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Comment by notyourday | Hacker News Reader

I have an even better approach:

uBlock origin + noscript

uMatrix is also great. It does a lot of the same things NoScript does, but at a greater granularity. I still use NoScript for its XSS protection features but have the main JS-blocking feature disabled because it's redundant.

Interesting. I never got around to playing with uMatrix. Is it worth it considering i have a boatload of configs for sites i use with NoScript?

You can convert NoScript configs to uMatrix with [1]uMatrix-Converter.

[1]: https://pro-domo.ddns.net/umatrix-converter

It is. It does. uMatrix is probably not for the average user out there, but personally, I won't go anywhere on the web without it these days.

Keep the blacklists up to date, and have scripting completely off by default. You get granular control on a wholly different levet than offered by NoScript (which I really no longer see a need for).

>have scripting completely off by default

Does this mean you have the "scripts" column red and turn them on for individual sites?

That is what it means, yes. And click them on as needed, first local scripts, and then various external ones if that's not enough. Can be a bit of a hassle for a while, but once you get permanent rulesets established for sites you frequent and more or less trust, it works like a dream. I hardly ever see an ad, and various sniffer-services (or "analytics") must somehow learn to live without a lot my traffic data.

Not parent but probably yes. That's how I roll as well.

An even better approach is to block all ad-serving domains at the DNS layer. If you associate with my home access point and use my DNS cache, you don't get ads period, and you don't have to install an ad blocker or lift a finger.

Can you explain how you do that?

> Can you explain how you do that?

Probably Pi-Hole running on. Raspberry Pi. https://pi-hole.net

Yea, not exactly Pi-Hole, but the same concept. dnsmasq running on router, with a big list of ad-serving domains and hosts resolving to 0.0.0.0

Wow, nice and simple. Is that list available in some repository? would like to implement that since I run a dnsmasq bearing router at my home border as well.

I do the same - my approach was to take some of the popular /etc/hosts files (like http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/zero) and sed them into dnsmasq format:

    # before:  0.0.0.0  evil.biz
    # after:   address=/evil.biz/0.0.0.0
    sed 's#^0\.0\.0\.0[[:space:]]*\([^:]*\)$#address=/\1/0.0.0.0#'

which goes in a file in /etc/dnsmasq.d/, with this line in /etc/dnsmasq.conf:

    conf-dir=/etc/dnsmasq.d

The results can be trimmed a lot, e.g. if you have rules for a.evil.biz and b.evil.biz, you can usually reduce those to a rule for just evil.biz. I wrote some scripts to help with this, which are now at https://petedeas.co.uk/dnsmasq/. I might write something up about the process later.

Here's a nice repo with a "starting point" for hostnames and domains to block: https://github.com/notracking/hosts-blocklists

Most recently: November Workshop: Running the Pi-hole Network-wide Ad-blocker, and more | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15608052

Related discussions (click the 'comments' links): https://hn.algolia.com/?query=netguard&sort=byDate&type=comm...

I loathe ads and tracking. I run ublock origin/https everywhere/privacy badger (the latter of those 2 are from the EFF).

I run a dedicated pfsense machine (old optiplex 755 with an old ssd) I added a nic to it. All network traffic must physically flow through it (1 nic goes to lan 1 goes directly to the cable modem). It's running pfblockerng and DNSBL with a bunch of sources. It's amazing. I can watch youtube videos on my smart tv in the living room streaming with 0 ads.

Is there much different between uBlock origin vs Ad Block Plus?

Yes, Adblock Plus lets website operators pay them money to be whitelisted, if the ads comply with the "Acceptable Ads" policy.

"Unexpected results: Adblock plus does not help with system resource utilisation"

https://twitter.com/adildean/status/936183316134416384

adblock plus is commercial operated and is paid by advertisers to get whitelisted, akin to an extorsion mafia business. It's an ad blocker coming with tainted default settings. It used to significantly impact performances (not sure if this is still the case).

ublock origin is a one man personal project to improve his online browsing experience that he shared with the public and has become the goto reference. It has no whitelist or acceptable ads policy, is a general purpose blocker (blocks trackers, remote fonts, etc.) coming with sane default settings. It does not have the same performance issues adblock plus has.

In short: ditch adblock plus and switch to ublock origins.

You'll find more details here: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock

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