Comments on: more on going stealth online

By: Sami

Sami — Sat, 29 May 2010 23:26:20 +0000

I forgot to mention this, but Shaw actually proxies the majority of popular sites through its own proxy. You can't avoid the proxy as there is a forced redirect. So yeah, this will help, but you ISP still has your entire click stream and it sells that for profit to whomever. Probably Google if they wanted it... The more you know (tm).

By: dnorman

dnorman — Sat, 29 May 2010 15:58:44 +0000

Feels kind of like the shared killfile in Idoru. William Gibson, as always, is a little ahead of the curve...

The best part of the killfile is that it works for all accounts on a computer, in all programs. No config. No tweaking. And it blocks silently. No opting out. No external lists.

You just drop out. Nice.

By: Boone Gorges

Boone Gorges — Sat, 29 May 2010 12:36:06 +0000

D’arcy, I can’t thank you enough for linking to that hosts file. For all the time I have to spend mucking with hosts files to get my development environments to work right, it never occurred to me that it’s a foolproof and totally safe way to blacklist sites. Awesome. Since adding those rules to my /etc/hosts, I have been seeing 404s all over the place (in a good way). Kind of a wakeup call. Anyway, here’s to putting power back in your own hands!

By: dnorman

dnorman — Fri, 28 May 2010 22:58:19 +0000

heh. I even had a license for LaunchBar back in the early days. Was it still Rhapsody back then? PR1? I’ll give it another shot… Not sure I can justify $35 for what I’d be using as an app launcher. Spotlight actually does that pretty well (it used to suck quite spectacularly, but is pretty snappy now)

By: Micheal J.

Micheal J. — Fri, 28 May 2010 22:41:25 +0000

*cough* LaunchBar *cough* 😉 Anything but Spotlight.

Best of luck.