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Comment by lorenzhs | Hacker News Reader

To anyone who is concerned by this change, I recommend taking a look at μBlock Origin [1,2]. It's blazingly fast, very flexible, and under active development. I made the switch about a year ago and it has served me very well.

[1] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock [2] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublock-origin/cjpa...

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Just be sure NOT to install "U Block For Origin", by www.z1z2z3z4.com, which is currently the top hit if you search the Chrome extensions store for 'ublock'.

I don't know what it does, but I bet it's not good.

I reported this malware app on both my devices and suggest everyone do the same. It's up to no good.

I also reported this on September 21st, after someone alerted me to this on Twitter.[1]

To think that uBlock Origin itself was suspended from the store back in April because its icon resembled too much that of the other uBlock.[2]

[1] https://twitter.com/gorhill/status/646059022790037504

[2] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/issues/50

It even steals the real uBlock Origin's icon. That's incredibly sketchy.

This is what happens when you have an "app store" with no approval or review process. Google should be cracking down on this, just like those ads they were displaying[1] which would serve up malware-infected versions of Firefox whenever someone searched for "Firefox".

[1] https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/websearch/IFl...

A lot of people lost bitcoins because of the malicious ad problem. Somebody spoofed blockchain.info and stole a bunch of credentials... The entire bitcoin subreddit reported it, yet 2 months later it was back up.

I reported an issue with spoofing on the Google play store about 6 months ago. They told me there was no timeframe for the fix, and no fix yet as far as I'm aware. Maybe if I post it here someone from google will do something...

Just so everyone is aware, you can use any email address as your company email address on the google play store without verification. This means when looking at an app, you see the email is support@legitcompany.com and think it's from them, but it's not.

Frigging Google and it's shitty app stores.

Wow; that's quite malicious.

Question for HN: back in the Napster days, were there likewise Napster clones ("napster"?) that purported to allow peer to peer music downloads but in fact had malware properties?

I don't remember any, but then again, I don't know when I (or most people) would have come across them if such a thing existed. If you wanted Napster, you just went to napster.com and downloaded it. There wasn't a gameable walled-garden app store like you have to go through to get uBlock Origin.

I don't think stuff like that became popular until BitTorrent and other distributed filesharing protocols and clients came about. Lots of people were tricked into installing malware while trying to download warez and porn, though.

There were (and still are) sites hawking anything popular - games, porn, desktop apps, etc. If someone was lucky, they ended up with a bunch of adware slowing their computer down. Worse scenarios involved things like programs which would surreptitiously hang up your dialup connection and redial the equivalent of a 900 number in some country where the scammer could pay off the local police.

Search for something like "flash update" on non-Google/DDG search engines and look at the top ads if you want the general feel.

The only disadvantage, if one could call it that, is that uBlock Origin does not have a version for Safari, which uBlock has. I have read a bit about the controversies between uBlock Origin vs. uBlock. I prefer uBlock Origin wherever available.

uBlock 0.9.5.2 is available for Safari. It looks an awful lot like µBlock Origin on Chrome.

I know uBlock has a version for Safari, which I mentioned in my comment. However, uBlock Origin does not, which I also mentioned. Is there something unclear about what I said above?

Both uBlock Origin and uBlock have similar code bases because they were "born" from the original uBlock (now called uBlock Origin).

Probably that there's a difference between uBlock and uBlock Origin.

My only problem with it is that it blocks Google hangouts and Facebook messenger. I haven't figured out a way to make those work while it's enabled.

Edit: not sure why I'm getting downvoted. Apparently this is an issue, as gorhill mentions, when selecting the leaky IP option. They should make the implications much clearer.

I have not had that problem. I access Hangouts through gmail.com.

Did you click the setting "Prevent WebRTC from leaking local IP addresses"? If so, this will prevent Hangout from working. Reference issue: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/issues/757

Oh I had no idea that would prevent it from working. I wish they made that clear. Thanks!

> I wish they made that clear

I agree, I opened an issue to address this: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/issues/773

Hi gorhill,

Love the app, by the way. It's the single reason I have Firefox on my Android device instead of Chrome.

Do you happen to know WHY the leak breaks Hangouts? I'm assuming Hangouts now leverages the webRTC for connection--that's fine. But I was under the impression that the local IP leak was an unintended side-effect of webRTC, not a 'required component', if you will. Does having that checkbox on effectively break ALL webRTC components, or is it something specific with Hangouts' implementation?

> I was under the impression that the local IP leak was an unintended side-effect of webRTC, not a 'required component'

Same here. My understanding is that the breakage of Hangout is unintended, as the original Chromium issue for the IP address leakage states[1]:

> This change causes WebRTC traffic to be forced through the same path that HTTP traffic would, i.e. the traffic follows the default route to the destination site.

In other words the purpose of the setting is strictly to prevent IP address leakage, not to prevent WebRTC from working.

[1] https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=333752#c...

Oh I had no idea you were the author. Very cool; thanks!

Works great on Firefox for Android, too. No more app store popups!

Hey there! I thought I was the only one :D

That's the straw that broke the camel's back for me, personally. A lot of sites out there were becoming completely unreadable.

For me it was mostly those building up a slow rage, and then an audio ad was what actually pissed me off enough to drop whatever I was doing and install it.

My Problem is that Chrome feels so much more responsive than Firefox, when scrooling.

Recent Firefox releases solve that issue. Try Developer Edition or a Nightly.

I may try that again... I last tried regular release a couple months ago.. some sites and the ads are so horrible in mobile without an ad blocker... but firefox was way too sluggish.

Thanks to Google, those full-screen app store ads are going to go away soon: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2015/09/mobile-fr...

TIL Firefox for Android has addons. I have apparently been living under a rock (called Chrome).

FF for Android just works amazingly poorly for me.. not to mention I really like chrome's tabs now coming up under the task list separately, instead of the tab-like interface.

I tried FF on my phone, simply for uBlock, but it was just too sluggish to actually use.

I've been using it for a month now. Can't recommend it more.

"Can't recommend it enough" is what you meant to say, I want to believe.

I think GP meant it as a compliment, and a synonym of your phrase.

> Can't recommend it more.

"I'm physically incapable of recommending it more often/strongly because I'm using my full strength to recommend it already"

> Can't recommend it enough

"I'm physically incapable of recommending it as frequently/strongly as it deserves because I have exhausted my strength in so doing"

> Can't recommend it anymore

would be positive or negative?

Point taken. There is definitely some ambiguity about your phrase, and GGP's phrase, but in-context I think it was clearly a compliment. :)

yes.

"any more" is ambiguous, "more" is not.

https://xkcd.com/1576/

Do ublock has a mode/plugin that enable me to select objects on a HTML page for custom blocking? For adblock I use Element Hiding Helper which I use rather often.

Yes: http://i.imgur.com/BqN7iCF.jpg

Thanks! I will test that out on my laptop.

yes. there is a eyedropper icon on it's popup and you can use it to select dom elements.

I like uBlock a lot. With default deny 3rd party, or even some other settings enabled, I find it breaks the back button often, or I have to reload the page at google to search again. ANyone else have these issues.

Haven't run across this. What sites?

Actually, the most annoying was on google because it would lock up occasionally and if I typed a new query in, i would have to reload. I was using ublock origin on mozilla firefox. I just upgraded to El Capitan and changed some settings so I will try to give it a go again.

edit: Did you have default deny third party req?

I've been using it for a while in Chromium (a lot), Opera (not as much), and a bit in Safari, and have not had that issue.

Sounds annoying, though.

I haven't the faintest idea how to use it besides just setting it and forgetting it. I tried digging in settings and whitelisting and whatnot but couldn't get it working.

Whitelisting a site is just a matter of pressing the big blue button: it works on a per-site basis.

Yeah that's what I've been doing.

or just stay with Adblock Plus which isn't affected by this change...

Because it was already sold to a dubious company with relations to the Ad industry several years ago, and extorted 30 million US$ out of advertisers like Google.

why the downvote?

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