Google's war on ad-blocking is no doubt just starting. They will be escalating and adding new tactics as the quest for ever greater profits at the user's expense continues. Other giants like MS and Facebook have no doubt got similar plans in the works, just based on their own unique leverages since they don't own the most popular browser. It's sort of amusing that Google has started trying to cut some of the other giants out with new restrictions on things like third-party cookies.

But I'm now wondering if the centralization of the network has gone too far. We also depend on those huge corporations for a basic access system of the network, DNS. Aside from Google, again, there is Cloudflare (one of the 'backbone' giants), Quad9 (IBM), OpenDNS (Cisco!), and then a few specialty services like AdGuard or DNS Advantage. But they are much smaller. I wonder if they can handle the increased use from a large numbers of people switching over. And if they do, they will then become targets of the ad-pushers. Google will surely do something or other if they perceive such services to be in the way.

Yes, nearly every ISP you can join provides 'their own' DNS servers. But what is this? Just linking into the pool provided by the giant services, isn't it? So then your local ISP (if it's really local and not a hefty player that doesn't quite match the giants, e.g. Frontier, Spectrum Cable, etc...) can then spy on you and sell your internet activity to someone.

There is some degree of filtering of known criminal sites in most of these servers. And that's good. But not protection from snooping and advertising by those same giants providing the 'service'... (except the specialty services, and how long will they last?)

The first thing I expect to do around when the ad-blockalypse really hits is start using custom hosts files full of nulled sites again. It used to be a pretty started thing to do, but ad-block extension just got so good it didn't seem necessary anymore.

It occurs to me, though, that there is clearly a lot of work already being done researching how advertising works to keep the rules for ad-blocking extensions up-to-date, and to keep the custom hosts lists up-to-date. There are clearly many teams of people with developed methods and systems.

Maybe it's time for another approach?

One thought I had was to stop expecting to go anywhere instantly. We really have been spoiled with the universal DNS system. And now we're so used to it that most people just put up with how it is exploited against them for spying and ads.

Hardly anyone listens to the serious security experts, it's too much fun to have the illusion of 'freedom'. But they have been recommending white listing for a long time. This is the opposite of the current approach of both the ad-block extensions and the hosts files. Instead of just allowing your browser to got out to some (corporate) DNS source and get info instantly and then add a quick check from the work done by the independent teams on your local machine, how about having a list of sites you think are safe to visit and a way to check those against 'authoritative' DNS servers occasionally, since they can and do change. But do most of your browsing with a static list (white list) of good sites. Isn't this what good corporate security does? (Or is 'good corporate security' now an oxymoron? Has everyone bu the government gone 'We Work' and 'BYOD' and there is no organizational control anymore? Outside of the tech giants who exist for the purpose of that control, of course....)

This would have multiple effects. First, if DNS lookup is NOT automatic, huge amounts of drive by ads, spyware, malware, and malvertising just wouldn't work anymore. It's the mindless automatic activity that our browsing triggers that allows these things. Second, of course, a major route of surveillance, DNS itself, would be come vastly less useful. All that DNS servers could learn when you tell your DNS 'utility'? to check your DNS list is that certain sites are in your list of interesting sites. Not every single time you access them, in real time.

This is a very rough idea, so I'm not yet sure how to execute it. Modify browsers themselves to have a new 'mode' of usage? Complicated, but certainly not any more complicated than many other parts of modern browsers. Another possibility is a local proxy. This is probably much more doable on Linux than Windows. Way back in the late stone ages, not the days of bang paths, but in the early days or the 'web', there was a nifty utility for Windows called Proxomitron. I used it for the better part of a decade before there even were 'browser extensions'. It was a local proxy which you could setup and program as an HTML filter. It was the best ad-blocker available until dedicated ad-block extensions. I got to be pretty good at writing my own extensions and learned a lot about HTML that way. But Proxomitron had to directly detect site names to block sites. It didn't affect DNS itself. That's what the custom hosts files were for. Unfortunately, support for that ended with the death of the author.

So, maybe something like I am describing can be implemented in Linux without too much trouble? I've heard of Squid but never learned much about it. What I'd heard was it was a local caching tool to save bandwidth, and could be a filter. But can you white list DNS with Squid?

And yet, even if so, what does that do for the common browser user? This is all to say, we need a new approach. I could have posted a question about Squid in a couple of lines.

New video cards are sitting here and I'm planning to place them in existing systems. This is a completely new generation of vNidia cards, so I'm sure the installed driver will not be compatible. What is the usual way to do this in Linux? Is it how I would expect:

Re-enable the Noveau driver and uninstall the current proprietary drivers
Shut down, make the hardware swap.
Restart and install the proprietary drivers again

Or is there some better process?

I've got a copy of Devuan 4 running in a VM so I can use Google Chrome for certain things without upgrading to Windows 10. It has been working flawlessly for months, but today I got a small update of some sort, I forget what the packages were, and when I restart it won't finish booting. I can sign in, but the desktop never appears, it just sits there with a black screen. Was there an update to display functions in some recent packages?