Re: Self-censorship 101 (was: Problems with https://manpages.debian.org/)
On Tue 26 Jun 2018 at 23:03:34 (+0300), Reco wrote:
> Hi.
>
> On Tue, Jun 26, 2018 at 02:14:36PM -0500, Nicholas Geovanis wrote:
> > Not to go off-topic, but you wrote:
> > "Difficult for me to judge. I do have over 13000 hostnames in /etc/hosts
> > which I hope has an accelerating effect on loading pages (though I"
> >
> > So you aggressively flaunt conventional wisdom with this practice. What is your
> > secret? I have often thought of doing the same when DNS queries crawl, but it
> > seemed that surely if the answer was so simple, others would have
> > discovered it already ;-)
>
> It is simple, but the implementation is questionable.
>
> One can put all major banner networks, maybe Google, Facebook and their
> friends into your /etc/hosts and point all those entries to 127.0.0.1.
> Works wonders on loading Internet web-pages, although someone may
> consider that "it can break web sites", or "it robs website owners of
> their income", or some other such nonsense.
I posted the rationale here last year:
https://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2017/10/msg00386.html
> The main questions here are:
>
> 1) How does one obtains such site list.
> Using any public source for this is suspiciously close to censorship.
In the post above.
> 2) Why bother with /etc/hosts at all, if one can use DNS or HTTP proxy
> for the same purpose with much simplier configuration (hint - you cannot
> block all sites in a domain via /etc/hosts unless you list all of them
> there).
That's probably why it's so long. But do I want to set up a DNS proxy
on each host, with any wheezy, jessie and stretch differences to sort
out? Then I have to maintain my list of domains to send to localhost.
Where do I start with that?
> 3) Why cripple system-wide resolver for a single program (in this
> case - a browser). A suitable browser plugin should suffice here.
How long does it take to read ½MB into memory (once) and then check
it? Obviously not very long as it works well. A plugin means yet more
maintenance for me to do.
Cheers,
David.
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