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Adblock Sold to Mystery Company

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Re: Adblock Sold to Mystery Company

#151

Post by eadz »

mbca wrote: post #132
chc wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It even steals the real uBlock Origin's icon. That's incredibly sketchy.

This is what happens when you have an "app store" with no approval or review process. Google should be cracking down on this, just like those ads they were displaying[1] which would serve up malware-infected versions of Firefox whenever someone searched for "Firefox". [1] https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/websearch/IFl...

I reported an issue with spoofing on the Google play store about 6 months ago. They told me there was no timeframe for the fix, and no fix yet as far as I'm aware. Maybe if I post it here someone from google will do something...

Just so everyone is aware, you can use any email address as your company email address on the google play store without verification. This means when looking at an app, you see the email is support@legitcompany.com and think it's from them, but it's not.

Re: Adblock Sold to Mystery Company

#152

Post by gorhill »

degenerate wrote: post #123
david-given wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just be sure NOT to install "U Block For Origin", by www.z1z2z3z4.com, which is currently the top hit if you search the Chrome extensions store for 'ublock'. I don't know what it does, but I bet it's not good.

I reported this malware app on both my devices and suggest everyone do the same. It's up to no good.

I also reported this on September 21st, after someone alerted me to this on Twitter.[1]

To think that uBlock Origin itself was suspended from the store back in April because its icon resembled too much that of the other uBlock.[2]

[1] https://twitter.com/gorhill/status/646059022790037504

[2] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/issues/50

Re: Adblock Sold to Mystery Company

#153

Post by tracker1 »

coldpie wrote: post #26
lorenzhs wrote: post #9

To anyone who is concerned by this change, I recommend taking a look at μBlock Origin [1,2]. It's blazingly fast, very flexible, and under active development. I made the switch about a year ago and it has served me very well. [1] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock [2] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublock-origin/cjpa...

Works great on Firefox for Android, too. No more app store popups!

FF for Android just works amazingly poorly for me.. not to mention I really like chrome's tabs now coming up under the task list separately, instead of the tab-like interface.

I tried FF on my phone, simply for uBlock, but it was just too sluggish to actually use.

Re: Adblock Sold to Mystery Company

#154

Post by tracker1 »

corv wrote: post #112
_up wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My Problem is that Chrome feels so much more responsive than Firefox, when scrooling.

Recent Firefox releases solve that issue. Try Developer Edition or a Nightly.

I may try that again... I last tried regular release a couple months ago.. some sites and the ads are so horrible in mobile without an ad blocker... but firefox was way too sluggish.

Re: Adblock Sold to Mystery Company

#155

Post by malchow »

david-given wrote: post #116
lorenzhs wrote: post #9

To anyone who is concerned by this change, I recommend taking a look at μBlock Origin [1,2]. It's blazingly fast, very flexible, and under active development. I made the switch about a year ago and it has served me very well. [1] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock [2] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublock-origin/cjpa...

Just be sure NOT to install "U Block For Origin", by www.z1z2z3z4.com, which is currently the top hit if you search the Chrome extensions store for 'ublock'. I don't know what it does, but I bet it's not good.

Wow; that's quite malicious.

Question for HN: back in the Napster days, were there likewise Napster clones ("napster"?) that purported to allow peer to peer music downloads but in fact had malware properties?

Re: Adblock Sold to Mystery Company

#156

Post by shabble »

makecheck wrote: post #15
ck2 wrote: post #2

I've always wondered what happens if a browser extension gets taken over by an entity someday that puts in bad code after millions of people have it installed and it gets auto-updated. Sure it's open-source and will get noticed eventually, but there will be days if not weeks of exposure. Same thing for all those android apps you have installed. If it doesn't add permissions, you'll never get a warning that something…

That's what's funny about some of our security mechanisms today...for instance the browser tries to help you ensure that this is the site you really meant to reach but it has no information about whether the site is under "new management" (which you tend to care about for something like a restaurant). Maybe companies should be mandated to update their key stores every time they change their board members, say, so tha…

It'd also be kinda neat if you could somehow tag your trust conditional on a content hash of the service's ToC or Privacy Policy.

It'd be rather impractical in today's world, although maybe machine readable policy formats would make matching easier additions/deletions of key items rather than just a text hash.

Balancing the user effort of reading and flagging each policy term (and considering all the weird implications of each change) vs the utility of being notified would be tricky though.

Maybe some sort of collaborative/curated lists of 'substantial T&C changes' similar to adblocker filterlists could be produced? (Or maybe they already are?)

Re: Adblock Sold to Mystery Company

#157

Post by kaybe »

dantillberg wrote: post #4

I'm glad to see this here. I saw this update yesterday, and the text was so typical of a company-acquisition-I-should- not -trust. Excerpt: "I believe this is a great thing for you users". Yet this is not accompanied by anything that suggests how users will possibly benefit from any of this. Can someone suggest alternatives to Adblock that aren't controlled by dubious/secret/obviously-sketchy third parties?

Ghostery also does the trick almost all of the time if you set it to block everything.

Re: Adblock Sold to Mystery Company

#158

Post by chc »

malchow wrote: post #155
david-given wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just be sure NOT to install "U Block For Origin", by www.z1z2z3z4.com, which is currently the top hit if you search the Chrome extensions store for 'ublock'. I don't know what it does, but I bet it's not good.

Wow; that's quite malicious. Question for HN: back in the Napster days, were there likewise Napster clones ("napster"?) that purported to allow peer to peer music downloads but in fact had malware properties?

I don't remember any, but then again, I don't know when I (or most people) would have come across them if such a thing existed. If you wanted Napster, you just went to napster.com and downloaded it. There wasn't a gameable walled-garden app store like you have to go through to get uBlock Origin.

Re: Adblock Sold to Mystery Company

#159

Post by on_ »

monochromatic wrote: post #95
on_ wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like uBlock a lot. With default deny 3rd party, or even some other settings enabled, I find it breaks the back button often, or I have to reload the page at google to search again. ANyone else have these issues.

Haven't run across this. What sites?

Actually, the most annoying was on google because it would lock up occasionally and if I typed a new query in, i would have to reload. I was using ublock origin on mozilla firefox. I just upgraded to El Capitan and changed some settings so I will try to give it a go again.

edit: Did you have default deny third party req?

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