LOG20042019: The great WWW antisocial purge

 Years ago I had a FB profile. The idea was to have a way to keep in
touch with the people I cared for while travelling.
I started noticing though that acquaintances weren't really engaging
in anything but an exchange of "likes".
Past friendships were reduced to "we should meet again one of these
days", but these reunions never materialized.
It all ended up degenerating into a series of vanity posts and the
expectation of social acceptance and the gratification that ensues
in the form of "likes" and shallow answers. I wasn't immune to this
addiction, no one is.
And it's poisonous, toxic. Is this what relationships are reduced to?

I deleted the account, figuring out that if people really wanted to
get in touch they would find a way to get in touch.
A few did, which I could count by the fingers of one hand.
The vast majority disappeared into that limbo never to be heard of
again. Instagram, WhatsApp gone, GMail reduced to a junk mail
account.
 I don't miss that tragic euphemism: "social media".

In reality, it's anti-social media - killing human contact one
relationship at the time. Promoting shallowness, vanity, 140 word
sound bites, killing meaningful discourse, promoting radicalization,
intolerance. A planetary scale social experiment, live, and about to
go awry.
Diplomacy lethally maimed and the lessons of past wars long ago
relegated to the dustbin of history.
The sound bites are particularly obnoxious, insulting in their 
monumental stupidity and unmitigated ignorance.

Browsing is a frustrating experience sometimes. Tens of MB of
javascript to check some news, only to find out a headline split into
20 pages of click-bait. It's hardly a surprise gopher is resurgent.
U-Block Origin helps, so do canvas blockers, adding noise to the ever
present fingerprinting, but perhaps we could also do our part.

Why not get the entire IP blocks for the many autonomous systems that
these purveyors of private data use? We could use WHOIS to get the
blocks belonging to these systems, and add them to IP sets that will
then be dropped by iptables.
I started this in BASH, but as complexity grows, associative arrays
and multi-dimensional arrays would be handy.
Python would've made things easier but I was trying to get a
self-contained script, for now at least. We could however use
the Python iptables extension [1]. 

You also need to find out the ASN names [2], and some companies might
have more ASNs in different countries.
There are more blocklists available [3] if you want to add them.

I suppose the next step would be to try and find out more of these
"bad netizens" and add them to the drop list. Suggestions, fixes are
most welcome.

After "purifying" your browsing experience, you might be tempted to
go back to patterned backgrounds, GIFs, and "best viewed with a 
browser" banners. The upside-down-ternet might be a good start for
that [4].

Links on the world wide web below:

[1] https://github.com/ldx/python-iptables
[2] https://dnslytics.com/bgp/us
[3] https://github.com/firehol/blocklist-ipset
[4] http://www.ex-parrot.com/pete/upside-down-ternet.html