Universal analytics opt out: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock
I haven't been able to block Youtube ads on my tv for example.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polar_bear_jail
PS: You might enjoy Veritasium (a YouTuber).
After all these years of doing that I finally visited the Wikipedia Home page a few weeks ago. I was quite surprised with all the stuff they have there that I had no idea about. That rabbit hole is a lot bigger than I knew about.
The illusion of purity allows corruption to thrive. There are influence teams hired by VIPs who use Wikipedia as simply an extension of cable news/social media. To "get out in front of stories", or if they're late to the game, to scrub/"memoryhole" undesired ones. Wikipedia editing as an amusing hobby for niche nerds is an outdated concept for many topics.
Wikipedia is far too powerful a Persuasion tool to let fail. Its essay-long donation plea's are designed to garner credibility towards innocence. How nefarious could the site be? They're scrounging around for scraps each year!
I found the actual easiest way to avoid YouTube ads, and maintain support for content providers whose services I enjoy, is to get a Premium subscription. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Would you mind sharing the script?
grep "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=" /tmp/bookmarks.html | cut -b22-64
On Android now Proxies don't apply anymore to apps like YouTube, and as these apps also use DoH, there's no way to block ads anymore.
All talk of "security" and "privacy" is false, as always it was all about profit. I honestly wonder if the people at Google working on DoH even knew why management supported their project, or if they genuinely believed they did something good while management secretly realised the potential profits from DoH
The scenario you're describing (DNS-level blocks) could always be circumvented.
On the other hand, if you live in the US and don't override the ISP's name servers, most probably they will spy on you and sometimes even do things like injecting ads into third party websites. This was the thing DoH was meant to solve.
The Chromecast has 8.8.8.8 hardcoded, but recently an ISP started integrating ad-blocking via DNS filtering (with 8.8.8.8 MitM) in their ISP routers. That case actually went to court.
It'll always be possible to do the filtering as prosumer, but the current state of the art of "it just works" ad blockers is something Google is fighting against (also see Manifest v3)
Not every thing that big corporations say they do for security reasons or whatever is a cynical ploy. Do you think they're experimenting with post quantum cryptography in Chrome Canary in preparation to drop a 50k qubit quantum computer on the market sometime soon?
On Android, some of the most popular apps are fake-VPNs which just register your own device as VPN with itself so they can filter ads.
This isn't about the pi-hole, this is about ad blocking becoming "too easy". You can always block DoH. But no ISP can include such a blocker by default easily anymore.
Do you have to block every known DoH server? Looking at Google's DoH certificate they list quite a few hostnames and IPs as Subject Alt Names:
dns.google
*.dns.google.com
8888.google
dns.google.com
dns64.dns.google
2001:4860:4860::64
2001:4860:4860::6464
2001:4860:4860::8844
2001:4860:4860::8888
8.8.4.4
8.8.8.8
The localhost forward proxy I use can distinguish DoH requests from other HTTP requests because the DoH query URL structures used are mostly the same; they follow RFC8484. As of today, it is easy to probe IP addresses for listening DoH servers. The list of "known DoH hosts" is still quite small. Of course this could change.
To be clear, I am defintely not a proponent of applications ignoring user system-wide DNS settings and using DoH to obscure that fact. I have long run localhost root and DNS for myself and have no need for third party DNS, whether ISP or open resolvers.
However, as an end user I see no reason to trust any outgoing HTTPS traffic from applications authored by folks who are agreeable to online advertising as a business model.
The greatest threat I face is online advertising, not DNS lookups associated with malware. With DoH, HTTPS traffic could contain an unwanted DNS request, but prior to DoH it could also contain data to be used for tracking and advertising purposes. I felt the need to start monitoring/MITM'ing the HTTPS traffic on the private networks I control long before anyone proposed DoH. I would guess many corporations and other organisations do the same.
When your are using Google Cast, you don't stream from your device to the TV/Chromecast. Your device sends a package containing the app name you want to open and some basic configuration data and then the TV/Chromecast downloads a web app from Google's severs and opens it with the configuration you provided. Then your device can interact with it.
Note that I'm not against ad blocking in general, but if you use a website a lot, it seems fair to me to remunerate it one way or another, and at least paying for membership is not a business model based on selling your data.
Ublock on PC, youtube vanced on android!
Edit: I guess maybe you're just talking about on a smart TV.
However, as most sites are https nowdays, privoxy is effectively limited to just blocking domains, making it pretty similar to pihole ...
It was blockable, but the author decided to rename the file to jquery.js.
I'm retaining myself to quote the famous "If it looks like a duck, moves like a duck...", but I won't. :-)
That's another reason to use LocalCDN[0].
[0]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/localcdn-fork...
It is a spectrum, not mutually exclusive.
Ads are inherently 'mal-', in that you didn't ask for them and don't want them.
Javascript provides the '-ware'. And the question is really if they're just there to distract you or do something worse to your machine.
I'd like to understand how opting-out of Google Analytics would spare you much from the massive big data tracking done via other JS libraries, ads, and especially mobile app use.
Go onto any large news site, ecommerce platform, realty/home search site, etc. and look at the network tab in your Web Developer view. Commerce may in good part "run" the world, but that traffic will expand as bandwidth expands; what data will they want to track next? => using cameras and audio everywhere to determine what your mood is, what you're talking about, what you say you want. Anything with a mic or camera could be doing this today, in theory, but the bandwidth isn't there to support it.
How can we avoid this?
Should we stop WiFi and just wire our homes well, then plug-in and enable cellular data only when we sit down or really need it?
It seems almost unavoidable, and that we've become too reliant on these things if privacy is the goal. And the bureaucratic EU policies on privacy seem like a simple game of chess for big data companies; we're responsible for this.