Privacy Redirect: Redirects browser requests to privacy-friendly alternatives | Hacker News Reader

Privacy Redirect: Redirects browser requests to privacy-friendly alternatives

github.com

129 pointsignoramous26 comments

This extension is a lifesaver for my older computers, who inevitably get frozen up by the giant shitpiles of JS on all the ubiquitous sites.

I used to dread accidentally clicking one of those domains, which inevitably happens when I'm googling something, because it usually meant killing the browser process or sometimes even hard-rebooting.

Now I get a usable alternative. Many thanks to the authors. (And many thanks and props to google search for being one of the few Web mainstay services staying accessible to older devices.)

Having written this, I now notice that my machine stuck with Firefox 66 is not compatible with this extension.

If the author happens to be reading this, it would be great if you could bring older Firefox versions into the fold.

I know it's possible, because I'm using another extension which only does reddit-to-teddit.

https://github.com/SimonBrazell/privacy-redirect/blob/master... looks like it's a 3958 npm dependencies project :)

::backs away in horror::

When Mozilla's own site killed my their own browser with a javascript infinite loop, I knew enough is enough and installed noscript and disabled scripts by default, and web unironically became a better place.

Sadly, I have not figured out how to allow JS on a per-site basis in Firefox 66, nor how to allow a bookmarklet on a site with JS turned off.

I like the little JS-driven niceties my own sites (and HN) provide.

My solution has been to block the offending sites at the /etc/hosts level, which works marvelously.

This goes along my philosophy that "the medium is the message", and a site with shoddy markup is unlikely to have any content worth my time either.

Something something AOL.

Brave has a JS toggle built into the address bar. It even separates trackers from regular scripts, and allows temporarily toggling them on and off independently.

On ublock origin, there's a button to toggle JS.

You should know that, by default, addons are disabled on some Mozilla websites: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Privileged-Pages

For my needs it's great, I'm using it for about a year now and beside few issues I believe it's worth recommending.

The issues: invidious redirect would be great if would automatically try to go for another instance when loading one fails and that happens a lot. The same happens to nitter but it's way more "stable". Bibliogram redirect works but "tunnel" itself is been limited with what it may fetch from instagram.

And there's also one invidious instance (invidiou.site) that unlike all other asks for disabling ads blocking extension in order to show the content - that's not nice.

I really hope that imgur redirect will be included anytime soon - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28849936

For Nitter there's https://twitit.gq/, which tracks the uptime of a bunch of instances and redirects you to a healthy one. Very cool, wish there was something like it for Invidious.

Invidious has already such pages with health status but an automatic redirect to more "alive" instance would be much better; perhaps the extension author could consider such feature

If you're annoyed with public instances of nitter, libreddit, invidious: they're super easy to set up with a bit of caddy & docker and don't require much in terms of compute or maintenance.

I find reddit & twitter much more usable on nitter & libreddit, so Privacy Redirect is one of my default extensions, with my own instances configured.

For any of you that have an "old reddit" redirect plugin, this plugin will do that for you, too.

The lists that this add-on comes with includes many links to dead frontends. Annoying to have to click on a link 5 to 10 times to get a working frontend.

This is something I've encountered using this addon as well and I imagine would put off a lot of people (as it has for me on some occasions even). Having a brief look at the issues, it does appear it's something that has been discussed a lot[1][2][3], sadly without any code contributions yet. This might be partly due to how difficult automating the detection of this would be.

[1] https://github.com/SimonBrazell/privacy-redirect/issues/171

[2] https://github.com/SimonBrazell/privacy-redirect/issues/48

[3] https://github.com/SimonBrazell/privacy-redirect/issues/101

On a slightly-related topic, is there any way in Firefox to disable redirects?

Sometimes I want to see where the original page is, but it redirects so fast that I can't stop it. Also sometimes there's a broken automatic redirect that I want to disable.

Is it not possible to make such an alternative to facebook?

Zuck has high walls around his garden.

Facebook is extraordinarily aggressive at obstructing the techniques needed to build an alternative FOSS frontend, including web scraping and HTML parsing. Examples:

- Obfuscating HTML element classes, text, and structures to circumvent ad blocking, while disrupting screen readers at the same time: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-46508234

- Preventing university researchers from obtaining data on Facebook's political ads through web scraping: https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-seeks-shutdown-of-nyu-... and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24874602

- Sending a cease and desist letter to the developer of the Unfollow Everything extension, and banning him from Facebook: https://www.techspot.com/news/91650-facebook-bans-sends-ceas... and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28801908

Add to that list:

- Sending a cease and desist to the student who developed a FOSS Instagram app: https://github.com/austinhuang0131/austinhuang0131/issues/2

Which is why these offensives should be done anonymously, and preferably served via Tor. If it's safe enough to evade law enforcement for years, it should be safe enough from Zuck.

Tor servers aren't anonymous, only clients.

Imagine all the fun when you need to see that one post, that one video, or that one thread that doesn’t exist on those alternative platforms.

“Allow me to interject for a moment” of browser extensions.

No, this extension redirects users to alternative FOSS frontends for the same services: Nitter[1] instead of Twitter, Invidious[2] instead of YouTube, and Bibliogram[3] instead of Instagram. The main content displayed by these frontends should be the same as the content on the original platforms.

The map, translation, and search engine redirects might produce different results, but each redirection rule can be enabled/disabled separately in the extension in case you don't want to use any of them.

[1] https://github.com/zedeus/nitter

[2] https://github.com/iv-org/invidious

[3] https://sr.ht/~cadence/bibliogram/

The README could be improved here. I didn't know about Nitter, Invidious, ... It wasn't clear to me that these are just different frontends for the same services when I read the README.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com