Adblocking innovation

[Digmor Crusher]

I tried Decentralytes in combination with UBO and Privacy Possum, went to the 25 or so sites I frequent each day, it only blocked anything on 2 sites. Conclusion: I don't need Decentralytes, your mileage may vary of course.

 

[monkeylove]

So far, I've been using the ff. setup since I posted, and it appears that I've gotten rid of most problems concerning broken pages (e.g., videos not playing, etc.) and popups:

- uBO at default settings, but I turned on EasyList Cookie to block the cookie warning popup in some sites; for the mailing list popups, I'll see if the popup blocker button in uBO will work;

- Decentraleyes: so far I had to disable it for two company sites (an ISP and cable service), and the number of blocks only shows up for a few websites;

- PrivacyBadger: I had to disable it for around six sites so far (two magazines, one newspaper, some stores, an ISP, etc.), and the number of blocks also shows up only for a few sites;

- NoScript: disabled

 

[SeriousHoax]

Lenny_Linux, how about Adguard DNS? It's surely the easiest way to block ads related and some tracking related domains system wide. Their list gets updates regularly. Looks like it has around 3K domains at the moment. How does it fair against something like Peter Lowe's list and other similar lists.

https://adguardteam.github.io/AdGuardSDNSFilter/Filters/filter.txt

 

[Lenny_Fox]

DNS filtering has advantage (no resource consumption on device) and disadvantage (no badfilter or allow exception) in case a website breaks.

Peter Low's list is for english language area, what Adguard DNS is for russian.

I am not testing several adblocking techniques, more lookung at the technologie they use. I occasionally brievely test them to understand how their technology works.

 

[SeriousHoax]

Adguard DNS is for russian

This is not correct. Adguard DNS is not tied to any specific region.

 

[Evjl's Rain]

according to my tests with my daily-visited websites, most of the blocks come from:
1hosts (mini)
stevenblacks

sometimes, only 1hosts can block while the rest fail, including the top500 list
I also have other generic filters

 

[Lenny_Fox]

This is not correct. Adguard DNS is not tied to any specific region.

No? What country code is RU? Adguard DNS has 1893 of them

 

[SeriousHoax]

No? What country code is RU? Adguard DNS has 1893 of them

View attachment 234559

I've seen that as well. It has many Russian sites but the number is a lot less than that. Words like "forum, run, trust" all have ru in them but that doesn't mean they are Russian you know
Even with those Russian domains there's a lot of room for over a thousand of other domains.

 

[Lenny_Fox]

I did a search on .ru (dot RU)

 

[SeriousHoax]

Ok, that's a lot then. So, more than 1000 of others. Not too bad.

 

[Terry Ganzi]

I'm getting the same as you on Firefox but not other browsers.
Will try to solve it as i finish what I'm doing.

Seem to be an ublock error cause by the edgekey.net filters, think I'll have to report this one. Seems there's nothing me and you can do about it at the moment.

 

[oldschool]

@monkeylove @Terry Ganzi - Vids played OK on FF here with µBO, and edgekey.net showed as allowed.

 

[Burrito]

Ghostery heuristics seem to work well. It did find to two in-video bumper ads on Dutch websites which are not in Easylist (English + Dutch) filters (the unknown trackers left and right in picture below). What really impressed me was the fact that the second one (on the right) was a first party advertisement. Websites NOS.NL and NU.NL visited with the 'upped' settings.
...
Also because Ghostery filters the parameter and does not block the third-party request to the domain, the chance of breaking a website is much lower. Besides this domain-URL-parameter heuristics filtering mechanism, Ghostery also uses a domain-level blacklist.

I've been trying on Ghostery for a few days. I am very well. I have replaced uBo and Privacy Badger. It works perfectly and I see no contraindications.

So Ghostery is the best, compared to Privacy Possum and Privacy Badger? Or did i read the comments wrong?

Lenny... maybe it was not your intent, but in this post as well as your first big (and good) adblocking post -- I got the feeling that Ghostery seemed to make the most sense to you. Apparently I'm not the only one who possibly thought that... I'd ask you to be more opinionated about what you think -- as most of us will never put in the time you have on this topic. So we want to know what you think.

So.... do the think that Ghostery is possibly 'a best' (not narrowing it down to 'The best') product?

In your opinion, should I spend time learning and tweaking Ghostery rather than AdGuard?

And good thread, good info..... thanks.

..consider me an undercover agent, spying on behalf MT-forum .

Wow, our own MT spy.

We are the Big Time now.

Oh, but hold on.... spies and spying are antithetical to our MT community values. We want to round up spies, and throw them in the river.***

Our new member in this thread captures it well:

But ok.... since it's Lenny, I think it's probably ok. Maybe even a good thing.. I for one support Lenny's spy adventures.


***Not an actual threat to throw actual spies like @ForgottenSeer 58943 in the river..

 

[Lenny_Fox]

@Burrito My opinion is undecided, because there is no one-serves-all-uses-best-solution


1. For people favoring an 'innovative heuristics' out of the box solution - Ghostery
When you enable all categorie except Essential and Video Players, it blocks a lot without breaking websites. Because Cliqz is a digital marketing agency, it is distrusted by many privacy aware pc users. Ghostery provides ' offerings and rewards' (like Brave) as an alternative to Google advertisements (it is relatively easy to opt out). As long as it is possible to opt-out, it is a good option, since it uses the most advanced technology.

2. For people favoring ' classic blocklist' out of the box solution - AdGuard
AdGuard has the most accurate and easiest to use "element hiding feature' - ' block missed ads on this webpage' feature. On top of that Adgaurd's maintains its own blocklists and has an option to use ' optimized filters'. Although AdGuard uses classic blocklists, it deals with the two main disadvantages of classic blocklists (stale/dead rules and rules which are never triggered).

3. For people favoring to block third-party - uBlockOrigin
When you like to block third-party javascript and (i)frames and selectively enable (trusted) websites, then uBlockOrigin is your best choice. Only change I would make is to enable Peter's Low and disable all other stuff and enable advanced options to selectively block additional domains on your trusted websites. When blocking 3p by default, it makes no sense to enable many blocklists, since 3p-blocking will do all the muscle work for you.

4. Brave-Edge-Opera users
Why bother to use an adblocker when the build-in adblocker works so well? Initially I used 'balanced-mode' by default in Edge and switched to strict blocking-mode when searching/surfing the web. Now I use strict-mode, because I noticed online banking and booking worked when I had forgotten to turn back to balanced-mode.

5. Geek mode (for dodgy browsing)
When you block 3p-scripts and 3p-frames with uBlockOrigin, you still miss some other potentially tricky third-party stuff like XMLhttp Reguest and Websocket calls. For dodgy browsing it is better to install uMatrix. In Opera I have installed uMatrix with all hostfiles disabled and rule 'matrix-off: * true' While matrix is off, it still shows what is happening on a webpage (geek-mode). For dodgy-browsing I just change ''matrix-off: * true' to 'matrix-off: * false' temporarily and block all 3p-stuff for that session.

 

[Lenny_Fox]

according to my tests with my daily-visited websites, most of the blocks come from:
1hosts (mini)
stevenblacks

sometimes, only 1hosts can block while the rest fail, including the top500 list
I also have other generic filters

Factual information please: which adblocker, which websites?

 

[Evjl's Rain]

Factual information please: which adblocker, which websites?

ublock origin + adguard DNS + 1457 entries in hosts file
websites to watch streaming football loaded with tons of ad, mostly unpopular adservers, in my language or in russian

1 example:

Spoiler: link

Kèo Nhà Cái - Nhận Định Kèo - Trực Tiếp Bóng Đá

my ublock showed 82 blocks

here are some links for testing

Webtest.app - The worst ad implementations

A website speed test tool to compare uBlock Origin with plain Chrome. Check the weight of your ad implementation. Please consider the environment before loading a bunch of ads on your website.

webtest.app

 

[Lenny_Fox]

@Evjl's Rain thanks explains a lot. The top500 is based on W3C tech survey on most used web-technology in the world. This 'of the world' arrogance should be limited to the North America and West-Europe. It is like the world series of baseball (where world is defined as the US and the Toronto Blue Jays ).

Really love the website you posted, need to post a pic (this is with Edge blocking on strict and Javascript blocked on HTTP://* )

 

[SeriousHoax]

I've never seen a website with so many ads But I need to bookmark this website because I myself dive into the free streaming sites every week to watch premier league matches.

 

[Stopspying]

Nor me, I haven't ventured on the internet for ages without any 'protection' is this what its like if you don't block everything? Scary!

I don't read Vietnamese, which it looks like to me, where is the content?! No wonder gambling addiction is such a big social issue.

I've just loaded this site in a private window in FF, most of the adds are flashing and blinking like those flash banner ads we saw on many sites 15 years ago or whenever, its most likely a nightmare for epileptics.

 

[Stopspying]

@Burrito My opinion is undecided, because there is no one-serves-all-uses-best-solution


1. For people favoring an 'innovative heuristics' out of the box solution - Ghostery
When you enable all categorie except Essential and Video Players, it blocks a lot without breaking websites. Because Cliqz is a digital marketing agency, it is distrusted by many privacy aware pc users. Ghostery provides ' offerings and rewards' (like Brave) as an alternative to Google advertisements (it is relatively easy to opt out). As long as it is possible to opt-out, it is a good option, since it uses the most advanced technology.

2. For people favoring ' classic blocklist' out of the box solution - AdGuard
AdGuard has the most accurate and easiest to use "element hiding feature' - ' block missed ads on this webpage' feature. On top of that Adgaurd's maintains its own blocklists and has an option to use ' optimized filters'. Although AdGuard uses classic blocklists, it deals with the two main disadvantages of classic blocklists (stale/dead rules and rules which are never triggered).

3. For people favoring to block third-party - uBlockOrigin
When you like to block third-party javascript and (i)frames and selectively enable (trusted) websites, then uBlockOrigin is your best choice. Only change I would make is to enable Peter's Low and disable all other stuff and enable advanced options to selectively block additional domains on your trusted websites. When blocking 3p by default, it makes no sense to enable many blocklists, since 3p-blocking will do all the muscle work for you.

4. Brave-Edge-Opera users
Why bother to use an adblocker when the build-in adblocker works so well? Initially I used 'balanced-mode' by default in Edge and switched to strict blocking-mode when searching/surfing the web. Now I use strict-mode, because I noticed online banking and booking worked when I had forgotten to turn back to balanced-mode.

5. Geek mode (for dodgy browsing)
When you block 3p-scripts and 3p-frames with uBlockOrigin, you still miss some other potentially tricky third-party stuff like XMLhttp Reguest and Websocket calls. For dodgy browsing it is better to install uMatrix. In Opera I have installed uMatrix with all hostfiles disabled and rule 'matrix-off: * true' While matrix is off, it still shows what is happening on a webpage (geek-mode). For dodgy-browsing I just change ''matrix-off: * true' to 'matrix-off: * false' temporarily and block all 3p-stuff for that session.

Thanks for this summary, informative and useful, particularly for the uMatrix tips, I've played with that numerous times and somehow never really got the hang of it.