GoogleMonkeyR

By mungushume Last update Dec 8, 2011 — Installed 255,995 times.

Privacy is an inherent human right!

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mungushume Script's Author
FirefoxWindows

Privacy is an inherent human right! Keep it!


The Google toolbar reports every page you visit back to http://toolbarqueries.google.tld where tld is is your google localisation i.e. in England it is co.uk
The Windows operating system contains a file called 'hosts' that will force redirection of domain names
The ip address 127.0.0.1 is called a loopback address and points to your own machine

This means that if in your hosts file you specify that toolbarqueries.google.tld should point to 127.0.0.1 the information which would report back to google gets sent no where

Here are some instructions on how to modify your hosts file

Open the hosts file
1, Go to the Start menu and choose Run. Type the following in the Run dialogue box:
For Windows NT and 2000: C:\winnt\system32\drivers\etc
For Windows XP / VISTA: C:\windows\system32\drivers\etc

2, Click the OK button

3, Find the file called 'Hosts' and double–click it. If prompted, specify that you would like to choose a program to open the file with from a list of programs. Choose 'Notepad' from the list of available programs.

4, Add the following lines to the hosts file

127.0.0.1 toolbarqueries.google.com
127.0.0.1 alt1.toolbarqueries.google.com
127.0.0.1 toolbarqueries.google.co.uk
127.0.0.1 alt1.toolbarqueries.google.co.uk

if you use a different localisation then add that as well, save the file and restart your browser

Privacy is an inherent human right! Keep it!

Feel free to add your own comments

 
auscompgeek User
OperaWindows

Some people run a web host on the loopback interface, and redirecting queries to the httpd running on the loopback interface would cause pages to load slower...
Use an invalid IP such as 255.255.255.0 as the IP to redirect to instead.
Firefox will detect the IP as invalid and won't try to load anything!

 
mungushume Script's Author
FirefoxWindows

What you're redirecting is an asynchronous call from the google toolbar to the loop back device.
How exactly would this slow down a page load in FF? It has nothing to do with the load time of the DOM and/or content.
mh

 
Cerberus™ User
FirefoxWindows

I wonder why people use this Google toolbar at all. Using a bookmark with keyword is much better - unless I missed some advantage.

 
mungushume Script's Author
FirefoxWindows

Updated the includes for the hosts file to include alt1. entries
A recent update of the google toolbar has started to also report back to these alt1 addresses
mh

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