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Comment by tyingq | Hacker News Reader

"Content can still be blocked with extensions"

Well, without live heuristics. Chrome ad blocking is basically now limited to a dumb, limited list of URI patterns. Better than nothing, but much less capable than before.

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And without privacy invasion implications. Apple introduced content blocking 4 versions ago implemented nearly the same way. No one would accuse Apple of trying to help Google make more money.

Google didn't remove any of the observational capabilities of the API.

Every application has privacy implications, and it isn't difficult to manage this one. Having a giant warning around installing extensions with this level of access would be a good way to protect people while also allowing them to make their own decisions.

Because warning people has historically worked well with PCs not to mention Android.

See Also Vista UAC.

It’s kind of amazing for people to say that they care about their privacy and then they install extensions that can record their entire browsing history and install VPN software on their phones that intercept all of their internet communications.

There's a mountain of difference between "can" and "will", and it's called "trust".

For decades, people have been using software on their PCs which can essentially delete all their data or worse, yet what are the chances of that actually happening? Of course malware would exist, but at the same time, the unrestricted nature lead to a seamless exchange of data and creativity unhindered by any bureaucratic permission-maze.

A world of "perfect" security in which malware and cybercrime cannot exist is basically a dystopian police state.

And we have found better ways on a newer platforms not to implicitly trust apps with unfettered access to user data and surprisingly enough, no one has started rounding up people en masse for looking at cat videos....

... That's how computers work, yes. If you have a way to make a VPN that doesn't see its own traffic, I'm all ears. In the meantime, I trust a VPN more than my ISP.

What gives you more trust in your VPN provider than your ISP?

Did you also trust Onavo’s VPN back in the day?

My ISP has told people they're tracking users, and can get away with it because there's effectively no competition. The bar is low.

I am, indeed, necessarily careful about VPN providers.

Have you personally audited your VPN provider? Or did you go by a pinky promise that they would track you and sell your data?

On a practical note, which VPN provider can reliably not reduce the speed of my gigabit up/down connection?

In my personal case, yes I have because I'm running it myself on a VPS. In general, though, the commercial providers that I would use have stood up to court orders / warrants, so I reckon they're fine.

Unfortunately, I don't have a fast enough uplink to comment on speed concerns.

You don't see any hazard to showing a giant warning to people when they install something that almost everyone should use? If people see a big warning when they install a legitimate ad blocker, people will start ignoring the warnings.

Google pays Apple for access to their browser.

Google pays Apple for access to the search bar.

The 30,000 rule limit is a pretty big deal breaker for me, but what sort of live heuristics are you referring to here? Aren't e.g. uBlock Origin's filters entirely rule based (not unlike most other ad blocker extensions)?

This article has some examples: https://www.ghacks.net/2019/01/22/chrome-extension-manifest-...

The quote from the article is here: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=896897...

Thanks!

The rule limit will be increased:

"We are planning to raise these values but we won't have updated numbers until we can run performance tests to find a good upper bound that will work across all supported devices."

https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/m/#!msg/chrom...

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