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posted by Fnord666 on Monday February 11 2019, @01:59PM   Printer-friendly
from the had-to-step-outside dept.

In a series of articles at Gizmodo, Gizmodo Writer / editor Kashmir Hill blocks Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon for a week each, then she blocks all five simultaneously. The last article was just published on Feburary 8th.

This wasn't a casual experiment. She literally had an expert block every known IP address by said companies and banned technology from these different groups for that particular week. In the last week, she couldn't even use DuckDuckGo because it was run on AWS (found in the conclusion).

Selected paragraphs from the introduction:

The common retort to these concerns is that you should "just stop using their services." So I decided to try.

This is a story of how, over six weeks, I cut them out of my own life and tried to prevent them from knowing about me or monetizing me in any way—not just by putting my iPhone in a drawer for a week or only buying local, but by really, truly blocking these companies from accessing me and vice versa. I wanted to find out how hard it would be—or if I could even do it—given that these tech giants dominate the internet in so many invisible ways that it's hard to even know them all.

It's not just logging off of Facebook; it's logging off the countless websites that use Facebook to log in. It's not just using DuckDuckGo instead of Google search; it's abandoning my email, switching browsers, giving up a smartphone, and living life without mapping apps. It's not just refusing to buy toilet paper on Amazon.com; it's being blocked from reading giant swaths of the internet that are hosted on Amazon servers, giving up websites and apps that I didn't previously know were connected to the biggest internet giant of them all.

...

To keep my devices from talking to the big five's servers, and vice versa, Dhruv built a virtual private network, or VPN, for me, through which I sent all my internet traffic. He then used the VPN to block my devices from being able to use the IP addresses owned by Amazon, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and/or Apple, depending on the week.

On a normal day, as measured by the VPN, I tend to send two million data packets out onto the internet and more than half of them (60 percent) go to the tech giants. That meant that over half of my normal internet usage was going to grind to a halt—including virtually every way I communicate with my friends, family, and colleagues.

...

You have no idea how hard it is to find a phone that's not touched by Apple or Google.


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  • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday February 11 2019, @03:37PM (2 children)

    by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Monday February 11 2019, @03:37PM (#799536) Journal

    She blocked all IP addresses for: Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon

    (first, isn't that "...and Amazon" a redundant redundancy?)

    Why would I want to block ALL KNOWN IP addresses for these companies? I'm assuming that includes their hosting services?

    If I use Netflix, should I care that Netflix hosts on Amazon?

    Isn't cutting off hosting IP addresses like saying I want to try to do away with all contact to Digital Ocean, Linode and other hosting providers? Why not just try to live without the internet at all? It is a big tangles web, of dependencies, so to speak.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 11 2019, @05:13PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 11 2019, @05:13PM (#799612)

    Why would I want to block ALL KNOWN IP addresses for these companies? I'm assuming that includes their hosting services?

    Yes, to block even their hosting services.

    If I use Netflix, should I care that Netflix hosts on Amazon?

    She wanted to completely eliminate Amazon -- not just the online store, but everything they're connected to -- from her life.

    She discovered much the same thing that those of us who try to avoid buying anything from evil corporations like Nestle [google.com] do: they're just too vast to be able to complete eliminate from your life short of finding yourself a desert island and moving there.

    • (Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Monday February 11 2019, @11:50PM

      by NotSanguine (285) <NotSanguineNO@SPAMSoylentNews.Org> on Monday February 11 2019, @11:50PM (#799841) Homepage Journal

      She wanted to completely eliminate Amazon -- not just the online store, but everything they're connected to -- from her life.

      She discovered much the same thing that those of us who try to avoid buying anything from evil corporations like Nestle [google.com] do: they're just too vast to be able to complete eliminate from your life short of finding yourself a desert island and moving there.

      She should try blocking Akamai as well. What could go wrong?

      The truth is that the centralized nature (due to the lack of symmetric consumer ISP links) has created monsters that will haunt us for decades to come.

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