from Hacker News

An update on uBlock

by mattbit on 7/28/18, 1:44 PM with 84 comments

  • by newscracker on 7/28/18, 3:00 PM

    Anyone who wants a low overhead and trusted ad blocker should use uBlock Origin. The developer even refuses to take any donations (for some good reasons).

    For those who want a lot more control and a content blocker, uMatrix would help.

    Anything named as “Adblock” or “Adblock Plus” or similar is just a way for advertisers to decide what ads users see and don’t see, depending on how much they’re willing to pay and be held hostage to such extensions.

  • by rlabrecque on 7/28/18, 2:25 PM

  • by michaelhoffman on 7/28/18, 2:29 PM

    I'm using uBlock Origin and get

        uBlock Origin has prevented the following page from loading:
    
    https://www.ublock.org/announcement/
    
    Because of the following filter
    
    ||ublock.org^$document
    Found in: uBlock filters – Badware risks

  • by ad1ttya on 7/28/18, 2:35 PM

    From Ublock Origin's github(https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock): uBlock Origin is (and has always been) COMPLETELY UNRELATED to the web site ublock.org.

    edit: and here is a commit blocking the site ublock.org - https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uAssets/commit/82067d1ef3370...

  • by echelon on 7/28/18, 2:41 PM

    There appears to be so much confusion in this thread about whether or not this involves the open source uBlock Origin. uBlock Origin should seriously consider rebranding to distance itself from the commercial uBlock.

  • by subway on 7/28/18, 2:28 PM

    Heh:

    uBlock Origin has prevented the following page from loading:

    https://www.ublock.org/announcement/

    Because of the following filter

    ||ublock.org^$document

  • by mattbit on 7/28/18, 6:12 PM

    It seems like they are just trying to steal the name of uBlock. AdBlock CEO says they “do love the name” [0] and are "investing heavily" into the product, but the commits in the repo [1] are just cosmetic changes and rebranding. Oddly enough, the only active committer is anonymous.

    I wonder if this will cause legal troubles to the true uBlock Origin.

    [0]: https://twitter.com/judemaier/status/1020034358558670848 [1]: https://github.com/uBlock-LLC/uBlock/commits/master

  • by trash_panda on 7/28/18, 2:29 PM

    A good solution I've found for ad blocking is using the following hosts file:

    https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts

    Which sinkholes every known ad/malicious domain. It's been pretty useful, and it hasn't broken nothing important yet.

  • by eric24234 on 7/29/18, 1:01 PM

    Was a user of "Adblock plus". They partnered with ad agencies and started to whitelist ads. That defeted the whole purpose and also it became clear the for profit organizations can not fight against the ad agencies as they have to partner if they want to make profit.

    Ublock origin is so much awesome.Its free software and also very easy to use and its actually much more than adblocker.

  • by hk__2 on 7/28/18, 3:04 PM

    > If you’ve noticed recent updates to the product, that’s because uBlock has been acquired by the team responsible for AdBlock. We will be investing heavily into uBlock to help it deliver on the promise of being one of the best ad blockers available.

    Why would they invest "heavily into uBlock" instead of improving AdBlock? It doesn’t make sense to maintain two different ad blockers.

  • by propogandist on 7/28/18, 3:01 PM

    a crowd-fundraising round to help uBlock's actual founder may help him fend off competition from AdBlock, using his own (uBlock) brand name

  • by Tiki on 7/28/18, 2:39 PM

    Self-hosted DNS solution with an easy setup and a nice web GUI to manage it.

    https://pi-hole.net/

    https://github.com/pi-hole/pi-hole

  • by squarefoot on 7/28/18, 3:31 PM

    I think this Soylent News article summarizes the situation pretty well.

    https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=18/05/17/028245

    tl;dr: the real one is Ublock Origin, get it here: https://github.com/gorhill/ublock

    From the same author I would also suggest uMatrix, sort of a NoScript on steroids which allows a much finer filtering literally ripping pages of a great deal of their junk more selectively, but be aware that it requires "training" (telling it this can be loaded, that cannot) which for some non technical people could be annoying.

  • by se7entime on 7/28/18, 3:07 PM

    Found in: uBlock filters – Badware risks

    By uBlock Origin

  • by myf01d on 7/28/18, 2:30 PM

    Wasn't this the same asshole who hijacked gorhill's work 4 years ago and even asked for money for others' work? now he sold others' work? what a scumbag!

  • by visualphoenix on 7/28/18, 2:36 PM

    deleted

  • by 3ds on 7/28/18, 2:28 PM

    Time for a new fork!

  • by wallabie on 7/28/18, 2:23 PM

    Cue the YouTube video of Michael Scott saying "No God, please no. Noooo!"

    uBlock was the AdBlock when AdBlock sold out. Now who will be the uBlock now that uBlock has sold out? And this is separate to uBlock Origin, right?