Tell HN: $ echo 127.0.0.1 www.google-analytics.com | sudo tee -a /etc/hosts

13 points

11 years ago

Also:

   127.0.0.1 ssl.google-analytics.com
   127.0.0.1 www.hosted-pixel.com

Unlike many I don't object to advertising. What I object to is analytics.

I'm completely cool with webmasters who analyze the log files of their own servers, but I regard it as morally reprehensible that analytics services correlate visits between multiple websites. Consider the problem faced by closeted homosexual evangelical Christians, for example.

There are lots of ways to ferret out the hostnames of web bug servers, however the "user-friendliest" way is to use a really, really old version of Safari.

Open the "Activity" window then visit a few of the more-popular websites. The kind of websites that your Mom likes to hang out on.

The activity window lists the URLs and file size of each resource that goes into a web page. The web bugs will commonly have huge, long URLs full of query parameters, with images being either 43 or 60 bytes. Javascript "source code" will typically be one single byte of whitespace.

"Don't Be Evil" indeed.

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