µBlock for Firefox • Hacker News Board

Re: µBlock for Firefox

#131

Post by marios » Tue, Jan 20, 2015, 2:14 PM UTC

mih wrote: post #103

chippy wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

curious about the performance issue. Would the impact on performance be larger than a similarly sized block list in a browser plugin? I have a netbook, so always want to keep an eye out on performance. I wonder if there's a GUI application which enables these hosts sources to be tweaked, searched, whitelisted etc

I use this on Windows. For a large hosts file (several megabytes), I find the DNS client service hangs until it reads the whole file. Further, there is also a noticeable delay in the order of a few seconds until the hostname is resolved. For smaller files, I find there is no noticeable lag. Can't offer you any numbers though. Hostsman ( http://www.abelhadigital.com/hostsman ) on windows is the my choice of a frontend…

Slower DNS responses with big hosts file is something to be expected.

The solution is to feed the data to a DNS caching resolver such as unbound or dnsmasq, as I have explained in reply to UserRights.

Answering here also to point out I originally implemented this on a 5y old netbook (Atom CPU, 1GB RAM) because I tend to have a lot of tabs open in firefox, and ABP's memory usage quickly becomes noticeable, and then comes the swapping. Running unbound+nginx scales remarquably well, without hogging too much memory at startup. (Sorry, I don't have access to the netbook right now to report real numbers).

Re: µBlock for Firefox

#132

Post by oconnore » Tue, Jan 20, 2015, 2:19 PM UTC

sjwright wrote: post #125

oconnore wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't get the privilege of having their data analyzed and used to market products back to them. Some of the marketing people on here will probably find that to be horrendous. Where is my relevant promoted content?!

If most geeks end up blocking GA (in most cases without realising it) then the audience of geek-focused content might end up being severely under-reported to publishers. This will only accelerate the mainstreamification of our culture.

You ought to be supporting publishers that are important to you with your dollars, not with HTTP requests to Google Analytics.

Re: µBlock for Firefox

#133

Post by gorhill » Tue, Jan 20, 2015, 2:23 PM UTC

losvedir wrote: post #127

danielsamuels wrote: post #108

I tried this out for a couple of weeks after the "Adblock makes things slower" article came out, and I found it was blocking more stuff - but not necessarily the right stuff. I was finding that sites were breaking, stuff was disappearing and it was because of uBlock. I think I was trying to log into Medium and the Twitter and Facebook had been hidden, literally breaking the functionality of the site. That's not what…

Well, as the README says, it's not an "adblocker" but a generic blocker. Hiding Twitter and Facebook log-in functionality on Medium is a feature not a bug for me. By including those javascripts, both companies can build up a history of the sites I visit. So I gather this is more of a privacy+ad blocker rather than strictly ad blocker.

Unfortunately, even with EasyPrivacy and "Fanboy's Social Blocking", you will find that blockers (ABP, AdBlock, uBlock, etc) do not prevent 100% connecting to Facebook, Twitter, and whatnot.[1]

This is one of the reasons I see dynamic filtering as a key feature: users have the last word, not the filter lists.[2]

For example, I currently block all Facebook, Twitter, Disqus, and any of similarly ubiquitous domains by default using dynamic filtering, so that I have now 100% certainty that no connections to these domains occur on any page, while such certainty is not possible when relying solely on the filter lists.

[1] https://www.diffchecker.com/pz6rv6lq

[2] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Dynamic-filtering:-qu...

Re: µBlock for Firefox

#134

Post by danieltoomey » Tue, Jan 20, 2015, 2:24 PM UTC

My version of firefox (34.05 on mac) says the tool is corrupted

Re: µBlock for Firefox

#135

Post by fpgaminer » Tue, Jan 20, 2015, 2:25 PM UTC

wampus wrote: post #117

fpgaminer wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, which is why I added the bit about salting the URIs before encryption. The salt could be per request, per session, or rotated after some period of time (say once per day). If only rotated once per day, it would still thwart ad blocking, but have less of an impact on caching. It would turn into an economic question of whether the extra ad impressions are worth the extra bandwidth.

Since most ads are effectively blocked at the domain level, I doubt your scheme would provide much bang for the buck.

The idea is that the ads would be served from the original host. Combined with encrypted URIs and the ad resources become indistinguishable from content resources. Thus thwarting blocking. As others have pointed out, yes this evil trick is incompatible with existing ad networks (which use their own domains). But it wasn't my intention to put forward a viable idea. Just an interesting one (namely, ciphering URIs to prevent blocking).

Re: µBlock for Firefox

#136

Post by oconnore » Tue, Jan 20, 2015, 2:27 PM UTC

sjwright wrote: post #130

GrinningFool wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it entirely disables Google Analytics on every site. Some might find being tracked across most of the Internet to be a privacy concern. People put google analytics on their site because of the 'free' data they get from google, and I suspect most don't consider that there is a cost - it's just their users that are paying it.

If you think GA is a privacy concern, you should consider services like gmail to be a privacy concern too. Perhaps they should block that too. "Paying for it"? GA doesn't do much that a webmaster couldn't otherwise learn by analysing their webserver log files.

Yes, lots of people don't use gmail for this reason.

GA does a lot that webmasters couldn't normally do -- specifically: to cross reference those requests with requests to almost every other website, and use that data to build a full profile of the user. (Granted, the full profile is not available to the webmaster, only to Google's ad targeting platform).

Re: µBlock for Firefox

#137

Post by losvedir » Tue, Jan 20, 2015, 2:29 PM UTC

gorhill wrote: post #133

losvedir wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, as the README says, it's not an "adblocker" but a generic blocker. Hiding Twitter and Facebook log-in functionality on Medium is a feature not a bug for me. By including those javascripts, both companies can build up a history of the sites I visit. So I gather this is more of a privacy+ad blocker rather than strictly ad blocker.

Unfortunately, even with EasyPrivacy and "Fanboy's Social Blocking", you will find that blockers (ABP, AdBlock, uBlock, etc) do not prevent 100% connecting to Facebook, Twitter, and whatnot.[1] This is one of the reasons I see dynamic filtering as a key feature: users have the last word, not the filter lists.[2] For example, I currently block all Facebook, Twitter, Disqus, and any of similarly ubiquitous domains by d…

Oh, it's you! Great. I'm confused. I've been using HTTPSwitchboard now for the last several months and love it. Is µBlock the successor to that, or are they for different things?

edit: Ah, I followed the link to µMatrix and I see now, I think. HTTPSB became µMatrix, and µBlock is the "easy" version of µMatrix. So I guess I should upgrade my HTTPSB to µMatrix, then. Is that right? Thanks for all your work on these tools!

Re: µBlock for Firefox

#138

Post by codychan » Tue, Jan 20, 2015, 2:30 PM UTC

I tried this for Chrome for a couple days and found that it really didn't block too much ads(I can say none ads were blocked) comparing to ABP.

Re: µBlock for Firefox

#139

Post by teamhappy » Tue, Jan 20, 2015, 2:32 PM UTC

Does anybody know if I really need the "Malware domain list" if I have Chrome's malware and phishing protection activated at the same time? Sounds like they might contain the same sites anyway.

Re: µBlock for Firefox

#140

Post by AdmiralAsshat » Tue, Jan 20, 2015, 2:33 PM UTC

Beltiras wrote: post #27

colechristensen wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where's the law that says I have to view web content as it's creators intend? You send me a stream of data, I decide what to do with it, what parts to render, what parts to ignore.

There's no law. I work at a newspaper. We are digitally aware and head towards a digital distribution. That means infrastructural changes and that costs money. Those advertisers pay the bills. They provide the means for us to reach you. Subscription models are (currently) not enough. I'm not trying to guilt anyone into anything but this will be a an interesting field to watch in the coming years. How will journalism…

So this is a slight digress, but while we're on the subject, how does an advertiser know that an ad has been successfully served or blocked? I've never had that part fully explained to me. If they're just basing it on number of adds clicks, I rather doubt whether I use an ad blocker or not makes much difference, because I can more or less guarantee that in the ~18 years I have actively surfed the web, the number of ad links I have consciously clicked is between 0 and 5.

So I assume, then, that they have some way of tracking whether the ad was presented to the end-user?