Comment by stirfrykitty | Hacker News Reader

Comment by stirfrykitty | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Or, best method is to block all ads, beacons, 3rd party cookies, and trackers. Keep it simple, just block anything that is not actual content. Everyone knows online ads are now the major vector for malware online along with bad apps.

Pi-hole, uBlock Origin, Privacy badger, Decentraleyes, Tracking Token Stripper, Neat URL, and No Coin. Set browser to block all HTTP/S referers, disable geo, css links history, fingerprinting, and you are well on your way to never having or seeing an issue. uBlock Origin also kills dead the adblock blockers.

Editing to say that it was my children's absolute frustration with waiting for ads in videos that led me to adopt the Pi-hole. Nothing so far has escaped the event horizon of the Pi-hole. It's great for TVs, too. Everything on the network benefits from the Pi-hole. Setting up a VPN will allow you to pass your mobile device through it while away from home.

One of my upcoming projects is to get a DO Droplet, set up the same and have less "infrastructure" in my house. Benefits remain. Google Cloud also allow this in the free tier. Why not? There is nothing to lose except annoyance.

> just block anything that is not actual content

At this point the reverse approach (whitelist) becomes easier. Just pluck out the content, ignore the rest, and write your own simple UI. Most websites can be modeled quite easily as category->article(->comment) with some additional data.

Writing UI for that is quite trivial.

It can be done in browser via extensions/userscripts (without a database), or you can fetch the data into a database and view it via an electron app, or cli tools, or whatever.

> At this point the reverse approach (whitelist) becomes easier. Just pluck out the content, ignore the rest, and write your own simple UI.

This basically exists already. It's called Reader View in Firefox.

which doesn't even work with github readme.md

And outline.com

Or Pocket.

If I understand correctly, ublock origin in dynamic filtering mode does this.

More aggressive whitelisting is warranted in my opinion. I recommend using uMatrix to block all javascript by default, including first party. Built your whitelist over time by enabling only that which is necessary to read the content you're after, which more often than not is nothing. Contrary to popular expectation including my own expectation, javascript is totally unnecessary for the majority of sites I visit.

Of course this is only feasible for technically competent users. Regular users are forced to rely on lesser blockers with simplified UX. Such is the unfortunate nature of techno-inequality. Rectifying this would be a worthwhile pursuit.

I recently set up a Pi-hole. I've always been pretty extreme in my blocking extensions (everything you listed and more, plus things like first party isolation) and I was flabbergasted to see Pi-hole blocking 10-15% of my requests. Highly recommended!

Always good to see other people enjoying success with the Pi-hole. I've set up so many of them for people. It really does work.

I'll ad (pun intended) to the Pi-Hole praise. I set mine up a couple months ago and I absolutely love it. I've had literally 0 issues so far.

For a service that does this https://ba.net/adblockvpn

Disclosure: it's my day job

Reply on news.ycombinator.com