melannen: Commander Valentine of Alpha Squad Seven, a red-haired female Nick Fury in space, smoking contemplatively (Default)
melannen ([personal profile] melannen) wrote2012-02-29 08:30 pm
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Googlepocalypse

I have been trying to minimize my dependence on Google for years now, but none of the other search engines out there are as good at just plain finding stuff as Google is, even with all the ways that Google has made itself worse lately, and Gmail is still Gmail, and Youtube is pretty much necessary, and sometimes people send me things on Docs or Calendar that I have to be able to access.

So in preparation for Googlepocalypse tomorrow - beyond deleting a couple of my extraneous accounts, and making sure my fannish-youtube account has nothing whatsover to link it to my RL-gmail account - I have gone the low-effort way, and just used my browser's javascript options to block all the Google-owned domains from downloading cookies or using javascript on my main browser.

While I'm not giving up my gmail account (which I only used for RL stuff anyway) this means that I physically can't log into Google things with my main browser, which I find satisfactory - granted my backup browser is where I do most of my banking, my torrenting, my workstuff and my kinkmemeing from, but all the *important* stuff is over here.

And you guys, you guys, OMG, if you block javascript for google.com, it suddenly starts working again. No pop-up previews! No infinite scroll! You can still get to "advanced search"! Image search actually shows you information without annoying popovers again! It doesn't try to search while you're typing! And all actual functionality - that is, finding stuffs on the internets - still works perfectly, just like it did a couple of years ago before they broke it all. It is brilliant. I recommend doing this even if you don't care about the security issues or you have them covered other ways, I love it so much.

(I have no idea if blocking javascript prevents any/all of the creepy altering of search results they've been doing lately, but it should stop most of the tracking short of using a proxy server to hide your IP address, and frankly just killing all the popovers was worth it.)

(Note: this does break Maps pretty comprehensively, but Maps is full of privacy heebie-jeebies anyway.)

Also to celebrate the intercalary day I went to the beach! In northern hemisphere February. In the rain. It was fun! I recommend that, too.
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ellen_fremedon: overlapping pages from Beowulf manuscript, one with a large rubric, on a maroon ground (Default)

[personal profile] ellen_fremedon 2012-03-01 02:32 am (UTC)(link)
used my browser's javascript options to block all the Google-owned domains from downloading cookies or using javascript on my main browser.

Where do I find the javascript options? (I've looked on Firefox and Safari without success; I don't use IE at home, and I don't have access to most customization options for it at work.)
melannen: Commander Valentine of Alpha Squad Seven, a red-haired female Nick Fury in space, smoking contemplatively (Default)

[personal profile] melannen 2012-03-01 02:46 am (UTC)(link)
Ah, well, I'm one of the smug weirder-than-thou SOBs who uses Opera, for which it is just in the standard preferences menu. I suspect for Firefox you need an add-on for that (like for most awesome things Opera does natively); NoScript, I think, will let you make a by-site javascript blacklist by turning on trust-globally and then marking individual sites as "untrusted": here's their instructions, but I've never used noscript myself.

Safari I haven't used for a very, very long time, sorry.
nagia: (me; N7; i have died for you)

[personal profile] nagia 2012-03-01 03:00 am (UTC)(link)
Firefox has a "NoScripts" Add-On, I do believe. But I haven't used Firefox since I switched to Chrome. (I know.)
lannamichaels: Astronaut Dale Gardner holds up For Sale sign after EVA. (Default)

[personal profile] lannamichaels 2012-03-01 03:15 am (UTC)(link)
For Firefox, use the NoScript add-on. Set it to disallow scripts globally (not-allow scripts globally) and you can choose which scripts to allow by page. I usually give temporary permissions, so when I close my browser or click revoke temporary permissions, the permissions for that site are reset to don't-allow. You can also give permanent permissions, which can be made unpermanent if you decide you no longer want to trust them.
Edited 2012-03-01 03:17 (UTC)
kaz: "Kaz" written in cursive with a white quill that is dissolving into (badly drawn in Photoshop) butterflies. (Default)

[personal profile] kaz 2012-03-01 08:16 am (UTC)(link)
That's a good idea. :) *installs NoScript* I also downloaded Ghostery, which is a program that disables trackers etc. as well - probably superfluous but I want to be on the safe side here.

My problem is that I have a fannish gmail account and I'm not sure where else to go for e-mail... :/ I also have two RL Gmail ones I never, ever use, but the danger of Google deciding to give my fannish Gmail my RL name keeps me up at night.
dingsi: The Corinthian smoking a cigarette. He looks down thoughtfully and breathes the smoke out of his nose. (Default)

[personal profile] dingsi 2012-03-01 09:31 am (UTC)(link)
For speakers of German I always recommend web.de - their interface is shitty (in the sense that their homepage is full of ads and celebrity gossip) and you can only download your email in 15-minute intervals, but that are the only drawbacks I can think of. They also have a pretty good anti-spam feature that you can fine-tune to filter out specific adresses. Don't know if it's to your liking but I thought I'd put it out there.
kaz: "Kaz" written in cursive with a white quill that is dissolving into (badly drawn in Photoshop) butterflies. (Default)

[personal profile] kaz 2012-03-01 11:15 am (UTC)(link)
I've been somewhat bitter about web.de ever since I got suckered into a "free trial of premium account" which turned into 1 year of having to pay, buuut that was really my own fault and a while back. Also, they had the maximum limit of 500 e-mails for free accounts - is that still around? because it made getting e-mails via anything but POP3 kind of pointless, which is not good for a web-based service.

Although... at this point I would actually be WILLING to pay for my e-mail if it meant I was guaranteed privacy/people not e-stalking me and selling my information to the top bidder. The DW model, essentially.

(...now I am imagining the OTW creating a fannish e-mail service.)
dingsi: The Corinthian smoking a cigarette. He looks down thoughtfully and breathes the smoke out of his nose. (Default)

[personal profile] dingsi 2012-03-02 05:48 pm (UTC)(link)
Ugh, yeah, their "check out our free trial!" ads are annoying. I'm not sure about a 500 emails thing, but there's a 12 MB limit for your online storage. As I only use them to get my emails via POP3, it wasn't something I considered. :/
Fannish email service... how awesome would that be?
melannen: Commander Valentine of Alpha Squad Seven, a red-haired female Nick Fury in space, smoking contemplatively (Default)

[personal profile] melannen 2012-03-01 05:52 pm (UTC)(link)
When I realized Ghostery had a simple Opera extension version I went ahead and added it too! It's interesting to watch, anyway.

I don't have any alternate recommendations for webmail, alas, the last time I went looking I didn't see anything that was free and did what I needed it to do - my understanding is that webmail is really expensive to run, so you might have to either pay or but up with an evil megacorporation. Which is why I'm sticking with gmail. (I have my "being an adult" stuff on Gmail and my fannish/etc. on Yahoo because it seemed like a good idea to make sure I couldn't possibly cross the streams, but then I somehow ended up with a Google account under my Yahoo address anyway, which I deleted yesterday with great prejudice. But MS/Yahoo is only slightly less scary than Google.)
staranise: A star anise floating in a cup of mint tea (Default)

[personal profile] staranise 2012-03-01 11:17 am (UTC)(link)
Oh, bless you for the tip about Google and javascript. :D :D :D
melannen: Commander Valentine of Alpha Squad Seven, a red-haired female Nick Fury in space, smoking contemplatively (Default)

[personal profile] melannen 2012-03-01 05:48 pm (UTC)(link)
:D
wintercreek: Woman doing a cartwheel in the g ([misc] the joy of being young in spring)

[personal profile] wintercreek 2012-03-01 05:45 pm (UTC)(link)
That is genius, that blocking javascript fixes Google. Yay, unbroken Google of years past! (This is my massive gripe about most of the internet. IT WAS NOT BROKEN. WHY DID YOU CHANGE IT.)
melannen: Commander Valentine of Alpha Squad Seven, a red-haired female Nick Fury in space, smoking contemplatively (Default)

[personal profile] melannen 2012-03-01 05:48 pm (UTC)(link)
It does break a few things that I actually use - like Maps, and some of the fancier Books functionality - but frankly getting Search and Image Search back are worth it! I can do that other stuff on my backup browser if I have to. (also mapquest is nearly as good as GoogleMaps now for everything other than stalking.)
melannen: Commander Valentine of Alpha Squad Seven, a red-haired female Nick Fury in space, smoking contemplatively (Default)

[personal profile] melannen 2012-03-01 06:16 pm (UTC)(link)
I've had DuckDuckGo set as my default search for awhile (before that it was Bing, now it's IxQuick/Startpage); Blekko is on the list to try. They all have their good points and things they do better than Google, but when it comes to simply finding webpages, Google still usually gets more & better results; so when I can't find something with my default, I still turn to Google (and usually find it.)

Opera makes it really easy to create a list of pages-to-search-which that you can use really easily - my current list of commonly-used searches is Ixquick, Google, DuckDuckGo, Bing, Blekko, Wikipedia, Pinboard, Delicious, Youtube, Twitter, Fanlore, AO3, LibraryThing, DeviantArt, Google Images, Google nGram, Archive.org, the Wayback Machine, and IMDB. :D
krait: a sea snake (krait) swimming (Default)

[personal profile] krait 2012-04-16 03:16 am (UTC)(link)
Late commenter is late, but if anyone is still here and interested:

A friend pointed me to IxQuick, which is a search engine that does NOT log IP addresses (and is the only search engine that doesn't!); it's replaced Google as my home page and I find it more than acceptable!

(If I could figure out how to break it of the thing where it opens all my results in new tabs, it'd be perfect.) :D

Random other reference things: I have Firefox with NoScript (this gives you about three weeks of frustration, as you slowly "allow" the sites you frequent; but then it's great) and I also use Ghostery.
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