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Comment by buro9 | Hacker News Reader

> As we have seen, Google does not explain ( https://developers.google.com/tag-manager/serverside/custom-... ) the reason for creating a subdomain of the website for its "proxy" server:

> > The default server-side tagging deployment is hosted on an App Engine domain. We recommend that you modify the deployment to use a subdomain of your website instead.

The reason is simple: it creates a denial of service attack on DNS block lists used by things like Pi-Hole and NextDNS. Sure, Google knows that some of the subdomains will be blocked for some block lists... but the vast majority won't be blocked on the vast majority of block lists.

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Looks like the only sane thing to do is to block routes to GAFAM AS directly on your router instead of relying on DNS tricks. I knew people doing that over ten years ago and i thought they were kind of crazy, but in retrospect they were right all along.

What if your website is hosted by Google Cloud Engine or AWS, should we block it? I certainly would. Please find a decent host that does not use their customers as human shield/leverage to engage in criminal conspiracies against privacy.

A cron job on the network gateway that creates iptables rules to drop connections to x IPs sounds like a good plan.

Blocking all GCP and AWS hosted sites is about as effective as turning off all javascript. It reduces the usable set of sites on the web to basically worthlessness.

I've found the web to be very enjoyable without Javascript. Some sites don't work but fortunately they're usually of the SEO-clickbait kind without any sort of interesting content. I'm already blocked by many providers for using tor, which is a redflag for abusive behavior on their part.

I just wish we had a manifesto, automated test suite, and dedicated search engine for websites that respect their users.

Gorhill managed to get uBlock to block CNAME masked domains, so surely this wouldn't be that out of reach for an adblocker?

Good luck getting this to work in google chrome though.

Maybe this will drive people back to Firefox? It's a perfect opportunity for Mozilla to do a marketing drive... oh, wait, they are busy partnering with Facebook (er, Meta) to do advertising stuff. Sigh.

Don't forget force-installing addons like Pocket as a service.. and.. Disney.

If only some (former?) Mozilla workers setup a workers coop that relies solely on donations to produce a decent web browser... Something like what The Document Foundation did for Libreoffice sounds like a good economic model.

I'd be more than happy to donate 10€/month (though i'm really not rich) to keep business incentives outside of the web in at least one well-supported browser. I'm sure there's other likeminded folks. But donating money to help COs and managers make in a month what i make in several years*? Never.

EDIT: Just to be clear i'm explicitly not talking about Brave which is an advertisement company investing in so-called cryptocurrencies, both of which is a redflag for a web browser (although they have some cool tech to showcase).

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