This browser extension shows what the Internet would look like without Big Tech:
The Economic Security Project is trying to make a point about big tech monopolies by releasing a browser plugin that will block any sites that reach out to IP addresses owned by Google, Facebook, Microsoft, or Amazon. The extension is called Big Tech Detective, and after using the internet with it for a day (or, more accurately, trying and failing to use), I'd say it drives home the point that it's almost impossible to avoid these companies on the modern web, even if you try.
Currently, the app has to be side-loaded onto Chrome, and the Economic Security Project expects that will remain the case. It's also available to side-load onto Firefox. By default, it just keeps track of how many requests are sent, and to which companies. If you configure the extension to actually block websites, you'll see a big red popup if the website you're visiting sends a request to any of the four. That popup will also include a list of all the requests so you can get an idea of what's being asked for.
It's worth keeping in mind that just because a site reaches out to one or more of the big four tech companies, it doesn't mean that it's necessarily snooping or doing something nefarious. Many websites use fonts from Google Fonts, or host their sites using Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure. That said, there are pages that connect to those IP addresses because they use trackers provided by one of the big four companies. The examples I'm about to list were selected because they're common sites, not necessarily because they should be shamed.
[...] Big Tech Detective isn't meant to keep your data private from these companies — it even says when it locks one of the pages that it isn't actually preventing the resources from loading, or collecting your data if that's their purpose. It's really meant as a visualization tool to show you that if you want to use the internet without relying on these companies, you're not going to have a good time. It does, however, let you somewhat recreate the experiment Gizmodo ran where one of its reporters tried to cut out the same four tech companies and Apple — and some technology from that work helps power this extension.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 25 2021, @12:16PM (8 children)
Only one in six people identify as male/female according to recent surveys. It is only these people that complain about nothingburgers like loading a google font or facebook icon.
These reactionary "people" - if you can call them that - do not belong on the modern internet.
(Score: 5, Touché) by Tork on Thursday February 25 2021, @03:35PM (6 children)
Boring troll is boring... and possibly lacks sentience.
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Thursday February 25 2021, @08:15PM (5 children)
Did you know:
Sapience is the term that means "higher intelligence capable of abstract reasoning"
while
Sentience refers to the basic ability to perceive the world around you through senses, such as is posessed by a worm, or even the simplest paramecium?
A strawman lacks both.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 25 2021, @08:24PM (4 children)
(Score: 3, Informative) by ikanreed on Thursday February 25 2021, @09:26PM (3 children)
Yes, it's a stupid strawman? I don't get your point.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 25 2021, @09:34PM (2 children)
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Thursday February 25 2021, @09:39PM (1 child)
Are you upvoting your own nonsensical posts?
That's ridiculously sad.
(Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 25 2021, @09:52PM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 25 2021, @09:40PM
"Only one in six people identify as male/female according to recent surveys."
Only? That seems way too high for hermaphrodites, even if only self-identified.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Unixnut on Thursday February 25 2021, @12:45PM (12 children)
It is pretty much impossible to avoid the "Big four", precisely because so many lazy dev's just link to them for the silliest of things (like fonts). If you don't enable Google javascript, the site is unusable as you don't get any fonts. I mean, mad.
I like the idea of this plugin, and I will see if I can find a way to just block the big fourt at the router level using /etc/hosts redirect (at least until that stupid DNS over HTTPS becomes commonplace), but it does drive the point home that if one of these big four decide to cut you off, you basically can't function in modern society.
We had a similar example recently with FB and (I think) the Australian government, where FB disagreed with the government and blocked all access to its services from the country. The main issue was no so much that people can't reach their insta-profiles, as much as how many local government and social services had become wholly dependent on their FB pages to function.
Needless to say the government backed down.
Likewise if Google decided to block a country due to not liking their government policies, you would have a wide outage, and some sites may only partially function, not to mention all the Android phones.
They have far too much power, the world wide web has effectively been centralised, and it no longer can function as a distributed system.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by SomeGuy on Thursday February 25 2021, @01:16PM
Silliest of things indeed. When people first started placing links to the Facebook web site on their web pages, they almost always used a Facebook button that was hosted on Facebook.com. Even that simple thing by itself sends an HTTP request to Facebook every single time someone views your page. Do you really think they do nothing with that information? I already block facebook because of crap like this.
Hosting functional parts of your own web page (scripts, fonts, major content) on someone ELSES web site means your site will break if the other site goes down or they replace their content with the goatse guy.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 25 2021, @01:20PM (7 children)
Just thinking out loud... what if one would proxy all (well, things like fonts and such) the content and have all requests to the big four handled by that proxy?
I mean, in the dial up modem age, many people used proxies hosted by their ISPs. I wonder if that still would work these days.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 25 2021, @01:45PM (1 child)
Proxies work great for static content, not so much for web applications.
As much as I like to rant about how the term "web application" is over-rated and how everyone should be building their website so that I can render it appropriately in my lynx browser, that's just not what the www is used for anymore. Like it or not, we're back in the mainframe era, and it's applications that are run on resources shared between your mainframe (the cloud) and your display/rendering device (your browser).
Proxies don't work too well with this because all content being pulled back and forth is hyper individualized. For example: most requests contain some form of identifier (cookie, jwt, ...) that modifies whatever will be returned from the mainframe... I mean server.
(Score: 2) by Acabatag on Friday February 26 2021, @02:31AM
If we are using the www for communications, it doesn't really 'break' if you can't load google's fonts. It might 'break' some control-freaks intent, but communications can and will still go on.
The mainframe model involved completely dumb terminals that could do no computing at all. Or card decks, back when interactive computing was rare.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Unixnut on Thursday February 25 2021, @02:44PM (1 child)
> Just thinking out loud... what if one would proxy all (well, things like fonts and such) the content and have all requests to the big four handled by that proxy?
That was doable, and I did it for ages in order to reduce the bandwidth of my (slow) home broadband. However the bulk move to "HTTPS for everything" has broken that, as I can no longer proxy cache pages, and forcing HTTP just puts you in a loop (where you force HTTP, to have the server redirect to HTTPS, when your browser forces HTTP again, etc...). It also stopped me from being able to block/redirect specific requests to my own servers, and well as modify traffic on the fly. A right PITA.
A lot of web sites don't even have http anymore, just a redirect to https, because browsers like Chrome used to throw a big hissy fit about "insecure sites" every time people visited them.
Now it may be possible to cache https, by doing something like creating your own local CA, generating wildcard certificates, installing it into your browser, and shunting everything via the proxy, but (a) it is complex, limiting it to a technical minority, (b) it may not work on some sites, causing odd breakage, and (c) could well reduce your security
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 25 2021, @05:19PM
You beat me to it.
I would on average get a 30-40% reduction in bandwith usage by using a proxy. I had the logs to prove it too. Now nearly 95% of things are https. Unless you MITM the thing with your own certs proxy is dead. I have compensated by making the cache bigger on my web browser instances. But that too has drawbacks.
Caching works very well. If we could have 2 modifications to HTTP and HTML we could have something. Number one is authenticated plaintext. Basically signing of objects and all we need is auth checking instead of re-downloading the whole asset all the time. This would allow caching of many items yet cut out the MITM attack. Second is to have the ability in HTML to say 'here is a list of servers I consider equivalent' so https://xyz.abc.com [abc.com] and https://lala.abc.com [abc.com] are consider the same and objects could be folded ath the HTML level instead of playing DNS games with routers and load balancers.
(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Thursday February 25 2021, @08:35PM (1 child)
There was once a little utility you could install, I think it was called the Proxomitron (something close to that). It still worked even though it had long ceased development (it was originally created for Windows 95!). I had it on my Windows XP PC, which was once my primary PC but for its last 12 years or so I only connected to the internet in emergencies. It did a lot in its default state (mostly to block ads), but could be customized for your own purposes against many things.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 26 2021, @05:12AM
The author of that got sick and died back in the early 2000s. Privoxy is a similar program that has been around for something like 20 years and is still maintained.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 26 2021, @12:39PM
"many people used proxies hosted by their ISPs"
Err. What? I don't recall that being the case. Maybe you are talking about AOL? I think this is revisionist history, attempting to astroturf for the idea that carriers should NOW do that, because it "used to be that way". Which is of course complete bullshit. IOW, sneakily trying to formalize walled gardens on modern networks. Which is being implemented already, just in sneaky ways.
Are there even any real people here on SN anymore? I wonder.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 25 2021, @01:28PM (1 child)
>It is pretty much impossible to avoid the "Big four", precisely because so many lazy dev's just link to them for the silliest of things (like fonts). If you don't enable Google javascript, the site is unusable as you don't get any fonts. I mean, mad.
I wonder what sites you are using or what definition of "unusable" you use since I find sites working just fine without the default fonts. I have been surfing without javascript enabled by default (uMatrix plugin) and limited javascripts for a handful of specific sites (youtube, my banking site and a few more) for quite a few years and many sites work just fine. Some sites need to have a few javascripts enabled and certain features need them (some obviously, some not) but fonts is rarely impeding the usuability of a specific website.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 25 2021, @01:47PM
Consider this extension: https://decentraleyes.org/ [decentraleyes.org] and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decentraleyes [wikipedia.org]
While it doesn't give you 100% coverage, it gives you better than 0% coverage.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 26 2021, @01:14PM
Web devs that refused to use Google fonts, or refused to put a "Like us on Facebook!" button on the page, and so forth would be replaced.
The problem isn't that the web dev for Irving's Auto Parts Supply put a Facebook button on his website, and it's not even that Irving wanted a Facebook button on the page. The problem is that Facebook is the best way for them to reach potential customers. That won't be solved until Facebook goes away.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 25 2021, @01:41PM (1 child)
While the extension provides interesting information, it is not totally meaningful information. I recommend you read El Reg's article on this extension as well: https://www.theregister.com/2021/02/25/big_tech_extension/ [theregister.com]
It highlights some 'lackings' in the methodology applied by the extension.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday February 25 2021, @02:12PM
Classic.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by bradley13 on Thursday February 25 2021, @02:33PM (7 children)
The web without the big four? I see that every time I turn off my computer.
Seriously: basically nothing works. Nearly all web development today starts by linking in crap: JS frameworks, fonts, trackers, ad nauseam. Unless you have barbarians like me, who write static HTML in a text editor (and I only do that for my personal site) - no, sorry, there's nothing out there.
Minor irritation: it isn't the internet that breaks, it's the world wide web. The internet includes plenty of other services besides HTTP/HTTPS.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 25 2021, @02:44PM (2 children)
recently i found out that gopher still exists. that lead me to gemini. the 90s internet is still going, after a fashion. ascii forever!
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Thursday February 25 2021, @04:48PM (1 child)
Indeed, gopher is still around, and growing funnily enough. Likewise usenet is getting stronger. People very much saying they are sick of the world wide web, and just want text information (with the odd link to images). Still a lot of empty topics atm, probably because many of them once created (even in the 90s), are never deleted, but those that are working, are really quite busy.
I set up a local usenet caching server, and will have a go and making some gopher pages once time allows.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 26 2021, @12:53PM
Usenet has scaling and administration problems. I once thought that it would be appropriate to port web forums to use usenet as a storage back-end. More or less a middle layer between the web front end and a database. That way they could consortium and back up eachothers content automatically. The problem that you run into, is the heirarchies are admin'd by a committee, and you can't register a namespace in the tree without their rubber stamp. And like all commitees they are made up of people who want to be there for all the wrong reasons.
Of course you can run a private set of heirarchies. Nobody really must listen to the comittee, but they usually do because that is where the largest active file is maintained. In fact, if a lot of web forums banded together they could probably take over usenet with a little effort.
Now I think that a scratch built fully decentralized block chain system is the way to go. Nothing beats knowing exactly what messages were dropped, shadow banned and by whom...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 25 2021, @03:28PM (1 child)
You can use all the JS you want. Just host it yourself. If you go to any responsible banking website, you'll find they don't link from outside.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 26 2021, @10:59PM
Pretty much every bank or online payment site I've ever been to loads scripts from Qualtrics.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Thursday February 25 2021, @08:24PM
You don't need to regress to 1995 to make code that is free from stupid dependency webs. Django is fine.
Heck, if you dump a static copy of jquery on your own server, that's fine too.
Starting about when NodeJS came around is where the poison crept in to every site. Check off a bunch of dependencies you don't need, cargo cult a bunch of ugly and user-unfriendly engagement-increasing anti-patterns, kowtow to every advertiser demand, and revel at the mess you've made.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 26 2021, @01:23PM
If you use Jekyll or one of its thousands of competitors, you have a nice set of tools to build your website content. But then you run a command and it translates it into static HTML you can host on nginx (or whatever).
The advantage of working with Jekyll or something like it is that you don't have to manually update your links, and your table of contents, and anything else when you add or remove a page or tag of whatever. But the final site is still 100% static, so you're not wasting your end users' time, compute power, or bandwidth with junk.
If you have a medium size or larger site, it's a real time saver over managing everything with a text editor and sed.
(Score: 2) by Rich on Thursday February 25 2021, @09:43PM
It's a bit of a personal rant of mine that "EVERYONE can simply run it in the browser" (and therefore we use web technology) should really be "MANY can simply run it in somewhat recent, we don't know how recent though, versions of Google Chrome, except for the latest one, our technicians are working on that, and Mac users can simply run it in Safari, except for the buttons to suspend and resume sessions, and while we haven't validated Firefox, we heard it should mostly work, too, except for some font layout issues (where you can't see the bottom line results)."
TFA brought to my attention that in many cases this needs to be extended with "... if Google font servers are up, and the framework repository, and our cloud provider".
Given WINE, applications written for the Win32s API are are least as portable today than web apps, and don't suffer from remote breakages.
(Score: 2) by Nuke on Friday February 26 2021, @11:17AM
TFA gives a link to a demo/joke text only website that claims to have no shit (their word, interpret how you like) or links to shit. But in fact it has links to Google-Analytics - you can see it in its source code. If you want a website with no shit, write the HTML with a text editor. Graphics are not the issue. I have a couple of websites done that way so they must be in the 0.01 percentile of true no-shit websites.