• 2 Posts
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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 11th, 2023

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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)


  • 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 as filtering instructions get more out of date, the addon’s privacy protections will also fail.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.



  • 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.


  • 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.






  • 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.


  • 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