With pfsense and pfblocker-ng you can just plug in facebook's BGP AS number, it can look up all the subnets in that ASN and block those.
AS32934 has 379 subnets with 144k addresses and seems to cover every Facebook property from WhatsApp to Instagram to meta.com. It's guaranteed to be consistently updated since they have to announce a subnet for it to be routable.
I've been doing this a couple years now. The only noticeable side effect for my browsing habits is a tasteful void where fluffy news sites are trying to embed instagram posts.
Thanks. I have some project students who can use this.
It would be great to see other lists under specific "ownership groups"
according to corporate control.
Their project is to block the entire AS blocks of bits of "big tech",
then measure how much of the "Internet" remains accessible.
Basically, governments that want to break up big-tech don't understand
the problem, and why that won't help.
Measuring the dangerous resilience anti-patterns of Google, Facebook,
Amazon, Microsoft, and other asset estates or edge brokers like
Cloudflare is about measuring inter-dependency.
> Basically, governments that want to break up big-tech don't understand the problem, and why that won't help.
Governments want to regulate big tech, not break it up. There are calls for forced break ups though. If anything, the size of big tech is a great argument for regulation, and why not breakups. There are "easy" ones, like Amazon and AWS, but the focus by (the only government with the will and necessary power to actually enact regulations) the EU Commission is entirely elsewhere, forcing big tech to build bridges accros their moats, enabling interoperability and competitors.
> Governments want to regulate big tech, not break it up.
Correct. And I think they would rather do the former, but consider the
latter a "nuclear option". In either case though, my key point is that
they don't understand the problem. It is much more complex than a
simple, traditional economic model of ownership as power. That's what
the project is aimed at determining and explaining.
If I were an entity trying to regulate social media, I'd probably spend less time fully understanding and emphasize compelling the medias to behave in an approved manner.
I think that is probably a misunderstanding of what an echo chamber is.
Lies and fantasies are not alternative viewpoints, and there is no reason that such things would or should challenge your existing viewpoints or conceptions about the world. Blocking those things is just avoiding having your time wasted or your mind rotted from the inside out.
Likewise, why not spend 50% of your time on jihadist websites? Support groups for wife-beaters, or unmedicated paranoid delusional schizophrenics for discussion of psychotic fantasies? If I say the spectrum is fox news on the left, and ISIS on the right, do you need to now spend 50% of your reading time on ideas that you might find disturbing, appalling, or psychologically destabilising? Are you failing to challenge your worldview if you haven't fully considered all the valid points that ISIS makes? I think people should be free to make their own choices about how much they want to be exposed to appalling or even mildly troubling viewpoints.
That said, the only domains I recognised in the "fakenews" category were indistinguishable from "news". All adults presumably know already that "news" is a category which contains a mix of lies, fantasy, conventional wisdoms, bootlicking for domestic ruling classes, factual information, and in some very rare cases, a smattering of worthwhile journalism. So it is a category of information sources which, by definition, require a large effort to extract any reliable information from. The fact that the inclusion criteria for "fakenews" might not be to your satisfaction is entirely to be expected since the meaning of "fakenews" is "news that I don't like", so any "fake news" category necessarily encodes the preferences of the author which may differ from your own preferences.
Adding for example banned.video to a block list, says more about the person adding it than anything.
Block lists are to stop yourself from visiting a site you frequent, or stopping tracking.
Zerohedge was the top 5 places to get macro level global trends for the financial market. They were called fake news and dangerous because they were talking about gain of function research back in March 2020, before it was acceptable.
They also have other bias, but so does everyone. If you are an adult you can scroll past that.
What is the threshold to ban a whole domain, what percent of speculation is allowed.
Is speculating on certain ideas weighted differently?
All news has a certain percent that is clearly aimed to shape your thinking on a topic rather than to inform. In my opinion you have to accept that if want a diverse range of ideas, from the other content a media site has - especially in the financial markets.
Zerohedge is currently on my ban list (russia coverage) so I can't tell you what they are currently talking about. But I made the active choice to add it, it was not hidden deep in a massive blocklist.
foxnews isn't blocked, neither is oann. Infowars and the Kopp Verlag is. This seems to be very much targeted towards actual conspiracy stuff over "Right wing" stuff.
if you're naiive to think they serve JS and Fonts and whatnot just out of the kindness of their silicon hearts
The point is you can block all of Meta and carry on happily. Google has its tentacles so deep in everything that they will be tracking us till the heat death of the universe (unless you live in China)
They are billionaires they can probably just hash random numbers and acquire those domains if they wanted to, this seems like a very toes in the water approach.
AS32934 has 379 subnets with 144k addresses and seems to cover every Facebook property from WhatsApp to Instagram to meta.com. It's guaranteed to be consistently updated since they have to announce a subnet for it to be routable.
I've been doing this a couple years now. The only noticeable side effect for my browsing habits is a tasteful void where fluffy news sites are trying to embed instagram posts.