61–70 of 79 posts
For an open source app distributed on the App Store, is there actually any way of verifying that what you get on your phone is the same as the source code you can read?
Checksum of a binary package against checksum of a reproducible build?
It's functions similar to other mobile ad-blockers in that it can route all your phones traffic over a VPN tunnel it establishes. But the ad-blocking vpn server is 127.0.0.1, so perhaps, like it says all the blocking happens right on your phone. This is what I've been waiting for if this works. Still getting ads on instagram though.
I haven't checked myself, but I read that it's likely because Instagram may use the same domain to serve ads as its regular content. So, if you block Instagram's domain, you will block Instagram itself.
On macOS, we got a port of OpenBSD pf (probably not up to date though). I've been able to convert hosts files to OpenBSD pf format in, when was it, 2002? What you'd need to do is create an anchor. Perhaps there's a GUI for it as well for those who prefer. There's at least pfBlockerNG which basically does that for PfSense. [1] FWIW, all of this existed before Pi-Hole (or Raspberry Pi for that matter). IIRC there was a…
On the product page[1] of little snitch you‘ll find a mention of a „blocklist“ feature. [1] https://www.obdev.at/en/products/littlesnitch/index.html
I found this list (by Peter Lowe) for Little Snitch [1]. There's also a shell script to convert to Little Snitch rules [2]
[1] https://pgl.yoyo.org/adservers/serverlist.php?hostformat=lit...
[2] https://gist.github.com/SethCalkins/1ac3bee593b37067b489cd6e...
It's "open source", but there's only been 5 commits since August last year? Where do the updates to blocking rules etc come from? Also, the homepage states "Over 1 Billion Trackers Blocked", but that really feels misleading. I'd say Guardian Firewall is a much better choice: https://twitter.com/guardianiosapp
$10/month is a lot for a firewall.
The $1/day / $10/month / $100/year has been fairly well received, but may not be for everyone, especially those who enjoy running their own VPN server and/or curating their own block lists.
It's functions similar to other mobile ad-blockers in that it can route all your phones traffic over a VPN tunnel it establishes. But the ad-blocking vpn server is 127.0.0.1, so perhaps, like it says all the blocking happens right on your phone. This is what I've been waiting for if this works. Still getting ads on instagram though.
Everyone should fire up https://mitmproxy.org/ from time to time just to see how much chatty your mobile apps can be, phoning home to places like analytics services on every tap and swipe. I was using a translation app on my phone that sent every keystroke to google analytics. Of course also fun in its own right to see the sorts of APIs an app uses and how often the developers like to query it.
Is there anywhere with an in-depth overview of what this does? Does it just fail DNS request and block known IPs? How are the lists maintained and updated? With TLS and it surely not mitm-ing connections, that's all it can do correct?
The source indicates that they check-in DNS blocklists as JSON files [0] and txt files (one of which has Facebook IPv4s) [1]. So, the updates to those would require app updates, I guess, unless there's OTA for the blocklists somewhere in the code that I missed. My experience with running client-side DNS based blockers are they consume additional battery and need a lot of RAM if you block with aggressive lists that ha…
It's functions similar to other mobile ad-blockers in that it can route all your phones traffic over a VPN tunnel it establishes. But the ad-blocking vpn server is 127.0.0.1, so perhaps, like it says all the blocking happens right on your phone. This is what I've been waiting for if this works. Still getting ads on instagram though.
"Can", not "does". The App Store page for it (for both Mac and iOS versions) says
> Optional VPN for additional privacy
LOL! Additional!!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Everyone should fire up https://mitmproxy.org/ from time to time just to see how much chatty your mobile apps can be, phoning home to places like analytics services on every tap and swipe. I was using a translation app on my phone that sent every keystroke to google analytics. Of course also fun in its own right to see the sorts of APIs an app uses and how often the developers like to query it.
It was sending every keystroke in the app, or every keystroke in the entire phone?
That you have to go through the trouble of mitm'ing yourself to see this stuff is also the flip side of HN's native app fetishization and knee-jerk web hate.