As the author was kind enough to pick us as an example, here's some background on what some of those requests are doing.<p><i>hits.theguardian.com</i> points to our Omniture implementation, which is the main tracking suite used for macro-level reporting (like when we say we have X unique monthly browsers, or whatever). So if you want to be invisible to that, leave it blocked.<p><i>ophan.theguardian.com</i> points to our own analytics tool, Ophan, which does things like tracks whether you "read" the article. It's for journalists to work out if people like their stuff. All the views of the data are aggregated, but if an analyst really wanted to they could go write some SQL to look at the behavior of individual cookies. So if you want to be invisible to that, leave it blocked. A quick Google [0] will turn up lots more about Ophan and how it works.<p>Our only calls out to Facebook and Twitter are to retrieve share counts for the current URL (besides articles with embedded tweets, for now). These are probably relatively safe to unblock, but if that information doesn't interest you they're equally safe to block.<p><i>api.nextgen.guardianapps.co.uk</i> is handling most Guardian stuff that gets ajaxed onto the page, like suggestions for what to read next. It's pretty harmless and required for a bunch of functionality. All the <i>guim</i> stuff is obviously just static assets.<p>It would be cute if there was some way of us hinting to the plugin which domains were needed to not break the site, though likely impractical in the real world.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=ophan%20guardian" rel="nofollow">https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=ophan%20guardian</a>