New browser extension blocks sites using Google, Facebook, Microsoft, or Amazon (theverge.com)

The article says "almost every search engine I could think of was blocked". Not a surprise, and if you look at his little app illustrating search services, and their search engine dependencies https://www.searchenginemap.com/

Disclosure: @mojeek team member; our search engine is independent so not blocked

Source code for this extension here: https://gitlab.com/big-tech-detective

> It’s worth keeping in mind that just because a site reaches out to one or more of the big four tech companies, it doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily snooping or doing something nefarious. Many websites use fonts from Google Fonts, or host their sites using Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure.

That's still snooping...

Speaking of, why are browsers still sending Referer headers?

Seems to miss the point when three of these are the largest cloud infrastructure providers out there. If you could detect the processor and blocked everything that pinged a server using Intel, you'd block 90% of the Internet. If you blocked anything routed through a router owned by Cisco, you'd shut down the entire Internet. Anything that loaded from a disk made by Seagate or Western Digital, memory made by Samsung, fiber backbone owned by AT&T. Every level of the hardware supply chain is dominated by a tiny number of huge companies. If that's really a concern, we're well past the point where we can do anything about it.

Personalized ad profiles and cross-site user tracking we can maybe still stop, but it's looking at the wrong thing to just flag any resource based on the IP block owner.