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Comment by escobar | Hacker News Reader

> in fact Privacy Badger is based on the ABP code!

This makes me sad. They should have based it on uBlock. ABP is very bloated, and really caused issues for my browsing experience. Not sure if I want to try it after reading that.

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Only the Chrome extension of Privacy Badger uses ABP code. And it only uses it for managing the blocklists it creates. Most of the function of Privacy Badger is run separately from the ABP code, and to be honest my first task for the next version is to get rid of ABP completely :)

Is a Safari extension on your roadmap?

Yes we are definitely thinking about a Safari extension!

Thank you! I'd be very interested in one, as well.

Privacy from OS creators is likely outside of the scope of your project, but I thought I'd pass along recently observing that filtering using the hosts file on older Intel OS X which works for other browsers does not seem to be effective for Safari. I'd long ago read of MS using their own DNS for IE, perhaps Apple is doing something similar? It could be done for performance reasons, but it certainly has privacy implications.

I hope you consider things like blocking loading of webpage icons, and something to deal with data being appended to redirects or even CSS calls when cookies are disabled. I'd read about detecting caching of slightly different colored versions of icons and beacons. Sneaky offsite https accesses (analytics etc) are commonly bundled in a pages JS and NoScript doesn't alert to that. Also, some browsers seem to make accesses to a number of sites on startup, before even going to open a page.

Widening the view from "advertisers" to data-mining contractors that even do drive-bys, it might also be worthwhile to study what could block local data broadcasts by code designed to modulate r.f. noise leaking from our machines. Tune across the A.M. broadcast band on a nearby battery operated radio. I've noted that sometimes there's much more pulsed/bursty noise that doesn't seem to be tied to any obviously more demanding content.

Some of the insideous Ad-Choices content seems to go beyond Flash for hiding data. From the plugin being called when there wasn't any visible content needing it, I think even Quicktime is being used to cache data. It would really help if scripts from one tab could not be accessed by another, and were killed on closing the parent tab. I guess the litterboxing would best be done by a trusted browser? Bring on the worming tablets!

> filtering using the hosts file on older Intel OS X which works for other browsers does not seem to be effective for Safari

Could you clarify this point? I may well simply be misunderstanding, but a quick check of a hosts-blocked site using Safari, in El Capitan, does indeed not resolve (or rather, resolves to localhost, as specified).

Privacy Badger is older than uBlock, it existed before uBlock, so they couldn't have based it on uBlock.

The bigger question today is whether Privacy Badger has value in light of uBlock… I don't know… anyone?

PB has value for people who only want to block trackers and not non-tracking ads. Believe it or not, some people like supporting sites through ads. They just don't like being tracked.

Personally I use uBlock and Privacy Badger. I'm not sure if it's entirely redundant, but I have not had any bad experiences with using both.

"supporting sites through ads" is like supporting your local grocery store through buying bottled water there.

Blocking ads and using reusable water bottles are socially responsible, positive behaviors. Anyone encouraging ads or encouraging bottled water (or worst: encouraging bottled water ads) should be ashamed of the harm they're doing to the world.

As I understand it, uBlock is based on httpswitchboard *2013.

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