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WhyJiffie

@ WhyJiffie @sh.itjust.works

Posts
2
Comments
2309
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • Firefox is now the last major browser that still supports uBlock Origin

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  • Considering I'm not being tracked in any noticeable way

    lol. can you give me a few examples when tracking is noticeable? because I don't know any, other than when sites show me consent prompts and privacy policies with obvious lies.

    How is me trying to understand the impact of the mechanisms used by uBO vs those used by, say, Ghostery, "arguing in bad faith? WTF are you talking about?

    how? you do not seem to be trying to understand this.

    Because I get the technical details

    you are wrong. you do not get the technical details. Otherwise you would not be saying stupid things like "I'm not being tracked in any noticeable way".

    I have had enough. I will assume you did not find the information yourself because your favorite search engine only gives useless AI slop instead of information, so here is most things you need to know: https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/wiki/Frequently-asked-questions-(FAQ)

  • Firefox is now the last major browser that still supports uBlock Origin

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  • So it's not a privacy issue, it's an ad issue. Which doesn't show, it's blocked.

    I don't understand what did you intend to respond to with this. as filtering instructions get more out of date, the addon's privacy protections will also fail.

    What does uBO do different here?

    on youtube? if you fire up firefox, install uBO, ocannote uBO logger and open a youtube video page, you'll see what it does. I don't know what it does different because I don't happen to have an itemized list of what does uBO lite do, but I suppose it has a logger function too, and you can compare it.

    uBO mostly protects against tracking here. automatically selects no in the google data sharing dialogue, employs lots of scriptlets (documented on the wiki) to set variables used by youtube, to unfuck youtube in other technical ways, and to block behaviors it shouldn't even think about doing (why does it need a scriptlet that blocks writing the clipboard??), blocks ad video segments, hides annoying things from the UI because I have lists enabled that do that.

    but there is something I can confidently say it does differently: it always works from up to date, detailed filterlists. lite cannot do that.

    Just FYI - that only happens to me on YouTube every once in a while. Like, three times this year for a day or two.

    so far releases go public within a day, but don't think that will go so smoothly when google gets the urge again to fuck up ad blockers, and addon uodate review suddenly takes days to weeks, or they find some idiotic non-existent problem as the play store team loves to do with open source apps.

  • Fairphone Is Finally Selling Its Repairable Phone in the US

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  • I am already using a custom rom that is somewhat similar, but there are a dozen of unique features in graphene and nothing else that I have listed in another comment in this thread.

  • Fairphone Is Finally Selling Its Repairable Phone in the US

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  • initially the founder had issues with an old project member, who founded copperhead os, a competing rom. allegedly he took all the code from graphene for use in copperhead, without attribution, and it even involved money some way. these two were suing each other for a long time, there was brigading in chat rooms and forums and whatnot. then somehow the rage extended to other projects too, like f-droid and calyx os, which they also accused of brigading and more, so that anyone mentioning calyx os in graphene rooms gets banned from there on sight.

    I don't have enough information to be certain about which projects were actually hostile to graphene and which not, but people have been calling the graphene founder paranoid for thinking everyone wants to destroy their project. the founder was writing a lot on twitter and other places, mostly (but not only) with tye official graohene os account. he stepped down from being the project leader a year or two ago.

  • Fairphone Is Finally Selling Its Repairable Phone in the US

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  • While that is true yes, their whole brand is built on being secure.

    but if calyx would take their features they would be screaming loudly how unfair that is

    If they release to Fairphone it won't be long before the news is flooded with "Police easily bypass supposedly secure GraphoneOS"

    that part I can understand. maybe release it under a different name, but they are probably not interested in that.

    their code is open source, but they were so hostile with every other part of the free android community that nobody wants to deal with the shitstorm that would happen if they took patches from graphene.

  • Fairphone Is Finally Selling Its Repairable Phone in the US

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  • once again, that is completely false. I'm fed up with all the people pretending that all grapheneos adds is hardware security.

  • Fairphone Is Finally Selling Its Repairable Phone in the US

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  • Entirely lacking disk encryption for typical users due to not having a secure element is a pretty major flaw.

    all android devices have been using file based disk encryption since several Android versions now.

    the others are all good to have security features, but lets be honest, a proper sensors permission toggle does not require any of that, just like a dozen other features only GrapheneOS has. storage scopes, contact scopes, pin scrambling and the requirement of fingerprint + pin for unlocking the lock screen, duress pin, the user profile improvements

    all this does not require any hardware support.

    https://grapheneos.org/features

  • Fairphone Is Finally Selling Its Repairable Phone in the US

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  • not any, but some benefits, and GrapheneOS maintainers are perfectionists

  • Firefox is now the last major browser that still supports uBlock Origin

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  • I just loaded up YouTube and didn't see a single call to a known ad server, so this seems to be false.

    of course you didn't. on youtube ads are not served from different domains. have you ever heard about pihole not being able to block youtube ads? that's why. every ad is literally a video uploaded to youtube, it is even possible to watch them as videos, with their own video page.

    Also: the CPU usage of loading even a couple MB-worth of ads is negligible compared to the overall resource hungriness of Chromium.

    not always the case, differs by ad and ad framework, but the memory savings are still significant. and the difference matters more on weak computers, old computers, battery powered computers and when you are on a metered network.

    I did notice that every now and again YouTube would block me from using it due to detecting the adblocker, but is that an inherent disadvantage of Mv3?

    I don't know if that's what causes that. but not being able to update filterlists independently means that nobody can react quickly to when a website starts detecting a content blocker, or when ads start reappearing. the needs to wait for the next addon update, which may take multiple days.

    And why wouldn't the extension developers then embed the updated filter lists and just release them as extension updates? Does Google limit the frequency of those?

    because all addon updates go through a review. the effectiveness of it is largely debatable, but it delays updates significantly.

  • Firefox is now the last major browser that still supports uBlock Origin

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  • Let me rephrase then: cookie prompt blocking capabilities are not tied to the Manifest version

    never said otherwise.

    But we're discussing the ad-blocking features, because these are the ones affected by Mv3, no?

    no. that is not the only feature affected by Mv3. it is just the most noticeable feature affected.

    Define "not so effective". What's "effectiveness" in this case?

    ublock has many tools to defuse tracking mechanisms. it can fake browser mechanisms, it can stop scripts when they do a certain thing, it can replace entire javascript functions. it can modify outgoing network requests and incoming responses to them in many ways, which privacy badger does not implement. I don't want to include multiple pages of text here, so please go through the wiki pages of the uBlock Origin github repository, because it details all the capabilities and technical details.

    but as even the main uBlock Origin maintainer says, the addon wouldn't be worth anything without all the community sourced filter lists with quick fixes and specific blocking instructions for lots of websites. compared to that, privacy badger does not use filterlists. it can only do things that can apply to any website without breaking it, and that limits the options a lot.

    OK, but again: what's the difference for the end-user? Does it impact resources utilisation? Website loading times? Reactivity? I don't see a difference in how my uBO browser behaves vs how my Ghostery browser behaves, so what am I losing because of the Mv3 switch?

    I'm starting to think that you might be not arguing in good faith. but it is certain that we are going in circles and I'm wasting my time. you should look up the wast documentation of uBlock Origin and you will get all the answers, if you are genuinely interested. there are probably even technical comparisons between uBO and lite from the maintaners

  • Why is my home server using so much RAM for cache + buffer?

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  • also: I did not realize until now, and also it might just he a coincidence, but it looks like as if your max swap usage with plenty of cached memory would be 10% of your RAM. I wonder if it would top out at half of that with a swappiness setting of 5. if you try it, load back all your swapped memory first.

  • Why is my home server using so much RAM for cache + buffer?

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  • cache is good, but you shouldn't have that much swap usage with that overall memory utilization. 8t seems the kernel is making a decision to move a significant amount of memory to swap to have just a little bit more cache. that could make sense in some situations, especially with lots of RAM and a slow disk that is frequently accessed.. but probably not on your system. I see you have already reduced swappiness to 10, so maybe all that was snapped out is really rarely used memory, but I wouldn't want even that on an SSD so you could try setting swappiness to 0. that way it should only use the swap when there is no more cache to free, I think, but the behaviour of this sysctl was not always clear like that.

    https://docs.kernel.org/admin-guide/sysctl/vm.html?highlight=swappiness#swappiness

  • Firefox is now the last major browser that still supports uBlock Origin

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  • OK, sure, but what are the actual, real-life consequences of that?

    uBlock Origin and any other effective content blocker had that as its most important weapon, without exaggeration. it has many other techniques for specific circumstances, but preventing to load the ad scripts, and preventing network requests that send back data to the advertising company, are universally a powerful tool.

    I don't see any ads online. So ad-blocking still works. What doesn't work?

    you don't see them because addons can still insert unlimited cosmetic tweaks. CSS snippets that make specific elements hidden. but the ads are still loaded, consuming network and CPU resources, and the ad framework still collects usage, interaction and device data.

    also, the addons now can't regularly update the lists even for what cosmetic tweaks to apply. google has decided it does not allow addons in their addon store that fetch filterlists from the network. this means these addons need to embed the lists in themselves. list updates are released much less frequently, and can have several days delay while google decides whether the updated version contains something malicious or otherwise unacceptable to their policies. compared to that, uBlock Origin on Firefox updates the lists every day by default, with no delay, as it fetches the lists directly from their websites.

  • Firefox is now the last major browser that still supports uBlock Origin

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  • Not part of any adblocker. Some, like Ghostery, have a separate mechanism to auto-reject these. I switched from uBO to Ghostery because uBO wasn't doing anything against those.

    this is false. and instead of just claiming so, here is proof: there are built-in (but disabled by default) blocklists specialized for cookie prompts and such

    That's not an adblock feature

    and as I said, uBO is not just an ad blocker, so saying xy ad blocker can replace it well is false.

    and there are hundreds of other extensions that handle that, like PrivacyBadger

    except that not really. Because again, the required browser APIs were removed, and even before that, privacy badger was not so effective

    Also: privacy related stuff is not affected by Manifest v3, no?

    everything is effected that:

    • needs to block network requests, including loading of certain site scripts
    • depends on an up to date list of things to block

  • Firefox is now the last major browser that still supports uBlock Origin

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  • it cannot do all the same if google stripped out the required browser APIs

  • Firefox is now the last major browser that still supports uBlock Origin

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  • I guess you meant the youtube website, but on a TV you won't be able to block youtube ads in the browser either

  • Firefox is now the last major browser that still supports uBlock Origin

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  • librewolf does not have much developer capacity to maintain such heavy patches. you may remember some chromium forks telling they will maintain a patch when google completely removes this API from chromium, but it seems none of them will follow through. I can't really fault them because it is likely a gargantuan task. but I'll fault them for claiming something they (should) have known they can't deliver. but my point is if vivaldi and others can't keep it, how could librewolf?

  • Firefox is now the last major browser that still supports uBlock Origin

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  • if firefox drops manifest v2

    I think they said they will go out of their way to keep the extension APIs in Mv3 that uBlock needs

  • Firefox is now the last major browser that still supports uBlock Origin

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  • only ads on big sites or ads by big providers are blocked. cookie prompts and other annoyances much less, because there is a great variety of them. data mining and hardware fingerprinting cannot even be thwarted anymore.

    sure, if you only care about ads, but not at all about your privacy, it does not mean much to you. personally I would rather see ads (topic based) than give up my privacy, and the complete uBlock Origin is very useful for privacy too.