Cool!
And thank you for your service to the Internet!
Block any outgoing connection you don't trust instead of simply taking some 3rd party list with URLs, unverified, no quality control etc, and only blacklist these KNOWN bad urls.
Ad parties don't sit still, they don't keep their ads on the same url when they found out they are blocked or maybe already preventive rotate through new urls etc.
In the end you'll end up with some bizar long list which has to be checked for every url you visit etc etc. This will be a performance hog, and if you cant imagine that, then your list isn't long enough yet.
Use proper egress filtering, allow what you know, and don't allow what you don't know, not just what some 3rd party put on a list.
My advice for you in 2018.
For ""Block by default" is a usability nightmare."
yes it is for a week or 2, but I prefer usability nightmare then a safety nightmare.
uBlock Origin allows you to block yourself any outgoing connection to servers you do not trust, including working in default-deny mode if you want[1].
In any case, those filter lists are maintained by dedicated volunteers[2], their work is way under-appreciated, because contrary to what you state, these volunteers spend a whole lot of time ensuring everything work as expected so that in the end all non-technical users who wouldn't be able to deal with default-deny mode can also be protected.
* * *
[1] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Blocking-mode:-medium...
[2] https://github.com/easylist/easylist/commits/master https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uAssets/commits/master
I have been using uBlock Origin for years and it's one of those things that just works. Turning it off in those rare moments it needs to be off is a bleak reminder of the state of the internet. Why would I want to go through the hassle of managing all of this work by myself?
A massive THANK YOU to the individuals behind uBlock - You literally make the internet tolerable for me.
It's like putting all _caught_ pedofiles in a jail, and then saying children can roam the streets free and in safety...
Negativity usually bills itself as realism, but that doesn't make it so.
Stating it will be a full time job is such an overstatement, i'd almost call it a blatant lie. Your mom is on FB, YT, and maybe a handful of other sites daily (so no popups for those or decisions to take there). You could also monitor and log and then apply block/allow rules later for when you visit for coffee or dinner. (if you want to reply something here about unprotected in that period, think about all the new bad urls not on such url lists yet for apps like uBlock)
And i only get positive feedback how well it works and how much they learned about websites and other internet services, the information leaked to 3rd parties, cooperation between companies. Even scared some contacts i have from social media like FB, Instagram and alike. Makes them a lot more aware of what is going on instead of giving them a list of known crap urls, again, maintained by some samaritan in an attic. Nice effort, i just think its fair from sufficient nowadays on the internet. In the time it takes these people to update the list, 1000 new crap urls have been registered.
And doesn't take that much time, sure you have to put in some more time then, simply telling people to install uBlock (or similar) and tell them that they are safe and secure with this application. I prefer to educate properly instead of just throwing some half *ed solution their way and having them figure out it fails in the end anyway.
Another note, the internet is broken, broken in many ways. And _you_ know this else you would not suggest any protection, apps like uBlock.
Right, and how is that supposed to happen in practice? Manually inspect every CDN domain loaded on every page that you visit? Or just live without scripts, images, fonts, video?
Basically, yes, see uMatrix. It's not for non-web-devs, I feel, but if you can easily recognize unnecessary connections it works pretty well.
I don't know. I'm not a web dev (x), and I went from "dafuq?" to "I get it, this is so cool" in two minutes flat. Let's just say it sure helps if you're a technical person, not j. random user.
(x) but engineer/CS, tbh
edit: remove accidental markup
Certainly, it just can take more time to sift through the list of tens of domains and deciding to allow or ban each connection if you don't already know which connections tend to be needed and which are not.
Still, it's perfectly doable for anyone if you experiment a little, and it's done once per site, so the time needed for this shouldn't be an issue. It's just that people working with this stuff will have an easier time using uMatrix - which is what I really meant in my comment above :)
(Just kidding, I'm actually a foolish middle-aged man. But I'm talking about my inner bright child.)
I find recognizing unnecessary connections to be the painful part.
They might burn some CPU cycles but surely the ads themselves burn much more.
no i don't work for or get paid in anyway by little snitch, i just love the product.
Imaging you start off with Safari being unable to connect to anything. Little Snitch is running in Alert Mode and it asks you to decide on every outbound network connection. You visit Facebook. LS asks if Safari can talk to facebook.com on port 443. You say "yes, always". What about "server893.ads.facebook.com:443"? You say "make that .ads.facebook.com and block it forever". Do this through the few dozen prompts you'll get on this first visit when you visit a resource-heavy domain. Now hit reload and pick up a few more (like maybe this time you'll get a connection to a video CDN that you didn't see last time). Repeat until the requests taper off to nothing.
Now put Little Snitch into "Silent Deny" mode and enjoy your Safari that can only view ad-free Facebook.
Note: I don't really recommend doing this because I'd rather be doing almost literally anything else, but if I had to set up a social media kiosk for a relative, that's how I'd go about it.
I do highly enjoy telling Little Snitch to deny connections to all the non-port-80/443 ad trackers. I can't imagine a single legitimate reason why I'd want Safari to connect to moatads.com:843.
Specifically, scrolling on Firefox feels very laggy. Also, Firefox doesn't play videos on same tab. That becomes very frustrating.
- This helps with all types of ads for many news and reading,
- the big benefit is: opening all youtube videos on Firefox with ublock origin in order to get rid of youtube ads -
A lot of websites will still look weird but still a million times better when you don't have popup windows poking your eye, also reading mode is a god send.
I started using Brave about a year ago and I love it. The only thing I'm missing is syncing my bookmarks between Brave on my phone and Chrome on my computer, but a year later and it hasn't bothered me enough to find a fix.
> We choose Adblock as it is one of the most popular. It is also possible to use Adblock Plus or uBlock, as the way they operate is exactly the same — HTTP filters and HTML element hiding.
AdBlock in the Chrome store uses Adblock Plus filtering engine[1], so to say the way these two "operate is exactly the same" makes sense.
However uBlock Origin uses its own code base, and is far better equipped than AdBlock/Adblock Plus to deal with anti-blockers, so to say that the way uBO operates is "exactly the same" is a stretch.
* * *
[1] Since version 3.0: https://help.getadblock.com/support/discussions/topics/60000... -- it's not explicitly stated in the announcement but this code repo mirror shows it: https://github.com/kzar/watchadblock/blob/c5f5b7f535182d6774...