Tenth Runniversary
Today is my tenth runniversary. It's been a decade since I first stepped
on that treadmill. Like my first day running, I ran on
the treadmill while listening to br\oken.
I've had some set backs in my recovery. Not properly rehabilitating the
atrophy in the left leg has caused some problems with the muscles around
my hip. Listening to my trainer only made it worse.
But now I'm taking care of it properly.
Like that first day ten years ago, I have a goal I am working toward.
This time it is the Dublin Marathon in October. This will be marathon
number 13. I don't expect to PR. I think 10 minute miles are a much more
reasonable goal at this point, but frankly I'll be happy just to cross
that finish line.
It's been a long, hard road out of Hell, but God has been by my side and
put some amazing people in my life to help me along the way.
I have to thank the Giraffes for today. I have to thank the Giraffes for
much of my life this last decade. I was heading for an early grave, and
they changed that. Giraffes, I thank you from the bottom of my heart and
I look forward to running the LTC and many other races with you in the
next decade.
[/running]
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Take back your privacy
Recent surveys have found that 76% of [the most visited] websites in the
world cotain trackers from google and 24% contain trackers from
facebook. This has been reported by CNBC,
PC
World, The
Verge, Fortune,
and Breitbart.
Almost anywhere you go on the internet, they are following you, building
a profile on you, and selling that information, your information,
to the highest bidder. Even if you don't have a user account for google
or facebook "services," they've built a profile of you using this
surreptitiously collected data.
It turns out there are some steps one can take to prevent these
companies from following you wherever you go. It's not perfect, but it
helps a lot. First, don't use Chrome. Second, install ad-blocker plugins
for your browser. Third, use your firewall.
It turns out Google and Facebook are large enough that they have their
own Autonomous Systems (AS) composed of numerous subnets. Google owns AS
15169, while Facebook owns AS 32934. Using a little bit of shell, it's
relatively easy to look up all the subnets owned by these companies.
whois -h whois.radb.net -- '-i origin AS32934' | grep "^route:" | awk '{print $2;}'
whois -h whois.radb.net -- '-i origin AS15169' | grep "^route:" | awk '{print $2;}'
That's a lot of subnets. Because I have different operating systems on
different computers and still want to block traffic to and from
all those IP addresses, I've written some simple scripts to add
rules to various firewalls. I have scripts for
IPFW on FreeBSD,
IPTables on Linux, and the
Windows Firewall that
should work from XP SP3
through Windows 10. I've only tested it on Windows 7 and Windows 10, and
it worked in those.
All of these scripts can be found
in this
directory. The IPFW and IPTables scripts are self-contained. For the
Windows command shell batch files, the *ips.txt files are also needed.
I have to say, the internet looks very different with these firewall
rules in place. There are noticeably fewer advertisements and pages load
faster. Embedded YouTube videos and Instagram photos don't appear.
Sometimes the frame disappears, sometimes you get a "failed to connect"
page appearing in a frame in the middle of a page. (Yes, these rules
block YouTube and Instagram; they are owned by google and facebook and
reside in the subnets owned by those companies.) On a relatively rare
occasion, I come across a site using some sort of javascript or css or
something hosted by a machine in one of those ASs and that will be
blocked. Sometimes the site handles that gracefully, sometimes it stops
being functional. A small price to take back your life.
Update: Twitter has trackers on a decent amount of sites out there too,
so I've added scripts to block Twitter's AS 13414 as well. Those scripts
are in the same directories as the others.
[/musings]
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