(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . How to block Twitter and stop supporting Elon Musk [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.', 'Backgroundurl Avatar_Large', 'Nickname', 'Joined', 'Created_At', 'Story Count', 'N_Stories', 'Comment Count', 'N_Comments', 'Popular Tags'] Date: 2023-02-23 Because of the way web browsers work, every time you look at a page that includes an ‘img’ (for images) or ‘iframe’ (for other content) tag that points to a Twitter source, it is as though you had visited that page yourself. Most web sites keep track of how many times people visit and any site based on advertising (Twitter, Facebook, DailyKos) does this. The more viewers, the more they can charge potential advertisers. This means that just reading a story at DailyKos that includes resources from Twitter makes your browser pull that information from Twitter and boosts Elon’s numbers. And considering how much DailyKos stories quote from Twitter, this adds up to a lot. 1,000 DailyKos readers just looking at a story containing five such links means 5,000 hits on twitter.com. You don’t have to click on anything — it just happens. This article shows you how to stop this from happening and remove Twitter from your internet experience. You probably do not want to do this if you actually have a Twitter account and use it. Just the facts This technique works for Windows, Macintosh, and Linux. It can even work on smartphones but I am not going to get into that. You need to be able to edit a plain text file as Administrator or Root. All that varies from one platform to another is exactly where this file is located. Windows: C:\WIndows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts C:\WIndows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts Macintosh: /etc/hosts /etc/hosts Linux: /etc/hosts This is a simple text file — do not edit it with a word processor. Just use notepad or nano or something. All you need to do is add some lines to the end of the file. To block twitter, you add these two lines and save the file: 127.0.0.1 twitter.com 127.0.0.1 twimg.com That’s it! Twitter is gone from your life. Any link there is now dead to you. You will notice a lot of holes in some DailyKos stories. TLDR; How it works When your computer needs to look up the address of a web resource is uses something called Domain Name Services (DNS), which is a gigantic lookup table of millions of names and addresses. Usually, you use the table supplied by your internet provider though there are ways to choose different ones. But before your computer goes to the network DNS server, it looks in that ‘hosts’ file. Back in the early days of the Internet, ‘hosts’ files was all there were and everyone copied entries manually from friends or other places. If your computer gets a match in the ‘hosts’ file, then it does not look any further . That is the key fact we use in this method of blocking Twitter — we feed false information to the lookup algorithm. The address “127.0.0.1” is special. It always means “This computer”. So these lines in the hosts file are declaring that, for any program on this computer, “twitter.com” is right here. So your web browser will connect back to your own computer, trying to find a web server at port number 80 (where all web servers listen). It probably will not find one, and if you happen to be running a web server on your desktop, it probably will not behave like twitter.com anyway, and the browser will get a failed connection. You will not see an error message — the requested information will just not show up. That second name, ‘twimg’, is actually part of Twitter. It is where Twitter stores all of the pictures and videos that can be embedded in a tweet. This works against Zuckerberg too This technique works for any web site. If you do not want Facebook tracking your every movement though its sneaky one-pixel images or “Like” buttons, you can add these lines: 127.0.0.1 facebook.com 127.0.0.1 facebook.net 127.0.0.1 fbcdn.com 127.0.0.1 fbcdn.net ‘fbcdn’ is the Facebook Content Delivery Network and it serves a similar function to ‘twimg’. Again, do not do this if you actually use Facebook, or want to be follow links from your friends that go there. Spreading the joy It is possible to use a variation on this technique to block access from any computer on your local home network, including your smartphone when it is using WiFI. I am not going to attempt to describe how to do this as there are too many ways to pull it off, it is very down in the guts of networking, and doing it wrong can make your internet not work at all. If you already know this stuff, just add the misleading DNS entries I have provided to your local DNS server. The easiest completely packaged way to do this is to run a RaspberryPi computer on your network that uses the “Pi-Hole” software and change your router configuration to point to it. This is a generic ad-blocker but you can add the twitter and facebook entries to it. Again, do not attempt this if you do not know what you are doing. what if I need twitter just this once? You can disable a line in the ‘hosts’ file by putting a hash mark (#) at the beginning of the line. This marks that line as a ‘comment’ and it will be ignored. Later when you come to your senses again you can remove the # and twitter will be blocked. Another way to bypass the block is to use a VPN. In fact, if you regularly use a VPN all the time, this method may not work at all, depending on how your VPN software insinuates itself into the lookup algorithm on your computer. Programs like The Onion Router (tor) also bypass the usual mechanisms. 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