Thank you Raymond and all others involved with uBlock Origin. It makes the internet bearable for me and other family members.
Every time I use the "YouTube" app on my elderly relatives TV and see how often it is interrupted with adverts I count my blessings that this add-on exists.
PSA: If it's a recent-ish LG TV, you can root it and install an ad-free youtube app in just a few clicks. That said, one might be afraid of potential future breakage/maintenance burden from installing homebrew software for a relative.
On Android TV there's SmartTubeNext that I've installed without root access.
It's such a joy to use. It's honestly better than the official Youtube app (it handles multi accounts properly) and even embeds SponsorBlock by default! And it doesn't show the comments, which is another feature as far as I'm concerned.
I installed SmartTubeNext last week and it feels like a burden has been lifted from my everyday life. There's genuinely not enough praise that can be given for it; it's arguably the perfect YouTube app for your TV.
At the moment, SmartTubeNext is the only reason I use my Shield on my LG TV, as the WebOS apps do everything else I need.
But SponsorBlock is the best thing ever.
Apart from SponsorBlock in YT, the most useful thing I've found is the Hyperion sender app. I'm really looking forward to building my DIY Ambilight when the pieces arrive, and it's really nice to automatically capture all output, instead of capturing through HDMI.
SponsorBlock is awesome. I just wish it could automatically “detect” those sections without users input. Something like a neural network to detect if a section is sponsorship.
Can you load custom OS images onto them, or is this the same situation as with bootloaders on most Android devices?
Not that I'd want it actively connecting to the Internet either way, but if I could run something more stripped-down than an OEM stock image it would... almost make a smart TV attractive?
As I'm just about to start shopping for TVs, like LG generally and would love it if I could root it, you know if there is any list of compatible models somewhere? I did some browsing and could only find which webOS versions that are vulnerable, but not which LG model runs what version ("out of factory" version at the very least).
I mean, YouTube at least offers a subscription that makes the ads go away. Which is not the case with the cesspool that's the rest of the internet basically. It's such a privilege that a software like this exists, and is offered for free with no strings attached.
The problem is YouTubers still get sponsored and advertise within the video. I would not want to pay for YouTube Premium and still get exposed to those ads.
FTC said that creators and influencers on social media services need to put "sponsored", "promoted" or "ad" tag disclosure on brands they are endorsing so it would be possibly for someone to make uBlock Origin filter which blocks such content.
The sponsor block extension is crowd funded, people put where the sponsor message is and it automatically skips it. Not sure if ublock can seek inside a youtube video.
Both "Includes paid promotion" overlay* and "#sponsored" hashtag can be detected and therefore the video could've been skipped or hidden by some extension or by uBlock Origin filter. You can either rely on detecting aforementioned Google overlay* or sponsored hashtag.
Hulu charges money and still interrupts shows with ads. Cable television ended up that way eventually too, despite one of the original selling points being the lack of ads. They always keep trying to take more.
Fwiw - paying for YouTube premium removes all ads from all devices and I see it as a strong vote in favor of subscriptions that do so. But, yes, it’s nearly unwatchable in its free state.
Do not subscribe to YouTube Premium. The whole thing just makes the problem worse by still allowing ads and requiring you to log in using an account that is also tied to your real world identity (for payment processing). You just end up giving more data points to Google to track and don't get rid of all ads.
Tangential question to anyone reading this: How does uBlock Origin block in-video ads that are in video format? I thought all those are embedded in the video stream and served from the same hosts that serve the video. If not, how has YouTube not changed the way it serves the video to disable such blocking functionality? Note that this is not about text ads that may be overlaid in the video or text ads elsewhere on the YouTube page.
I imagine that encoding the ads into videos would be too expensive. Ads change often and are personalized, so the video streams would also need to be personalized and couldn't be cached and served from a simple edge CDN anymore. Instead each ad is it's own stream which is loaded (or in this case, not loaded, so instead of blocking playback entirely it just skips the ad).
Not a direct answer to your question, but look up a browser extension called "SponsorBlock". It auto-skips in-video ads. These days I don't watch YouTube without this.
>Every time I use the "YouTube" app on my elderly relatives TV and see how often it is interrupted with adverts I count my blessings that this add-on exists.
Sad reality is Google can make ad blockers obsolete if they really wanted to but I don't think it will happen anytime soon since antitrust lawsuit is pressuring them to ease aggressive business practices.
Unfortunately, Pi-hole does not work for Youtube ads... At least, I have been unable to find a reliable way to implement it. My house would be much better for it, but I can not seem to find a solution.
I think youtube serves ads from its own domain, as a first party. This makes it harder for a pihole to block. Ublock does it differently, looking at elements etc...a pihole just tries to block dns requests to ad domains, not looking at code that your browser is trying to load.
Block Element is a quite a useful feature of uBlock Origin.
You can right click on individual things in a website's UI and make them go away using the "Block element ..." context menu command added by uBlock.
This is useful for not only getting rid of ads, but anything that distracts you or tricks you into clicking on it.
For instance, in Reddit, if you find yourself accidentally clicking on switching to New Reddit (which annoyingly updates your profile to make that choice stick), you can just block that button.
FYI, all of the things you block wind up in a text list within the settings of the app, so it's super easy to copy/paste/edit/add elements that way if you need to.
The eyedrop (permanently hide element) is great for getting through most cookie walls without accepting anything.
The filters (custom rules for hiding stuff) is great for personalizing your browsing. Eliminate scores on Reddit, YouTube video cards containing keywords for stuff you don't want to get spoiled, Tweets types that don't interest you like "Stuff your follows such as "You might like", etc.
I actually found this useful the other day when I was shopping online on a bugged website. After I applied a filter, the loading spinner wouldn't go away, even after it had finished loading the filtered results.
I blocked the loading spinner element and the website worked perfectly after that.
Sorry, what exactly is this "top block thing", on which StackExchange site?
I didn't manually block anything from these sites, but don't see any annoying block near the top.
Well, the main "stackexchange.com" has a dialog-box-like element titled "StackExchange Q&A Communities are Different. Here's how:", with a bunch of content, and a [Learn More] button. You can close this with the X in the top right corner. Is this it?
I guess it doesn't bother me because I've never found that site useful to begin with.
The dismissible block is not actually at the top; it's below the "search all sites" toolbar, and below that block there isn't any particularly useful content, just "hot questions" and a sidebar of "featured sites". Basically nothing other than that toolbar is useful, and that toolbar could just be a tiny browser extension or something. So if I dismiss that box, no useful content moves up to occupy that space. It could bother me a bit if I were interested in browsing the hot questions, rather than search.
Maybe DuckDuckGo has a shortcut for it? Hey, yes it does: !se
If you use DDG, you have no need to visit stackexchange.com just to search all the SE sites; just !se in front of your search terms.
I assume they mean the useless "Closed, duplicate" (which almost never links to a duplicate) or "Closed, opinion" box. I forgot I can remove them with UBlock Origin.)
This person is aggressively against being rewarded for their selfless desire to make the internet functional, nicer, quieter, and more about the users.
How many of you here instead spend your 40 hours a week making 6 digit salaries at a company that wants nothing more than to own the attention of everyone who connects to a network? How many of you have actively worked to create systems and technology to invade the screens and speakers of users who wanted nothing of the sort? How many of you have sat in meetings about "attribution" or "analytics" and lied to yourself about what you were building and what it would do to millions of people?
> This person is aggressively against being rewarded
Back when uB was transferred to a different maintainer and uBO came about, I recall reading something about this. It isn't so much that they don't want reward or recognition but rather the do not want the obligation that comes with it.
Back when I maintained a couple Add-ons for Firefox there was a constant external pressure from users to fix/improve/maintain/develop the Add-on. In addition to that, the user base wants to engage and feel part of a community and interact with you. In a way it's stifling and why I eventually abandoned the Add-ons.
When you start accepting recognition or donations for work you share, there's obligation tied to it.
Some people don't want the obligation, it has nothing to do with virtue.
The reason for their desire to not be rewarded is orthogonal to their virtue in spending their limited time and effort and resources in making the internet a better place, which IMO is virtuous.
That's what I was trying to get at. What legacy are you leaving this world? Are you truly leaving it a better place than you were given?
Does anybody know if there's a way to donate to gorhill/uBO development? I looked through the entire README and I don't think there's any link to send $ (just a "contribute to translation" link -- what a brilliant crowdsourcing solution!).
Does gorhill just do this for free because he's an amazing human being, or am I missing where I can buy him a coffee?
Been trying to make a more conscious effort to donate to meaningful causes this year, and I have to say uBO is one of the strongest forces for good on the internet I know.
uBlock Origin's manifesto.
Free. Open source. For users by users. No donations sought.
Without the preset lists of filters, this extension is nothing. So if ever you really do want to contribute something, think about the people working hard to maintain the filter lists you are using, which were made available to use by all for free.
You can contribute by helping translate uBlock Origin on Crowdin.
Yeah they really need a Ko-Fi[0] or Patreon[1] link in the README IMHO.
But that said, looks like they don't want donations[2]
> I don't want the administrative workload coming with donations. I don't want the project to become in need of funding in any way: no dedicated home page + no forum = no cost = no need for funding. I want to be free to move onto something else if ever I get tired working on these projects (no donations = no expectations).
> Have a thought for the maintainers of the various lists. These lists are everything. This can't be emphasized enough.
> Yeah they really need a Ko-Fi[0] or Patreon[1] link in the README IMHO.
I am quite sure that kind of nonsense lead to the Origin fork. As far as I understand the old uBlock project was taken over by a contributor who offered to manage user requests but immediately started to look for ways to monetize it and things only went downhill from there.
But yes, although I'd be quite happy to donate to uBO (it is the only extension I find indispensable and I even abandoned Safari after it stopped working there), I cannot help but admire their stance on donations.
I recall him stating he didn't want to take donations because he didn't want the chance of money coming in from someone that could influence the decisions of the project (see AdBlock Plus).
And every time I learn more about gorhill, I respect him more. Forget looking up to the Bezoses and Zucks of the world as role models, or even the Gates. This is someone who writes software that improves the quality of life of tens of millions of people across the planet, maybe even hundreds. I haven't heard a bad thing about him yet.
> This is someone who writes software that improves the quality of life of tens of millions of people across the planet, maybe even hundreds.
The sad thing is that it doesn't have to be this way, if ads weren't so terrible or intrusive gorhill could be working on something else instead. I'm sure people will point out the upside of browser ads but I speculate that it's a net (!) negative.
I find it funny that when HN loaded for me, the post below this one was "How I changed my mind about advertising." Not here - ads begone. Wuthout UblockO the net is ugly and insufferable.
I've been using Firefox + uBO on Android. But I also run NetGuard from F-Droid as a local VPN ad blocker. I used to run Blokada, which does the same thing and is good too. But I like the more granular control over each app in NetGuard.
I use Firefox + uBlock Origin, but to block ads in other apps I also use the NextDNS app (you can set up a custom set of blocklists, including adblock lists, in your NextDNS account).
Adguard works well since it's the only one which does cosmetic filtering and injects JS into requests that counters anti-adblock behaviour. Everything else is a simple DNS filter.
Same. I'm sad to say that Mozilla really lost its way, but Firefox is still the most libre browser I know of, thus I will continue to use it until it becomes otherwise.
”Lost its way“ is non-actionable and unsubstantiated criticism that reflects poorly on the person making such statement.
What specifically do you disagree with? I actually feel the opposite way. Finally after years of ignoring macOS Firefox feels more at home and the UI changes make it much more pleasant to use.
This is a discussion forum, not an academic debate. The core of my statement is that Firefox has qualities that make me want to continue using it despite how I disagree with how Mozilla operates. I don't owe anyone actionable criticism or evidence to backup my sentiment.
> What specifically do you disagree with? I actually feel the opposite way. Finally after years of ignoring macOS Firefox feels more at home and the UI changes make it much more pleasant to use.
Mozilla owns Firefox, but Mozilla is not Firefox. Firefox, for the most part, is fine. The text input I'm typing this in is being rendered by Firefox.
As far as specifics go, Mozilla can hardly be considered well managed by any objective sense. The market share of Firefox has been declining rapidly for years, and Firefox is the product everyone knows Mozilla for. Why then has Mozilla not done anything meaningful to course correct? Why do their executives of a non-profit foundation still get raises when their core product is losing? (to be fair they don't make much compared to for-profit salaries) Why are they more interested in selling other products in a space where there's already massive competition, and using Udemy's pricing trickery to convince you that you're getting a good deal? Why did they abandon Servo? Why did they integrate a commercial service, Pocket, into Firefox and make it opt-out? Did they really need to make Brendon Eich leave because he committed the deadly sin of... being against gay marriage? Do they really need to be blogging about political activism that has nothing to do with the web?
These are all facts you can look up easily.
Yeah, I don't like them. They're not well managed, and they pretty much only exist in their current form because Google needs them to exist. If Google stopped giving money to the Mozilla foundation, lots of people would be laid off, Firefox would go into a tailspin, and they'd be left with a VPN service nobody really wanted. Maybe if money spent on Mozilla VPN clearly went to making Firefox better, more developer friendly, and more prolific, then it would be a somewhat different story, but whether that is actually the case isn't obvious. Even then, it's debatable to what extent any VPN service isn't snake oil.
No, it isn't. The implication is "To hold oneself to a better standard, make actionable and/or substantiated statements, especially when making critical statements."
People seem to shit on Mozilla/Firefox often, and often without any evidence or useful data to work with. And they often say they use Chrome instead, run by an organization that those same people would probably say is user-hostile.
It's like seeing people criticize corruption in Western democratic governments and declaring they're avoiding that mess by moving to Moscow.
> The implication is "To hold oneself to a better standard, make actionable and/or substantiated statements, especially when making critical statements."
Ok, but defining the implications of 1st party statements to 3rd parties is tricksy business.
> People seem to shit on Mozilla/Firefox often, and often without any evidence or useful data to work with. And they often say they use Chrome instead, run by an organization that those same people would probably say is user-hostile.
Except ravenstine didn't do any of that, so you're applying your issues with other people to the wrong conversation. They responded with depth before you posted this.
> It's like seeing people criticize corruption in Western democratic governments and declaring they're avoiding that mess by moving to Moscow.
You sure you're in the same conversation as everyone else?
The first entry in the change log makes me think Mozilla knows exactly what it's way is, and is sticking to it:
> Rejected by Mozilla Add-ons Team. The reason is that I did not provide an exact link to the origin of the hsluv-0.1.0.min.js library used by uBO to implement dark theme (uBO's About page does credit the author of the library). A README has been added to 1.41.2 to disclose the exact origin of the library.
And for that reason, I'm sticking with Firefox. It's such a delight to see "transparency and audibility" are a hard engineering requirement. We in open source don't have much in the way of firm engineering processes, but we have that - and usually it's enough to ensure our software doesn't actively undermine us.
There was a pretty recent change where the most visited sites always open in a new tab, regardless of how it is accessed. I browse about 6 different sites. When I press the address bar by far the fastest way for me to go to news.ycombinator.com is to press it in the most recent sites.
But some time in the last half years I started having lots of new tabs. Right now I am at 60. 3 of which are interesting. So every day I have to spend about one minute closing tabs because firefox becomes sluggish (old lowhrange phone).
Ublock origin is the only thing keeping me on Firefox, but to be honest I have started looking at other browsers because this is driving me insane.
This is always the first addon/extension I add to a browse; installing uBlock is like "sudo apt update && sudo apt update -y" on a freshly installed system -- you're asking for trouble if you don't secure things as soon as possible.
The worst thing is that Firefox removes all add-ons if it was not used for a while. One can disable this by setting disableResetPrompt to true, but it's annoying e.g. when you set up an ad blocker on your mom's laptop only to find it being removed a few months later.
Don't get me wrong, but that implies she is not using Firefox as her daily driver.
Changing the icon to, shudder, the edge icon might help and call it "Internet" and maybe she will use it. Most people do not really know, or care, that their browser is.
I do this with very un - techsavvy people and install uBo and they have a fairly safe time online.
Indeed. I'm no stranger to creating new browser profiles for different things, and the first thing I do when setting up a new profile (in Firefox) is to install uBo. I have it turned off in one profile for sites that break when using it. For some reason, some e-commerce stores don't work with it, because of KYC BS and having them flagging you as suspicious because you're using an AD-blocker. That I can tolerate though (it's finance right?). But for the bulk of my browsing, uBo is essential.
I turn it off when I'm buying from a site because I've had cases where the blocking interferes with the checkout. In one case recently, when I forgot to disable it, the transaction half went through. I was charged but the order was stuck pending payment and it required me contacting their support team to manually override that.
Yeah the reason I have a dedicated profile for e-commerce (with uBo not installed) is that e-commerce sometimes use an array of different domains during the checkout process, and you have to whitelist each domain which is bothersome. Best just not using uBo entirely during the process.
I keep a Chrome install for when disabling uBlock for the main site doesn't work. Moving over to that also has the benefit of removing Firefox as a reason the checkout might not be working (I tend to assume that the only browser people test for is Chrome).
I have had a few cases where even that didn't work and instead I had to switch to my phone and disconnect from my wifi to ensure that the DNS block list I use isn't the problem.
I was setting up a workplace computer last week. It was shocking to see all the scams circulating in the adds. Especially the download scams on download pages. Next time I will change the order and install uBlock the first thing after the browser.
At the risk of comming off as pathetic but it just struck my mind that Raymond probably deserves something like a Time's Person of the Year (if not Decade) award. I mean - this is the only piece of software (not exaggerating - I'm actually just realizing it now) which I consistently install everywhere and anywhere me or somebody who means something to me is accessing the internet from. We reached a point where for me and probably each one of you guys the Internet is unusable / unbearable without it! It's an integral part of the Internet now to just make it and keep it useful.
Does anyone know of a way to run uBlock Origin as an HTTP(s) proxy? I'd really like to be able to provide uBlock Origin style functionality to mobile and other browsers on my network that can't easily run uBlock. Historically privoxy could do some of what uBlock does, but development on privoxy seems to have declined...
That's not necessarily true. SSL/TLS does not prevent all MITM, it prevents unwanted MITM.
To be fair, I don't think you can install certificates on a Chromecast for example, so it might not be practically feasible for all devices, but a blanket "SSL makes that impossible" is not correct.
You can always choose to install your own root certificates, at which point your browsers will trust any certificates issued by them (which could be your own mitm proxy)
Precisely. On iOS, I've recently been enjoying Hyperweb, which you can add some of uBlock Origin's blocklists to. My experience so far has been great, though I'm aware that their blocking is probably based on Safari's neutered "content blocker" API so it isn't quite as fast or efficient.
I've been very happy with the free tier of Lockdown Privacy, which blocks ads in every app, not only Safari. It creates a dummy VPN which can filter. Not as powerful as uBlock Origin, but it blocks in-app ads too.
Ah, not an option for me since I already use a VPN to access services on my home network like my pi hole. I tried Lockdown a while back, and I do remember it worked pretty darn well. But my pi hole works great, too, as far as DNS-level blocking is concerned. And it's nice to know that my network traffic is safe from my mobile provider :)
Yes and no. One could create a Squid SSL-Bump (MITM) proxy and create ACL's that operate closely to uBlock. There won't be full parity between the two so uBlock would still provide some benefit to the client. The method of using Squid as a MITM proxy method assumes one can install and trust a server public key into the clients. Squid will limit what HTTP protocols one could use. e.g. h2, alpn won't be supported. If one does not mind those limitations and having to maintain a small list of sites to bypass MITM due to public key pinning then Squid can have rules for anything the client or server can see. Domains, URL's, Content-Type, Size, Methods, Ports, you name it. One could save some bandwidth on static content as an additional benefit.
You could try adguard (android version), but it is paid.
And the biggest problem is most of sites are already upgraded to https, it needs MITM attack, but lots of applications won't accept any user certificate... (so adguard needs be installed to let those apps bypass its proxy, that's mean, you cannot just host a central proxy server to filter all ssl traffic)
>By default, at browser launch uBO waits for all filter lists to be loaded before unsuspending network activity so as to ensure web pages are properly filtered at launch.
Fun Fact: uBO might wait, but Chrome DGAF and will load pages without waiting for all extensions to properly load.
From https://ublockorigin.com/ itself: "The uBlock Origin project still specifically refuses donations at this time, and instead advises all of its clients, users and supporters to donate to block list maintainers."
Unfortunately, the list doesn't seem to be compatible with piHole (at least >5.0), and in searching around there's some beef between pi-hole folks and the oisd maintainer. I won't perpetuate it by posting links, but it's sad to see for sure.
I think it’s very much still an “if” not a “when”. Chrome will stop being a lot of peoples’ recommended browser if they do this, and could well end up losing them a lot of users.
Modern browsers share a "standard" list of APIs for plugins, that makes it possible to write a plugin that runs in both Chrome and Firefox. Google decided to remove several APIs for "performance" and "privacy" reasons from the third version of that list. It just happens that all dropped APIs where used by ad blockers and that some of the announced "replacement" APIs weren't even able to handle the most commonly used static block lists. As far as I understand the replacement APIs where developed in cooperation with Ad block plus, which just happens to allow Googles ads under its acceptable ads program.
What a wacky industry we are in. 90% of the websites people like us build are primarily there to show us ads. And then there's this one addon maintained by one guy (and an army of helpers) for free that removes those ads and makes the web more usable again.
The problem are not ads. The problem is the huge amount of ads, bigger bigger bigger, animated, with sound, tracking and and and...
Nobody has a problem with small decent ads without tracking, but that was not enough for big companies.
Even subtitle ads break your focus from the content, give bad incentives, unfair leverage, etc.
If ads were not here, most junk content in the internet would not exist because people would not pay 20 cents to see it. They pay to see it with ads, because it's a price they don't pay consciously, nor can they assess the consequences clearly.
I'm for the total and complete ban of ads. A content can't exist without it? Ask people to pay. If they don't, it means it didn't have real value. Let it die.
Worse, ads create a huge asymmetry of power in the favor of those who already have it. If you can throw a lot of money to ads, you can gain on the competition. Local small shops can't do that, so ads promotes way more coca cola than organic carrots.
Besides, the people publishing ads have an agenda that almost never align with the customers interest. People say there are ads they want to see, but the reality is that even those ads are not trying to make you more knowledgeable. They try to sell you something.
We have thousands of communities of experts in stuff, testers, consumers, bloggers, than can inform you. You don't need ads to know about something.
Society as a whole would be better without it.
Newspaper would be more objective, streets would be more beautiful, content would be more qualitative.
What about all those youtubers that couldn't exist without ads ?
99.99999% of them are crap. The youtube frontpage is a trash can.
A minority is good, but in the new adsless society, some of them would survive in a different way. Some would not, but the benefits are more important. Just like the US didn't keep thralls because "think of the economy".
Finally, the ads lead to websites to promote engagement at all cost, which fuels fake news, outrages, and tribalism on social medias. Ads are a burden to the human species.
And I say that... as a person who gets a lot of revenue from ads.
> Nobody has a problem with small decent ads without tracking
I do. When I want to see products, I'll explicitly ask for them. Nobody is allowed to grab my attention unsolicited. I have attention deficit, it's hard enough to focus as it is and I really don't need entitled company thinking it's okay to just hijack it at their convenience. I really couldn't care less about their "legitimate business interests" or whatever.
When email users do it, we call it spam. When applications do it, we call it focus stealing. Advertising is just yet another form of abuse that should not be tolerated under any circumstances. If they won't stop, we'll make technology that will make them stop. We don't need to apologize for it or try to reach a compromise with them. Their business model is unacceptable, period.
I HATE the 'modern-web' it is x10 worse on mobile.
You usually have to wait for the trackers, ads, popups, accept-popups,newsletters signups etc. I basically cant view 60% of the webpages google recommends for me ony android mobile. The other 40% is usually just super thin seo content :/
I just finished reading the Gemini Protocol specs. I really hope something like this takes off and there will be a second 'silo/community' running alongside the modern web.
I don't use uBO just for ads, I have tons of custom cosmetic filters to block all the god damn always-on-top video players, popups, fullscreen fade outs, annoying sidebars, non-ad animations, fonts, etc.
Or use firefox focus which is faster ime and while not as aggressive in filtering as uBO does a good job and saves nothing beyond current session (cookies, ...)
Whoever designed those video players that autoplay and follow you when you scroll down and give you no option to turn off that behavior... that kind of evilness is actually admirable.
through sheer scale of reach of the plugin, protecting our mental health from intrusive ads in our subconscious more than work done by 10s of thousands of therapists
I have recently switched to AdGuard as a system-wide blocker on all my devices since uBlock will be unusable on Chromium browsers due to them blocking MV2 extensions in 2023.
While still a good product, the UI is nowhere near the quality of uBlock Origin, nor are the options which are available to the user.
Ever since I heard about AdGuard Home I never looked back. I have a raspberry pi 4 serving all dns requests from every electronic at my house for 215 days of uptime now without any issues. Browsing the web seems faster and cleaner ever since.
Well, all dns except that over ipv6, DOH, DOT, software using a separate resolver hard-coded to a specific ip... The amount of work to force dns to your dns server these days is nuts.
I use a pi-hole and these days I have to:
- block dns advertisement of my ISP's dns server for ipv6 (which, there's no UI for that on my router so i have to edit the config by hand)
- maintain a list of dns over https ips and block them in my firewall (since mitming this traffic is a huge pain)
- force all traffic to port 853 to my pi and setup a masquerade for that traffic so the client doesn't know
- force all traffic to port 53 to my pi and setup a masquerade for that traffic so the client doesn't know
Apple introduced content blocking in Safari in iOS 9 with privacy in mind. Essentially, content blockers started off as filter lists that Safari would use. Even with the more recent support for WebExtensions, this wouldn’t allow uBlock Origin because uBO gets to see every network request made, intercept it, match the requests with the blocking rules and prevent or allow them. Granted that uBO is trustworthy and has never siphoned off browsing behavior to other systems. But that risk exists with almost every extension of this kind on other browsers.
I use Firefox with uBO, and am not supportive of Apple’s position on not allowing uBO. But I see the value in controlling what information browser extensions can see, capture and possibly exfiltrate.
Click the article, it's one of the first lines. But to save you the click it was due to a Chess match he played against Mozilla in '18, they are still bitter about losing
Performance and battery life were my worries when I tried ad blocking apps on iOS. So far I've been very happy with Lockdown Privacy, which when active, consumes 5% of the battery. In exchange, I barely see ads even inside apps. If only it had as much filter lists as uBlock Origin.
Every time I use the "YouTube" app on my elderly relatives TV and see how often it is interrupted with adverts I count my blessings that this add-on exists.