Hacker News Reader

Comment by Barbing | Hacker News Reader

wBlock by an MIT student is open source and seems (just!) about as trustworthy as uBlock, though of course without the track record. Light & fast, especially to update.

  “wBlock runs entirely within Safari's content blocking API. There's no data collection, no tracking, and no system-level extensions that can monitor your browsing.“

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/wblock/id6746388723 / GH: https://github.com/0xCUB3/wBlock

On AdGuard: can act as your PiHole and allow you to see network requests when run in non-native mode.

View on HN

Just a comment on the narrative:

> wBlock by an MIT student is open source

It's funny to me that some find that narrative appealing.

Here's another narrative: Many of those MIT students go on to be SV founders and employees who build, operate, and make millions or billions from the mass surveillance and ad industry. And I'm sure some participated in FOSS in college - what better way to build your resume for the surveillance/ad industry?

(I'm not commenting on the wBlock developer; I think all such narratives are deceiving and should be ignored.)

The "narrative" above is that they're both made by seemingly well-intentioned solo developers, that's it. Use your own judgement for something that wants to inject JS into every website you visit.

> The "narrative" above is that they're both made by seemingly well-intentioned solo developers

Our comments don't disagree (though I was only responding to the comment parent to mine). My point is to question how 'MIT student' is a signal for 'well-intentioned'.

No offense to the author, but I don't trust a college kid the same way I trust the team behind uBlock. The latter have a well-established track record with substantial external eyes (including Firefox directly.)

Age of author shouldn’t be of relevance. Experience and/or team size should.

A kid reading up on security from age 6 through college could have a decade of experience, for example.

I'm not sure whether this comment is serious or not. Poe's law strikes again.

Nice, last time I heard about wblock felt like years ago and I'm not sure why I didn't consider it.

These days I don't run on-device adblock, I just do DNS filtering for the most part but I'll check it out, not sure I wanna keep tunneling all my DNS queries to ControlD perpetually lol

Thanks for the link, I like it so far

Never heard of this but looks good to me. Nice to have another tool for the arsenal.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com