helper" that runs as a separate process (/processes). Is that what you're doing?
- dang-guefever 5y ago
  I use adblock on openwrt with a basic script to write to and revert the whitelist, and to restart dnsmasq. I use qutebrowser and made whitelisting a hints shortcut. There's almost certainly a better system, but this works for me.
shepik 5y ago
Honest question: is it worth it? Why would you spend your time on managing that temporary white list? Do you think that time is wasted, or not? (I apologize if my phrasing is a bit rude, but i'm really curious about that, and want to understand your thinking)
- samhw 5y ago
  I think people like this see it as a 'win' – as if they, John Smith, have beaten the dastardly BigCorp. Whereas, in fact, the most that happens is a Junior Marketing Executive at BigCorp says "Right, that guy falls within the 0.5% of techy customers who make things difficult for us. Ah well, it's only been 80,000 of them, well within our margin for this month."
  - samstave 5y ago
    True - however, IMO, the value is in the awareness of tracking and the knowledge of how to block things as such. Its better to know how your network operates that you rely on for your daily life than to know nothing about its internals. My biggest issue as I age is that I FORGET how to do some of the higher level networking that I used to know innately - and I also lose interest in doing such things and become lazy, complacent, and as I forget things, more and more ignorant to it all... Take PC Gaming as an example, or server rebuilds. I could build SUN 650s and many many PC based servers with a blindfold on. I grew up gaming and ran Intel's Game Development Lab for some time and was super knowledgable about all things PC/PCGaming when I had the lastest and best hardware literally delivered to me every day at intel... Now I don't knwo shit about 'PCMasterRace' and building these days....
    - samhw 5y ago
      The issue is that people like this fetishise avoiding tracking. It doesn't seem like they have a clear reason why they want to avoid tracking. Do they have sensitive data to hide? Do they ideologically disagree with large companies gathering data? Is it anything else? It honestly doesn't seem like it. It seems more like "stopping them from getting my data" is treated as an end unto itself.
chaz6 5y ago
Do you use an SSL proxy to catch unwanted requests to CDN's like Cloudflare that would otherwise be allowed?
luckydata 5y ago
seems like an enormous amount of effort for essentially no benefit.

MrWiffles 5y ago

I have no idea where that literary quote is from but it’s pertinent here. In related news, what software or tools do you use to manage that whitelist? I’ve been considering stunting similar.

danuker 5y ago
Not OP, but I am using uBlock Origin. Here's how I do it: https://danuker.go.ro/how-to-protect-your-personal-data.html#what-you-can-do-as-a-user https://danuker.go.ro/how-to-protect-your-personal-data.html...

omnicognate 5y ago

How do you implement that? I have a whitelisting transparent proxy for my kids (contrary to the popular meme around here that all kids are NSA grade hackers determined to defy your every attempt to protect them, it's uncontroversial in my house and works very well). I use squid for that and have a shonky web UI I made to access the logs and update the whitelist acl. I'd like to make it more capable (stuff like temporary unblock like you mention). AFAICT the only way to do such things is writing a squid "helper" that runs as a separate process (/processes). Is that what you're doing?

dang-guefever 5y ago
I use adblock on openwrt with a basic script to write to and revert the whitelist, and to restart dnsmasq. I use qutebrowser and made whitelisting a hints shortcut. There's almost certainly a better system, but this works for me.

shepik 5y ago

Honest question: is it worth it? Why would you spend your time on managing that temporary white list? Do you think that time is wasted, or not? (I apologize if my phrasing is a bit rude, but i'm really curious about that, and want to understand your thinking)

samhw 5y ago
I think people like this see it as a 'win' – as if they, John Smith, have beaten the dastardly BigCorp. Whereas, in fact, the most that happens is a Junior Marketing Executive at BigCorp says "Right, that guy falls within the 0.5% of techy customers who make things difficult for us. Ah well, it's only been 80,000 of them, well within our margin for this month."
- samstave 5y ago
  True - however, IMO, the value is in the awareness of tracking and the knowledge of how to block things as such. Its better to know how your network operates that you rely on for your daily life than to know nothing about its internals. My biggest issue as I age is that I FORGET how to do some of the higher level networking that I used to know innately - and I also lose interest in doing such things and become lazy, complacent, and as I forget things, more and more ignorant to it all... Take PC Gaming as an example, or server rebuilds. I could build SUN 650s and many many PC based servers with a blindfold on. I grew up gaming and ran Intel's Game Development Lab for some time and was super knowledgable about all things PC/PCGaming when I had the lastest and best hardware literally delivered to me every day at intel... Now I don't knwo shit about 'PCMasterRace' and building these days....
  - samhw 5y ago
    The issue is that people like this fetishise avoiding tracking. It doesn't seem like they have a clear reason why they want to avoid tracking. Do they have sensitive data to hide? Do they ideologically disagree with large companies gathering data? Is it anything else? It honestly doesn't seem like it. It seems more like "stopping them from getting my data" is treated as an end unto itself.

chaz6 5y ago

Do you use an SSL proxy to catch unwanted requests to CDN's like Cloudflare that would otherwise be allowed?

luckydata 5y ago

seems like an enormous amount of effort for essentially no benefit.