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Comment by pa7x1 | Hacker News Reader

This is a tragic loss, I can't be grateful enough to the author, such a fantastic tool.

I even started installing it in my parent's computers (not advanced users), reducing to 0 the amount of time I had to intervene to fix their computers. The trick is to configure it in blacklist mode, instead of whitelist. This way it only blocks requests from domains in the blacklist and frame elements. Just with this change you get non-power users out of trouble in their surfing habits and impacts negligibly their use.

I have taught them that if a web is blocked or doesn't work properly is most likely not a web they want to use but that there is also the possibility to turn it off using the on/off button (that they should use very judiciously). In this mode it is not too different from setting up Hosts file but they can understand better what's going on and how to turn it off if needed.

EDIT: fixed typos

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> The trick is to configure it in blacklist mode, instead of whitelist.

Or you can use it in whitelist mode, but with all things like Cloudflare and ReCaptcha globally whitelisted. It's good that way too.

But yes, for your parents, black list mode would be good. It would be like uBlock Origin.

> Or you can use it in whitelist mode, but with all things like Cloudflare and ReCaptcha globally whitelisted.

those two specifically are always the first entries in my blacklist :D

Most people want to block annoyances like advertising or tracking without breaking the pages they want to visit. What you're suggesting does the opposite.

If that's your goal, why would you use uMatrix and not ad and tracking blockers?

Granularity.

How does the granularity help block trackers and ads if you're not doing enough of it to regularly break sites?

Why do you blacklist them?

Because fuck them. Recaptcha in particular is abusive to non-chrome users with their "slow fade" tiles which are specifically engineered to frustrate to real humans (bots do not experience frustration, and if it were simply a matter of slowing down bots they would have simply added a timer, not spend five seconds animating a tile with fade transitions.)

Fuck any site that requires this hostile bullshit. 9 times out of 10 when I see recaptcha that site is dead to me. Very few sites are worth tolerating that sort of abuse from.

Agree this is hostile behaviour, but there are technical hacks[1] that a user could find that overrides google being a dick.

[1] https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/382039-speed-up-google-cap...

I get the same slow animations with Chrome. I don't know what the point of it is, since it's apparently trivially bypassable, but I don't think the goal is to annoy people.

Also, the web would be much more annoying to use without captchas. (Not necessarily recaptcha, but just the concept in general.) If you've ever been an administrator of a site that's prone to spam, it's usually one of the only effective options. Other trade-offs would generally involve blocking huge ranges of potential users, with tons of false positives, or laborious manual approval which isn't feasible past a certain scale if it's just you or a few people.

> Also, the web would be much more annoying to use without captchas. (Not necessarily recaptcha, but just the concept in general.)

This is a non sequitur; we're talking about Google's abusive faux-captcha (which is not actually recaptcha; that's the two-word OCR challenge captcha they replaced with said faux-captcha), not about any actual captcha or captchas in general.

Sorry, you're right, I think my error was due to the start of the parent:

>Because fuck them. Recaptcha in particular

I think I read it at that moment as "because fuck [captchas]. Recaptcha in particular". But they meant Cloudflare and Recaptcha.

I will say, as annoying as Recaptcha is, I find hCaptcha a lot more annoying, difficult, and time-consuming. (Cloudflare recently switched from Recaptcha to hCaptcha.)

I failed 4 "select the motorcycles" yesterday after selecting like about 7 - 8 of 18 images per try. So that's minutes spent clicking 28 - 32 out of 72 squares, and I failed every time, because I don't know much about bikes/vehicles and they mixed in regular bicycles and other semi-motorized bikes (which were all wrong answers), and many of the images were extreme close-ups of possible axles or handlebars with no clear shapes, and others were just generally blurry, unclear photos. It makes Recaptcha's ultra-slow fade-ins seem like bliss. I got the fifth one when they switched from motorcycles to something else, but that one wasn't easy, either.

> as "because fuck [captchas]. Recaptcha in particular"

Ah, that makes more sense, and now I'm not sure that wasn't what they meant (although it seems unlikely because fuck Cloudflare).

I'm not familiar with hCaptcha, but what I've heard (including from you just now) suggests that it, like Google 'captcha', is also a javascript-using non-captcha, in which case fuck them too.

I get tons of recaptcha on google search, basically everytime i open firefox incognito, surprising how it never happens with chrome. Google is doing many anti-competitive things with chrome.

Do you get CAPTCHAs with Chrome in incognito? It's not fair to compare Firefox in incognito to Chrome with all of your cookies.

I have never gotten a ReCAPTCHA in chrome(i meant including incognito in previous comment too) that i can remember.

But for eg cloudflare to work it also needs first party js

Any pointers on how to do this? I run into problems with online purchases, and find out easier to switch to chrome than try and authorise various sites on the fly.

It's fairly easy to determine what's breaking things. With something like online purchases, one of the domains will be for a payment processor that you've probably heard of, accept things from them and it will likely work.

More generally, you can often find a domain that calls itself a cdl, and those are usually needed. And sadly, if the site doesn't seem to work at all it probably needs google.

Oh, and it is basically never something in dark red.

If you want to replicate that kind of configuration that is as painless as possible you just have to go into the extension options/configuration. Head to the "My rules" tab and you will find a rule, towards the top of the rule list, that says:

"* * * block"

This rule acts as a default blacklist. If you switch it to:

"* * * allow" it will allow everything by default (except the blacklisted domains, which overrule this).

Then in the "Assets" tab you can configure your blacklists, I can recommend Steven Black's lists. He curates and consolidates several of the most famous ones:

https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts

He maintains several variants according to themes you may want to ban (adware, malware, fakenews...). Choose the combination that suits you.

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