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.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday February 11 2019, @02:12PM (18 children)
She went to all the trouble of gimping her devices for a story when she could have had a paid, week long fishing trip somewhere with shit for signal.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by FatPhil on Monday February 11 2019, @02:17PM (16 children)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 4, Funny) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday February 11 2019, @02:26PM (15 children)
She could still have gone fishing though. Some people...
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Rivenaleem on Monday February 11 2019, @02:29PM (5 children)
I don't think the point of the story was, "Can you do without technology for a week" but "Can you use technology, but boycott a specific company, for a week"
(Score: 5, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Monday February 11 2019, @02:42PM
Or, more to the point: look at all the stuff that depends on company X that you wouldn't have thought did...
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday February 11 2019, @02:48PM (3 children)
Right but my point was she could have cheated and enjoyed herself on the company dime instead of dealing with headaches.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 11 2019, @03:00PM (2 children)
She failed. Everything she owns or uses has some connection to those mentioned. The supermarket she buys her food from probably uses one of those services, the water utility that fills her toilet is probably connected to some Amazon server, the doctor she goes to, banking, ... on and on it goes. If you exist... Google earth has already snapped a photo of your house. And there's a database somewhere with your name on it.
(Score: 2) by realDonaldTrump on Monday February 11 2019, @03:41PM (1 child)
This is true. This is so true. It's known as Cloud Digital. Or Cloud Cyber. And every time our C.I.A. drones somebody, Jeff Bozo makes a couple bucks. From the Intelligence Community Information Technology Enterprise, the I.C.I.T.E. Say that one out loud. But not where "Alexa" can hear you!!!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 11 2019, @07:53PM
This is the recommend way to handle such a cyber scenario: oblig XKCD [xkcd.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 11 2019, @04:35PM (8 children)
Fishing is boring
(Score: 4, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday February 11 2019, @04:55PM (7 children)
Only when it's slow. Which is why you swap lies with the old men or set your catfish rods out and take a nap. Kids today, have to be provided outside entertainment the whole time they're awake. It's really pathetic.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 11 2019, @09:56PM (2 children)
You are a catfisher? This. Explains. So. Much.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Tuesday February 12 2019, @02:56AM (1 child)
Shit, catfish is delicious.
But you probably only eat hotdogs, right?
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. I have always been here. ---Gaaark 2.0 --
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday February 12 2019, @05:47AM
Don't knock lips and assholes. They've got their place too.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday February 12 2019, @12:00AM (3 children)
The youngsters can't stand themselves, they need the others to stop them go out of their mind.
Bonus point if the old man you are swapping lies with is yourself.
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 3, Touché) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday February 12 2019, @05:46AM (2 children)
Yeah, people never talk about the good things dementia brings to the table.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Tuesday February 12 2019, @01:07PM (1 child)
Yeah...I hear that people never talk about the good things dementia brings to the table.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. I have always been here. ---Gaaark 2.0 --
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday February 12 2019, @02:45PM
Have you considered all the good things that dementia brings to the table though?
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Funny) by arslan on Monday February 11 2019, @08:54PM
Maybe she did,
...as she was checking out her shopping cart with the fishing gear she realized it was an Amazon shopping cart...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 11 2019, @02:55PM (3 children)
i've been living without those shitty corporations since a few years now and don't need to write on my blog about it and yes I don't have one because shitty services are shitty. fools however are still falling prey of those corporations
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by looorg on Monday February 11 2019, @03:49PM (1 child)
Indeed. It's not really hard to be without them if you want to. Problem here is she is a bit of a cunt that wants to eat the cookie and also not at about the same time. She wants to live her urban metropolitan life with all the bling bling. She wants her Apple and Google and Amazon cause they make her life amazing. But she also doesn't. But she really does. It's stupid clickbait for the other anxious people that live in here world of the constant "need" for the Amazon, the Google and such.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 11 2019, @04:01PM
Indeed. It's not really hard to be without them if you want to.
You didn't actually read the summary, did you?
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday February 12 2019, @12:04AM
I don't believe you on this one.
Not very hard to set up and run a blogging platform yourself, I think the reason for not doing it is something else.
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: -1, Troll) by VLM on Monday February 11 2019, @02:56PM (1 child)
They're mostly harmless, well... other than maybe Google and they're not entirely bad. For a company who's customer service is almost entirely /dev/null and a couple shell script auto-responders they're not too bad.
She's going to get a much larger improvement in her life blocking clickbait and agitprop and leftist propaganda outlets. Oh wait thats the author's employer LOL, that could be a slight problem.
Even by the low standards of virtue signaling, its kinda lame.
Some macbook hipster clickbait churner blocks MS but not Apple, LOL. Kinda like I'm going to be a brave strong man by proudly publicly boycotting Ford, hope nobody notices I own a Toyota so I'm not actually doing anything other than soaking in the upvotes for bravery.
Author left Facebook and tried to make up for it on Mastadon instead of a more based and civilized alternative like Gab.ai or 4chan /pol/, LOL. "I've already written my conclusion, now where can I find something that sucks to promote as research proving my conclusion" (Insert "oh shit I forget was this a clickbait fluff piece or academia soft sciences troll?" LOL)
Author didn't leave twitter, LOL what a cesspool of politically biased propaganda and toxic groupthink that place is. "Hey guize, I stopped drinking drain cleaner, you shouldn't because I didn't see much health improvement; did I mention I'm still guzzling bleach and 10% ethanol gasoline? I donno I just can't find the source of my gastrointestinal disorder..."
Will give the author credit for understanding insta and FB are the same company, unlike maybe 99.99% of the population. Its not an entirely bad article, just mostly. By clickbait standards its actually pretty good. That would be called "damning with faint praise" if thats not entirely clear, BTW.
I LOLed IRL at the "deep as a rain puddle" superficiality in the anti-FB article where the author seems to think up-doot-ing some woman's picture of her crotch spawn is the pinnacle and definition of "socializing". Narcissistic social media platforms are "socializing", in the same sense that buying an anime body pillow off Amazon is "the same as a marriage ceremony".
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday February 11 2019, @03:01PM
F..... My blood level in my caffeine system is messed up again. Was still a pretty good rant anyway. Just search and replace complaining about systemd, or maybe going anti-paypal, in place of anti-apple rants and my post is still tolerable OK.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by ledow on Monday February 11 2019, @03:28PM
It's not really news.
Try doing the same and remove, say, Cisco... or Huawei.
At least when something uses Amazon you stand half a chance of knowing that just by blocking their IP ranges. But you have no idea if they are using them on the backend, or behind a proxy of some kind, to actually provide the service.
Hell, if you really want to mess stuff up, check out the doctype URLs and things like that - historically they've been the source of not only unrelated-website outages but even security issues.
Everything on the net is connected. That's kind of the point. Avoiding using the service provider of one of your own providers tends to cascade down to failure in anything. They make the choice to use Amazon, not you, and then you make the choice to use them. They can change their mind at any time, maybe even use several clouds, jump onto a new service without having to tell you etc. and you'll honestly never know what they're REALLY doing.
Trying to boycott Amazon is like trying to boycott a metal refinery used by half the world's manufacturers of even the tiniest of metal components. Even if you think you're avoiding them, chances are that one of those sub-sub-sub-sub-manufacturers utilised their services for at least one tiny component somewhere. It's not "whether they could have avoided that". It's "why would they bother?", "how would you ever know?" and "what good do you think that would do?"
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday February 11 2019, @03:37PM (2 children)
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.
The server will be down for replacement of vacuum tubes, belts, worn parts and lubrication of gears and bearings.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 11 2019, @05:13PM (1 child)
Yes, to block even their hosting services.
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
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.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 3, Interesting) by DannyB on Monday February 11 2019, @03:40PM
Another way to look at it:
Hard to find a phone not touched by AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile. Or a list of smaller companies.
Isn't it simply that to survive in the modern tech world you must do business with some big corporations?
Even if their terms of service allow them to sneak in the middle of the night and harvest your and your family members' vital organs -- unless your cable tv provider has already harvested them first.
The server will be down for replacement of vacuum tubes, belts, worn parts and lubrication of gears and bearings.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 11 2019, @03:57PM (1 child)
I'm waiting for part 8: blocking the NSA.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 11 2019, @05:19PM
That's easy, I've got this setup. All you have to do is [user disconnected]
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 11 2019, @04:01PM (5 children)
pshaw! i am appalled at the comments so far:"it's not THAT bad."?!?
it's freaking horrible! wake up people!
i understand if computer-sheep go about their business relying nonchalantly on the data whore houses, but people reading soylent?
the next step (and a constructive step it would be indeed), is to starting EXPLAINING how to avoid the big data-sucking blackholes on the internet, without losing anything!
so far it's just complaining:
"oh it's so cold and freezing so far from the google-facebook-micro$oft-etc fire."
"It's raining cats-and-dogs and i miss the google-facebook-micro$oft-etc cave."
holy sh1t, google-facebook-micro$oft-etc has alien super-quantum-pink-rainbow-fart-unicorns that can do blackmagic computing... not.
same pots and pans and salt and water, people!
here are a few possibilities:
mumble
irc (yes, there's a daemon for that)
tor (free dns.onion domain. easy to find you then, eh?)
bit-torrent (original seeder via DHT requires a open incoming port on the firewall. share a 4 TB file. go!)
...
if we don't stand up already and let information that is important for information to be free to be free (i hope i got that right) then the internet will turn into a walled garden cable-TV monstrosity!
YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Monday February 11 2019, @04:16PM (4 children)
Perhaps you should start a VPN service for people which does just that -- block the big 5. I suppose you could give users a checkbox list so they could ban some or all. I don't doubt there'd be some buyers out there.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 11 2019, @04:50PM (3 children)
no no no. it might work but the spirit of doing what you propose is the same spirit that governs the "big 5".
you "do think" FOR the user, without the user having a clue. and after being abused enough by (l)users (knowingly or unknowingly),
bills will have to be paid and then the hunt for profit begins and the spirit grins like a mischievous pixy and ejaculates all over.
-
the point is that computer USERS have to understand the power that comes with a internet connection and make use of it, not
just hand it over to someone else to manage.
today it might sound like a impossible thing, but the strange thing is that the seed of empowerment and knowledge dwells within the internet itself -aka- How-tos and FAQs. DO NOT FEAR MISTAKES!
i don't mind if people/sheep are oblivious to this but i don't want the (physical) internet to change, pointing only to "five points of abyss" with routing/connection from the edge to edge becoming dog-slow or even impossible (without having to dive into the abyss first)?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by hemocyanin on Monday February 11 2019, @06:38PM (1 child)
I'm pretty handy with computers -- started in about 1982 with a CoCo -- I'm easily in the top 1% of users skill wise, which means I know enough to know that there's a HUGE amount of stuff I don't. To really do this right, I'd probably have to quit my day job and spend the next year studying but even then, without extensive real world experience and a lack of a security background, the chance I'd screw it up would be high. I don't want to give up my income and lose my house. I would like to be able to pay reasonably trustworthy sources for the service (with my own personal understanding that you can never really trust).
This whole buckle down and DIY thing is just unrealistic when you consider facts of the world like snow, wind, food, water, septic, etc. and it annoys me that it is such a common theme. No person can know everything there is to know anymore, but people still want to make use of specialists because specialists can give us something valuable (and we them in areas they don't know).
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday February 12 2019, @01:15AM
I think you overestimate the difficulty, for the reasons below
1. define "right" in the "do this right".
2. look at the price of failure to do it "really right"
For the first point, the starting assumption on the thread is " how to avoid the big data-sucking blackholes on the internet" - doesn't take THAT huge amount to do it if you are willing to drop some convenience. Yes, there will be others to leak data about you, so it won't ever be perfect... but do you really need perfect?
For the second point, even if you utterly fail in stopping the deluge of private info about your private life, you'll be no worse than before (except some time invested in the process - put it on the account of "life-long learning") - which means not only you will survive just fine but live your life like before.
Me thinks is just a "perfect is the enemy of the good" post-factum justification on the line of "I'm not gaining enough for the HUGE effort".
Note that I'm not arguing your choice is wrong, the "I really can't be bothered to do it" is an OK choice to my mind.
I only have minor issues with the reason you avoid to admit your choice and rationalize it blaming circumstances outside your control.
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 11 2019, @08:21PM
A general purpose computer does not seem to be what most people want nor is it something they have a use for.
What most people want is to be able to fool themselves into thinking they are temporarily embarrassed millionaires. The entire thing is predicated on magical thinking. That is, if they have the same talisman the real millionaires (millionaire = middle class these days or for Marxists petty bourgeois), then they reason that must make them a millionaire in truth, despite their embarrassing net worth.
Your advice will only ever be for hobbyists and existing professionals. If I understand your larger concerns, that is important but when it's time for the ruling class to bring down the hammer on the internet (will have very convincing excuses in the mainstream propaganda but real reason will be to prevent the working class from organizing), well, China is a good example of what to expect.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 11 2019, @04:45PM (2 children)
Even if you rewind your life to approximately 1978 levels of technology, you can't rewind the rest of the world. If you go shopping, the point of sale device is almost certainly running Windows or iOS. If you make a phone call, the person on the other end is probably using a phone with Android or iOS. If you pay a bill, even if you do it by mailing a check, somebody's back office is probably running on Windows or AWS or Azure or all of the above.
The only thing you can do without involving any of these companies in any way is to grow vegetables in your own garden (provided your mortgage or rent and property taxes are already paid). Preferably using rainwater, as the utilities are probably metered with smart meters that almost certainly involve one of those companies too.
It's not just the point of the internet that everything is connected, it's the point of society.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by TrentDavey on Monday February 11 2019, @06:06PM
Yes. I didn't have a mobile telephone until a month ago (I'm 59). The cafeteria I go to had a loyalty program wherein buying nine coffees got you a free tenth and was kept track of via a cardboard card that the cashier hole-punched. Then they went to an "app". Brought new meaning to the phrase "loyalty Program"!
A few places keep asking for my telephone number for two-stage security - or something like that.
Those aren't the reasons I got the device. I was "out-of-the-loop" when it came to keeping in touch with my adult children and others. Now I'm one of those old fogeys struggling with new technology that I used to snicker at ("Dad, your microwave still flashing 12:00.").
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 13 2019, @12:01AM
So your mouth is connected to my fetid, infected cock.
Enjoy choking on it you social butterfly.