[dang-guefever]

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."

[omnicognate]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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.

[3np]

I can’t speak for everyone but there’s a growing awareness of where all the risks to society with gathering and spreading all this data.

It surprises me how someone who understands the inner workings as well as the interactions of the systems that society has increasingly expected us to depend on are not scared shitless of how things will look a generation from now.

[google234123]

Who cares about the intricacies of building a pc? You do it every 5 years and it takes a few hours…

[samstave]

I care about no longer remembering something I used to be considered a master at previously. :-(

I don't like knowledge evaporation.

[burnished]

I don't think you know what you are talking about. Here is a link to what they were quoting and might fill you in.

https://www.dhammatalks.org/suttas/MN/MN25.html

[MrWiffles]

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]

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...

[chaz6]

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

[luckydata]

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