At one time this blog was connected with the SecureMecca.com domain.  I let go of that domain several years ago.   It belongs to somebody else now.  So it is their responsibility now!

   You can still get the stuff that was at SecureMecca.com at HostsFile.org if you choose to do so.   I still own SecureMecca.net and since Google has kindly reserved this blog for me, this blog is now associated with just SecureMecca.net.  SecureMecca.net is used only for a personal email service.  SecureMecca.net existed at least a year earlier than SecureMecca.com so I have priority unless Google tells me otherwise.  I registered SecureMecca.net on 2005-04-08 and it has been continuously registered to me since that date.  That is easily verified by just looking at the WhoIs data.  You have to use that since there is no website associated with the SecureMecca.net domain.  If you go to it in the browser it will display 1&1's (now known as 1&1 IONOS) park page that has been saying for many years now "This domain has just been registered for one of our customers."  So you must go by the WhoIs data to have it correct.  Saying it has just been registered when I have owned it over 14 years means that park statement is incorrect.  This is a standard way of all ISP's for handling email only services.

   At one time SecureMecca.com was used to block not only ads and trackers but also websites that had malware.  But the malware from stabbed in links via SQL injection and other methods declined when methods were created to find them.  They went down even further as more methods were found to prevent the stabbed in links from happening in the first place.  That and many other reasons prompted me to just say goodbye to SecureMecca.com.

   I will tell you that the stuff that is at HostsFile.org probably became useless after everybody switched over to using https instead of http. That is one of the reasons I just mentioned in the previous paragraph.  Blame Edward Snowden for the shift.  My personal opinion is that corporate tracking was and continues to be much more prevalent than governmental tracking. I just did a lookup (8 August 2019) on Edward Snowden at DuckDuckGo.com and see an article with the title "Edward Snowden Says Facebook Is Spying On You" now on many websites.  I am glad he has joined the club of those of us who have known that far longer than he has.  How can you stop Facebook from tracking you?  Don't use Facebook and block them.  Just not using Facebook won't stop them from tracking you,  Facebook have links to them plastered on almost every website on the Internet.  So do many of the other social web services.  I am constantly deleting their cookies on Windows where I have less control than I do on Linux.

   I expect I will keep SecureMecca.net until I die.  It curbs a lot of tracking compared to a free email account.  I also have too many logins pointed towards it including three free-email accounts for password recovery as needed.  Closing it down would cause way too many problems for me.  I advise others to get such an email account for privacy reasons.  You can also use GnuPG with Enigmail in Thunderbird and use signing for peace of mind the email came from where it says it came from.  You can also encipher the contents of the email if you choose to do so.  Just be aware that the ISP will not be scanning your paid for email like it can be done with a no pay webmail service.  I personally like the signing but don't have much use for enciphering.  If you want GnuPG for Windows you can get it at GPG4Win.org.  GnuPG was and probably still is available for Macintosh, Android, and iPhone as well.

Henry Hertz Hobbit
alias  David Alexander Harvey