Advice Request Which block lists do you use with UBO, AG and ABP ?

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floalma

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Apr 5, 2015
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These are among others the one I'm using from my different browsers FF, Brave and Chrome based.

AdGuard Annoyances

Peter Lowe’s Ad and tracking server list

Top500 most used ad & trackers in West Europe & North America

http : // vxvault . net/URL_List . php

Block-EU-Cookie-#####-List

I don't care about cookies

Online Malicious URL Blocklist

Reduce Google nuisances on search, maps and youtube


Which block list do you use for now ?

How do you cope with the overlapped lists ? Do you compare, cleaned your list ?

Do you make your own customized list ?

Any comment or contribution will be great, thank you all.
 
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Lenny_Fox

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@JasonUK
Thanks I am using EU_US_most common filter only in my AG setup, I will add CNAME block, great addition 👍👍

! Block third-party requests to HTTP (insecure) websites
!
||HTTP://*$third-party,~stylesheet,~image,~media
!
! Block send beacon, hyperlink auditing and cloudflare cookie
||*$ping,object,cookie=__cfduid
!
! --- Block CNAME trackers not covered by EasyPrivacy (Removes need for Frogeye 1st-Party Tracker Filterlist)
/id?d_visid_ver=$~xmlhttprequest
/id?d_visid_

P.S. I discovered spoiler :)
 
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Lenny_Fox

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@security123
I am not using Smartscreen (send plain text link) nor Edge internal anti-tracking, instead using AG with Malware protection (is Google Safe browsing) and EU_US_most_common. Reason for blocking cloudflare cookie is that I use Cloudflare DNS in Edge and I don't trust Cloudflare storing my IP-adress as a cookie.
 
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F

ForgottenSeer 85179

Reason for blocking cloudflare cookie is that I use Cloudflare DNS in Edge and I don't trust Cloudflare storing my IP-adress as a cookie.
With all respect, that doesn't make sense as they already have your IP then.
If you don't trust them why did you use then their DNS ?

CNAME blocking:
NextDNS already cover that ;) to need to break things at browser level.
 

FALLEN

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Feb 13, 2015
112
Here's mine:

Untitled.png

+
AGH.png
 

Lenny_Fox

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With all respect, that doesn't make sense as they already have your IP then.
If you don't trust them why did you use then their DNS ?
Cloudflare is also a Content Delivery Network,, where website content is mirrored to reduce page load times.

According to Cloudflare the _cfduid cookie is for identifying individual visitors privately and helps protect against malicious visitors and although cookie lifetime is 30 days containing a hashed end user IP, it will not be used for "for cross-site tracking" or "merging various _cfduid identifiers into a profile" or "correspond to any user ID in a Customer’s web application".

I trust Cloudflare does what it promises with its privacy policy, only there have been to many cases (Avast lately) of wider interpretations of privacy policies. Since I have no hacking skills, there is no need saving my unique ID anyway, so I am not frustating Cloudflare's CDN functionality while using their DNS service for free. Free to often means paid with my usage data.
 

Gandalf_The_Grey

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@SeriousHoax don't get me started 😉

Adguard filters are better maintained than Easylist filters, so even for uBO users I would advice to use AdGuard block lists instead Easylist/Fanboy. With three filters AG should give you a good internet experience (in terms of website breakage, advertisement hassle and tracking concerns). What you will miss are the rules which are practically never triggered (left 'normal' filter rules count, right 'optimized' filter rules count).

View attachment 249356


Take in mind that AG has a paid service (expanding to dns/vpn service) which provides them the means to maintain their filters, so imagine how much dead wood and stale rules are present in less well maintained blocklists. User initiated blocklists work well for ADDING new rules, not for REMOVING stale rules. For removing stale rules you need an AUTOMATED process (check whether the website is still up and running).

So for starters what you miss out are stale rules, blocking dead-non existent websites or links to those dead websites.

In an old scientific study (see my thread about adblock innivation) adblockers with few rules (Ghostery, Disconnect) were as effective as large blocklist adblockers (AdBlock and uBlockOrigin). In this study Adguard was not included, but AdGuard with optimized filters is somewhere in between, a smart medium sized blocklist adblocker. Reason why those small blocklists are as effective is explained by Peter Low "The ad banners that you see all over the web are stored on servers. Stopping your computer communicating with another computer can be quite simple. So, if you have a list of the servers used for ad banners, it's easy to stop ad banners even getting to your browser" (link to source).

Large blocklist try to block ads on the websites you VISIT, small blocklist try to block LINKS to the servers (of ad and tracking networks) on the websites you visit. The advantage of focussing on the networks serving the websites you visit is because they are in numbers only a fraction of the number of websites in the world (Because it takes a lot of means (money and people) to setup and maintain these ad and tracking networks).

Also advertising delivery is handled by brokers in between companies wanting to advertise and website owners offering advertising space. For website owners it saves time and cost to let the brokers handle the advertising on their websites. For companies wanting to advertise it is way simpler and effective to pay a limited number of brokers for actual ad-VIEWS, in stead of millions of website owners for ad-PLACEMENT. So focussing on websites you visit is putting the horse behind the cart. It simply makes no sense, because it is not how the advertising industry is organized. This is the reason small blocklists are as effective as large blocklists when visiting the top 10 million websites (e.g. websites with more than 300 visitors per day).

In theory large blocklist are more effective for niche websites, because they focus on the websites people visit. The achilles heel of focusing on the website people visit, is that a blocklist might contain a lot of block-rules for website you will never visit and more likely won't have any block rules for the websites you do visit.

This is where the optimized rules feature of AdGuard comes in. Some people allow AdGuard to collect statistics about ad filter usage. The rules which are nearly never triggered by ALL AdGuard users allowing "send statistics about ad filter usage" are NOT included in the optimized filters. So when AdGuard has a lot of users in your region, you probably miss out on NOTHING!

When you live in an exotic country with few AdGuard users, chances you miss out of something is still zero to nothing. As shown by the picture optimizing rules cut out around 70K rules. Considering there are around 400 million active websited (link to source), chance any of those dropped 70K rules cover one of the 400M niche websites is only 0.0175%. A blog published by Brave Browser team claims that "over 90% of EasyList appears to provide little benefit for common browsing cases" (link to source). Therefore it is proabably GOOD PRACTICE TO INCLUDE THE EasyList Blocklist in YOUR LANGUAGE when available. @SeriousHoax I could not find ABP-blocklist in Bengali.

When you don't believe me (I am one of bad guys working in digital marketing), think about this: Mister GorHill has proven with benchmarks that performance is not an issue when using large blocklists (well he convienantly forgot to take blocklist load time into consideration). When performance is not the issue and large blocklist are as good as uBO-fanboys say WHY WOULD FIREFOX and MICROSOFT use the small blocklists of Disconnect?

Why would those companies whose core business is browsing (Firefox) and cloud based computing (Microsoft) offer an inferior anti-tracking mechanism when they need to provide potential users a compelling reason to switch from Google to Firefox or Edge? When large blocklists really would be more effective and the best adblocker (uBlockOrigin) according to large blocklist fans is open source, why not use uBO as build-in adblocker with all those large blocklist?
Do you still use or need the list from Kees in this setup?

Personally I also added the two (small) filterlists from Yuki2718:
adguard
Do NOT check the "Trusted" box if you subscribe these!
Because not needed. Trusted filters can inject javascript into pages and thus can potentially be risky. Of course I'm not going to do anything nasty with any of my filters, but imagine what if my Github account was hacked. I'd like to encourage a basic security practice.

AdGuard Social media Plus (social-plus.txt)​

AdGuard Social media filter tends to rely too much on cosmetic filters IMHO. This filter consists of network filters only and complements Social media filter.
  • ||connect.facebook.net^*/sdk.js
  • ||platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
  • ||static.evernote.com^$third-party
are commented out as some people will need them. Those who are sure don't need them can add them to User Rules without the initial !.
Exclusion:
  • Follow buttons & comment widgets - they can be useful to some people and often Social media filter doesn't block them.
Subscribe View List

AdGuard Tracking Protection Plus (tracking-plus.txt)​

AdGuard Tracking Protection filter is probably the least false-positive prone anti-tracking list; however, it comes with its own cost of less coverage which this filter aims to complement. Some of bug reports are commented out but you can add them to User Rules without the initial !. Some rules are taken from EasyPrivacy after I confirmed they 1) are actually in use, 2) are not covered by AdGuard Tracking Protection filter, and 3) apparently haven't caused false positives on my regular browsing.

Screenshot 2020-11-20 134929.png
 

Lenny_Fox

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@Gandalf_The_Grey

I used the three basic list of AdGuard as an example. The AG config shown is the one I have installed on my girlfirend's laptop. It is a safe config breaking no websites. I don't want her getting mad because something did not work. In her config I don't use Kees1958 EU-US_most_used (but added the Dutch Easylist)

No offense to @security123 but Kees1958 lists are 'only' maintained by two people. To the EU_US_most_common credits there were only a handful false positives and they were solved quickly. The two-man-band maintenance is the reason I did not use them on my girlfriend's PC.

As a digital marketeer I fully endorse the idea behind Kees1958/BeerIsGood blocklist, that is why I am using it personally (without other blocklists). I don't notice any differences using my Desktop or her Laptop, so I would say you don't need them both.

When you don't trust small blocklists, I would stick to AG-only blocklists for the bulk of the blocking and optionally add narrow focus (small) blocklists like the ones you mentioned from Yuki and your local language Easylist blocklist (e.g. Dutch easylist).
 
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F

ForgottenSeer 85179

@Gandalf_The_Grey
Kees1958 lists are 'only' maintained by two people. To the EU_US_most_common credits there were only a handful false positives and they were solved quickly. The two-man-band maintenance is the reason I did not use them on my girlfriend's PC.
Well Kees get the data from e.g. surveys of W3C, W3Tech and the on-line marketing community itself.
That's also the reason why his list get's (mainly) only updated yearly.

As a digital marketeer I fully endorse the idea behind Kees1958/BeerIsGood blocklist, that is why I am using it personally (without other blocklists). I don't notice any differences using my Desktop or her Laptop, so I would say you don't need them both.
My blocklist is Kees' list, build for Edge internal tracking protection.
I also switch back using original Kees' list in AdGuard as sadly the Edge feature you posted (thanks again!) get restored at every Edge major update.

Thanks for your feedback! Highly appreciate it <3
 

plat

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Sep 13, 2018
1,793

This seems to be a Chrome-specific issue. The combined two Fanboy "Easy" lists have over 68,000 entries between them. I have the lists as they cause no performance issues whatsoever. But for those looking to streamline things....? Def. a learning experience for me.

Here's what Fanboy.nz says.

Source
 

plat

Level 29
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Sep 13, 2018
1,793
I would say bigger the list, the more false positives and broken pages you find,
Yes, we are cutting out the redundancy, dead-wood and filter-list bloat for some months now. :)

Personally, I went from nearly 500, 000 entries to 160,000 and counting down. Now, since the recent browser update of Edge (which breaks things worse than any list), I'm looking further for ways to bypass the undermining of my extensions. Basic users like me are also looking to create rules "on the fly" utilizing uBO's inbuilt tools--with only partial success. :mad:

The saying nowadays is "uBlock Origin works better in Firefox" and that just irks the hell out of me. It's a work in progress: if I look to replace huge blocklists with a subscription DNS, my browsing is slowed down--just one example.

Happy days when monopoly-Google is detached from our online backs! :love: For me, that's what this is really about.
 
F

ForgottenSeer 78429

I am using these filter list in AdGuard Home.
Screenshot 2020-11-24 143329.png


But I am not sure which filter lists i should use in uBlock Origin. Can some one tell me which lists contain most of the cosmetic filtering rules and list to block youtube, Instagram and Facebook page ads because probably DNS adblocking can't block them? Also any advises to add or remove lists in AdGuard Home?
 

SeriousHoax

Level 47
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Mar 16, 2019
3,630
I am using these filter list in AdGuard Home.
View attachment 249696

But I am not sure which filter lists i should use in uBlock Origin. Can some one tell me which lists contain most of the cosmetic filtering rules and list to block youtube, Instagram and Facebook page ads because probably DNS adblocking can't block them? Also any advises to add or remove lists in AdGuard Home?
Adguard Home is mainly host based so EasyList, EasyList cookie etc won't work. Use Adguard DNS filter if you're not using it as your system DNS. Add this Dandelion Sprout's AdGuard Home Compilation List filter. It's specially made for Adguard Home. It had few false positives 7-8 months ago and I haven't tried it since so keep an eye on the blocked log.
FilterLists | Subscriptions for uBlock Origin, Adblock Plus, AdGuard, ...
Don't add too many filters. For filters in uBO you can check @Gandalf_The_Grey's list above which is pretty lite and effective.
 

Lenny_Fox

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Converterted my girlfriend's laptop to EU_US_most_common_trackers so changed her setup to uBlockOrigin.

1606236345489.png

1606236279397.png

I attached het My Filters as text file (includes youtube which is not covered by EU_US_most_common_trackers). When you copy all rules containing youtube out of the optimized filters, I get around 100 rules. When I look at the logger only a handfull seem to be really used (so even optimized filters contain a lot of stale rules)

1606237077502.png
 

Attachments

  • mijn-ublock-statische-filters.txt
    2.7 KB · Views: 416
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Lenny_Fox

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@security123

When you want to use these rules for adguard you need to replace uBo scriptlet with AG scriptlet (syntax is a little different)

e.g. youtube uBO scriptlets
Code:
youtube.com##+js(set-constant, playerResponse.adPlacements, undefined)
youtube.com##+js(set-constant, ytInitialPlayerResponse.adPlacements, undefined)
youtube.com##+js(json-prune, [].playerResponse.adPlacements [].playerResponse.playerAds playerResponse.adPlacements playerResponse.playerAds adPlacements playerAds)

would become AG scriptlets

Code:
youtube.com#%#//scriptlet('set-constant' playerResponse.adPlacements, undefined)
youtube.com#%#//scriptlet('set-constant' ytInitialPlayerResponse.adPlacements, undefined)
youtube.com#%#//scriptlet('json-prune', [].playerResponse.adPlacements [].playerResponse.playerAds playerResponse.adPlacements playerResponse.playerAds adPlacements playerAds)

Import attached file for my User Rules in Adguard (I tried them out on AG and replaced uBO with AG on gitfriends laptop).
 

Attachments

  • Adguard.txt
    2 KB · Views: 359
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