It did not hit me yet, but I'm already rewriting my extensions to firefox to switch if Chrome really axes uBO
For those unaware, what is uBO and how would it affect most extensions?
uBlock Origin CNAME uncloaking now supports filtering by IP address
41–50 of 133 posts
Re: uBlock Origin CNAME uncloaking now supports filtering by IP address
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
I always find this development curious. About a decade ago I worked in this space. When someone brought up ad blockers I just said "put the analytics on our main domain. No one is going to block the entire website". The answer I got was "no one would ever do that because of the implications of serving advertising from your main domain". Yet, here we are.
What are the implications?
If third party ad servers get access to your main domain's cookies, they can impersonate your signed-in users and steal their data.
Re: uBlock Origin CNAME uncloaking now supports filtering by IP address
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
I always find this development curious. About a decade ago I worked in this space. When someone brought up ad blockers I just said "put the analytics on our main domain. No one is going to block the entire website". The answer I got was "no one would ever do that because of the implications of serving advertising from your main domain". Yet, here we are.
News payers used to all serve their own ads including in house sales and design. Frankly with how key advertising is I don't understand why anyone would out source it.
cost and effectiveness.
selling ad space was always a lot of work. algorithms do it cheaper and in general better.
next step is just to run a GoogleAds lib/proxy...
Re: uBlock Origin CNAME uncloaking now supports filtering by IP address
#44Is chrome going to block uBO im never up to date on the latest. I do know theyre allowing 3rd party cookies now... so maybe theres a chance
They're not blocking uBO, they're removing the features in the browser that allowed uBO to work by releasing new plugin APIs, "Manifest v3". They're eliminating the key APIs needed for uBO to identify things that it shouldn't load, and then not load them. Google claims this was for "performance" or "security" reasons. Of course, the only major 'performance' or 'security' affected is the ability to identify, intercept…
Does this affect extensions that know every website you visit even if it doesnt need to know, and has nothing to do with the extension’s functionality? (ie the ones that Similarweb buys)
Re: uBlock Origin CNAME uncloaking now supports filtering by IP address
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
Browser profiling has been a thing for at least a decade if I'm not mistaken.
Makes sense. "I am session abcdef12345" always seemed significantly guaranteed to me, but in a world with ad blockers and third-party cookie restrictions, using heuristics is the only way forward. It's somewhat scary how much information our browsers leak to unknown parties. (I don't really take sides on this. I use an ad blocker and am very anti-ad, but am impressed when ad companies come up with tech to thwart them…
it's more than enough. especially that the competition is also only using the same tech
Re: uBlock Origin CNAME uncloaking now supports filtering by IP address
#46The title seems to be wrong, uBlock Origin supported it for many years at this point (only on Firefox). This seems to be a refactor of that code, not a whole new feature.
Well, it does support it now. It supported it before, too :P
i used to use ublock origin. i still do, but i used to, too
Re: uBlock Origin CNAME uncloaking now supports filtering by IP address
#47Re: uBlock Origin CNAME uncloaking now supports filtering by IP address
#48This a good example of why manifest v3 sucks. By definition, it can't do anything like this...no live code hueristics are possible.
It's a war of escalation with advertisers. Google is the arms dealer to both sides. They won't give you what you would need to win.
Re: uBlock Origin CNAME uncloaking now supports filtering by IP address
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is such an intrusion of privacy. I wish I could just disable cookies entirely but the usability of many webpages just goes down. I should not be punished for not wanting 3rd party trackers.
Before I get too alarmed someone would have to tell me how an adsite.com cookie is being sent to adsite.example.com. This workaround seems to let adsite.com profile me as well as example.com already can, but it loses the ability to correlate my activity across example2.com and example.com with a single cookie. (I guess ad providers have gotten good enough to not need cookies? Like they know my browser window size, in…
cookie is for each site, but that's enough... sure, maybe no retargeting ads, but those were creepy anyways (and likely not more effective)
Re: uBlock Origin CNAME uncloaking now supports filtering by IP address
#50As an example of what CNAME cloaking is, let's say that a SAAS provider A wants to provide you, company Q, with fancy ad tracking software. In the olden days, they'd tell you to embed a script at e.g. https://A-ads-tracking.example into your website at address https://q-company.example To block those ads, blocklists that uBlock Origin use have rules then that say "block requests being made to the domain name A-ads-tr…
That's not quite right; as the name suggests, it uses CNAMEs (which point to other records), not A records (which point to IPs). So you would have something like `media.q-company.example` as a CNAME to `q-company.ads-tracking.example` which then has an A record to give an IP.
Browsers might not offer intermediate DNS names to extensions (I don't know), so something like uBlock might need to rely on IP lists, but DNS-based filtering like pihole should just block it by a rule against `ads-tracking.example`. In any case, it's good to use both browser based and DNS based malware blockers.