I also use DNS based filtering since I run my own Unbound instance, but it isn't really necessary with the above setup. It may be useful if you must absolutely have a smart TV or other such appliances, but considering that they have cameras and microphones, I will never connect such a device to the Internet anyway.
It would be a win win for everyone.
(people commenting about how a bad design choice in ACorp's flagship product AProduct led to the tragic death of ten labradoodle puppies.)
AD: Buy two AProduct, get one free — limited time offer! Woof! ACorp — your pup will love it!Sent from my iPhone
Heck I have ran modern firefox on tinycore on my 32 bit 1 gig ram mini dell laptop lol
Content creators have paid sections in the video itself, the format optimises grabbing your attention, some legitimate-presenting channels are just real state for product placement...
You can’t win in that platform.
Yes, creators have paid sections but they are skippable (and note YouTube helps you skip with a little white dot in the UI[1]) and creators have a strong incentive to protect their credibility. They have an ongoing "relationship" with their viewer. Not so for the random companies that get to spam you with unskippable adverts for crypto scams or fat-free yoghurt in the freezer version.
[1]They don't like sponsored segments as they don't get a cut most of the time. They do have a programme for arranging sponsored segments via the platform, in which case they _do_ get a cut. I'm not sure if they still offer the little skip-helper dot in that case... Anyone know?
This comment is sponsored by Raid Shadow Legends
Is that a premium feature? How does it look? I don't remember ever seeing it (that said, SponsorBlock solves this).
> and creators have a strong incentive to protect their credibility.
I haven't seen this play out very much to be honest.
> I haven't seen this play out very much to be honest.
"Credibility" means "relative to the interests of their audience". Faux News has a completely different, almost inverse metric for "credibility" with their "Aliuns made the pirramids!" fanbase. CNN follows a more strict "if it bleeds it leads" policy to keep their audience believing them.
All I wanted years ago was an email address with my vanity domain. Had I only known I was shunting my whole family into a Bizarro Elgoog world...
iOS Safari + uBlock Origin + Vinagre extension = no ads, free background play.
Being able to remove Shorts from the app and to revert Alphabet's many incoherent design decisions makes the whole thing usable.
These kinds of customisations should be standard for apps people use every day.
You need to also hide them from the feed and a few other places. You are not stupid; Revanced has too many options and the settings and large and confusing. It's easier to search "shorts" and toggle everything.
Most people would like to have a roof over their heads and eat once in a while.
How many links that you clicked on from HN today are asking for a subscription, and how many have you supported?
(I still use uBlock of course)
But agree, totally worth it if you at all value your time.
Probably a business decision that's made them a lot of money, well done.
Thank goodness for ReVanced.
That's why I will never pay, no matter how much people glaze yt premium. I distinctly remember the day they took that simple feature away. uBlock and Vanced work fine, and it's also not hard to download to my media server for offline
I don't want to reward a company for shitty practices. What are they even doing at youtube besides changing the UI every 3 months and stuffing AI where it isn't wanted/needed.
At the bare minimum they need to enable the ability to blacklist entire channels, like I can easily do on my home setup. And ban AI videos without a label. Then they can have my $8
Firefox mobile, m.youtube.com, "Video Background Play Fix" browser extension.
Only the earliest google music people are still grandfathered in at the insanely low rate. The rest of us have been "upgraded" to at least $14/mo.
1. You don't need a separate browser extension for blocking cookie notices, Ublock Origin can do that just fine. You just need to enable the cookie notice filters in the settings (they are disabled by default).
2. AdAway on Android allows network-level blocking without resorting to a VPN (it's based on /etc/hosts). Though it does require root.
However, I have found that using NextDNS as a private DNS server works and doesn't cause any problems like this.
Don't forget to give apps that fuck with you in the name of security 1-star reviews!
This works the same way as NextDNS on Android but is less customizeable.
I didn't know it existed. FWIW, it's under Settings > Filter lists > Cookie notices.
I can't say I'm noticing any ads on Chrome, the lite ad blocker seems just as effective.
They still accept updates to existing Manifest V2 extensions [1].
[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/extensions/...
I like his suggestion of VPN via cloud. I might set up something with wireguard or tailscale for that.
I don't really use youtube, but my family does, so If anyone knows a way to get a better ui experience as a google tv app I'd be keen to hear it?
Both are superfluous if you have ublock, and pihole doesn't do anything for "native" ads like on twitch or youtube. The only benefit is that it blocks ads in apps that use third party ad SDKs.
This doesn't change the UI as such, but it auto-mutes ads, and auto-skips once the skip option is available. It's a bit of a funny thing to setup, but it works great once setup.
I don't use it much since I started using the ReVanced patched YouTube app, but it used to work well enough for casual usage.
https://medium.com/@lumenyx/isponsorblocktv-on-a-raspberry-p...
sound dangerous...
>AdNauseam 'clicks' Ads by issuing an HTTP request to the URL to which they lead. In current versions this is done via an XMLHttpRequest (or AJAX request) issued in a background process. This lightweight request signals a 'click' on the server responsible for the Ad, but does so without opening any additional windows or pages on your computer. Further it allows AdNauseam to safely receive and discard the resulting response data, rather than executing it in the browser, thus preventing a range of potential security problems (ransomware, rogue Javascript or Flash code, XSS-attacks, etc.) caused by malfunctioning or malicious Ads. Although it is completely safe, AdNauseam's clicking behaviour can be de-activated in the settings panel.
https://github.com/dhowe/adnauseam/wiki/FAQ#how-does-adnause...
the freetube app has both of those extensions built in. you just have to enable them in the settings
[1] https://github.com/dhowe/AdNauseam/wiki/FAQ#how-does-adnause...
You might be thinking of TrackMeNot, which does use tabs (iirc).
You can get something like NextDNS for $18/year, which is probably less than what you pay for the power required to serve Pihole or Adguard Home, and you get enterprise level infrastructure for it, along with redundancy, and it works "everywhere".
Yes, you (probably) need a caching resolver at home, and that could be Pihole or Adguard, but going through hoops to setup Wireguard and have all DNS resolve over that, just to reach pihole at home, that sounds like overkill.
Anyway, In case it's not obvious, NextDNS is how i roll, using a "stupid" caching DNS resolver at home.
If not, DNS4EU (https://www.joindns4.eu/) is free for personal use, and has no quota, and offers various endpoints for malware protection, adblocking, and other stuff.
Maybe that's what you ask: NextDNS has:
- 50+ blocklists ready to use (including Easylist, Adguard, HaGeZi, Energized). You enable the ones you wish to use
- Many privacy options you can enable, including Disguised Third-Party Trackers (TIP), CNAME flattening
- Many security options you can enable, including Cryptojacking, Google Safe Browsing, IDN Homograph attacks, Typosquatting, dynamic hostnames
- Ready-to-use application-based and category-based allowing/blocking
- Custom blocking options such as allowlists, denylists, blocking certain TLDs, custom rewrites
It also has:
- Option to "Bypass Age Verification"
- Option to keep logs (in EU, Swiss or US) or not
- Free to use up to 300,000 queries / month
- Multiple profiles for different clients
- Supports virtually all browsers and all OS, desktop and mobile, either via its official app, configuration profile (iOS), or IPv4, IPv6, DNS-over-TLS/QUIC, DNS-over-HTTPS
> Can you setup custom filters on the free solution?
No, but as the other person replying said, there's a huge range of built in filters and I've never felt any need to customize them.
EDIT: just spent a few minutes looking over the DNS4EU website. I can't see any configuration options at all. They just have 4 basic levels (standard, child protection, ad block, or unfiltered). So it appears less useful than NextDNS. Where did you see the ability to add custom filters?
I also wrote here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46191045
It's basically setup so that i have my internal machines registered in NextDNS as rewrites, and Wireguard is setup to route anything for my internal RFC-1918 network, ie. 192.168.1.0/24, so when NextDNS returns 192.168.1.5 for "host.mydomain.com", it will go over wireguard.
The advantage is that i can keep the tunnel up 24/7, and it has very little impact on battery life as normal requests simply go over the internet.
Host AdGuard on a VPS (same one as the VPN?). Then you can use it from everywhere.
For everybody else, $18/year vs $5/month for a VPS should be an easy choice.
https://github.com/time4tea-net/py-hole/
You can run it on your openwrt router - see readme. Its just a python script that updates a file that dnsmasq uses. No funny business, you are in charge of everything.
Disclaimer: author of said script.
I would add one more useful tool though: A user-agent switcher[1]. There are still some websites that insist you must use Chrome (or sometimes Edge). They will block you if you try to use them with Firefox, even though they work perfectly well and sometimes even better on Firefox than they do on Chrome. A user-agent switcher gives you the option to simply uninstall Chrome for good.
e.g. My ISP provides a website for streaming live TV (e.g. sports) that claims to be incompatible with Firefox, but actually runs better (i.e. fewer glitches) on it than it does on Chrome. However, it refuses to load on Firefox unless you use a user-agent switcher.
Why do people write websites that refuse to run based on user-agent checks? By all means, warn users that you couldn't be arsed to test things on more than one browser, but why go that extra mile to brick your site when other browsers probably support it quite well?
[1]https://addons.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefox/addon/user-agent-st...
I can’t stand those in-video intros or sponsored promos, where I’m suddenly pitched a random VPN or productivity app.
PiHole is popular but IMO not worth the effort when the above are so cheap. There are free ad blocking DNS servers, but they aren't customizable.
Or do you not import any lists into nexdns?
On my personal computer, I don't remember ever running into this, but if I did I'd just override resolv.conf temporarily.
You can also just whitelist the domain(s) too via oneclick actions in both systems, which was my initial caveat that you can't do that using public adblocking DNS.
I've bee trying these and alternatives in FF via LibRedirect for years. I keep on wondering if it's just me but I have to babysit the setup and cycle through instances every so often.
Here is the block management setup I personally use regularly:
Desktop
* DNS blocking is active via NextDNS.
* I use Ungoogled Chromium as my primary browser.
* I use the uBlock ad-blocking extension along with its filters.
* The SponsorBlock extension is very useful for skipping sponsored segments within YouTube videos.
Mobile
* DNS blocking is active via NextDNS.
* To block ads in Safari, I activate ad-blocking in Safari through the free Firefox Focus app.
* I use the YouTube app via AltStore. It is a nice feature that it also includes the SponsorBlock extension.
If you'd like, I can publish a comprehensive ad-blocking guide on the Ahmet Çadırcı https://ahmetcadirci.com/ page.
Only caveat is it doesn’t block ads served by the content provider itself e.g. some streaming services, but from what I hear those are difficult to block with any approach.
Sometimes this isn’t available.
I would like to support Daring Fireball (a publication I read a lot) but the only way is to buy an ad slot for $11K which seems like a scam to both the viewer and the advertiser.
The advertiser isn’t getting any ROAS (since we are blocking the ads) and since the ads are annoying and repetitive, the viewers would just go elsewhere.
I wish more creators would have a “remove ads” tier or an alternative membership tier as a different way to support their content rather than ads.
Then their content can just go away tbh. This isn't some big ethical dilemma either.
Either find a way to make content that doesn't rely on ads, or stop making content. If the whole ad-funded internet disappeared tomorrow morning, would it really matter?
AFAIK, Daring Fireball never runs these tracking ad networks with tons of flashing and annoying ads. It does one tiny graphical ad on the web page and has a weekly sponsor post, both of which can be easily ignored. The graphical ad does not even appear in the full RSS feed.
To support Daring Fireball, you can use the links to the weekly sponsor if that product is of interest to you. Once or twice in a year or so, there may be posts with Amazon affiliate links (with full disclosure), which you can use if you want. Other than that, you can share the posts and have more people read it. That in turn could potentially help with the above mentioned aspects.
For me an ad is an ad, in graphical or text form and I very much didn't ask for it.
I feel it is psychologically trying to convince me to buy or make me be aware about something I don't want or need and very much not want this ruin my flow of consuming content.
On his links Daring Fireball IS tracking, they all do tracking in the URL of the sponsored post otherwise it doesn't make sense for the sponsor to pay $11K (a week!) for the spot.
> It does one tiny graphical ad on the web page and has a weekly sponsor post, both of which can be easily ignored. The graphical ad does not even appear in the full RSS feed.
I mean, yes I could ignore them, but would massively prefer if these ads didn't exist at all, I have no interest in anything that is being advertised there. Luckily Ublock Origin blocks Daring Fireball ads by default and not sure if his advertisers would be happy about this, but if I spend $11K a week on ads to find most people block them by default, I don't think I would bother wasting another ad slot.
To be fair maybe it is a sign that instead of ads, a membership, patreon or whatever would be much more sustainable, freeing, less scammy and more profitable than running junk ads that people don't want.
You could always buy a Stratechery subscription - which is great by the way. Some of that money goes to Gruber for the Dithering podcast.
But Gruber is a famously self described bad business person for a content creator. He never tries to be an early reviewer when press embargoes are over for hardware. He claims to never look at his server logs and got rid of Google Analytics ages ago.
His podcast schedule is erratic.
I have no interest for anything sold in ads in their RSS and I assume they are tracking in the links that you click too (otherwise why spend all $11K for no results?)
> He claims to never look at his server logs and got rid of Google Analytics ages ago.
That is a good start, hopefully he should consider switching to a community supported model rather than rely on advertisers.
(A less tongue-in-cheek option would be to email John, say that you’re blocking ads, and ask if you can donate instead. If enough people ask he might put up a form?)
If Daring Fireball had this membership subscription model and not selling highly and questionably expensive ad slots I would definitely subscribe, even if the price would be $20 a month or $200 a year. (I would argue he can make more than he charges for ads does already given this model.)
But $11K (a week!) is outrageous to support Daring Fireball.
I regularly read https://daringfireball.com and sick of their ads showing up in my RSS feed.
It is bad enough and distracting that ads show up on the site (thankfully Firefox and ublock origin does the job already) but on RSS blocking ads is impossible.
I mostly just avoid subscribing to any feeds with ads. (Or pay for the ad-free feeds.)
For example, Shopify hates ublock and will sometimes not load apps at all
The ad domains straight up don't resolve at all and never get loaded. I don't have any adblock/ublock, so the websites almost never could detect if I block ads or not.
You'd need a VM to safely contain any exploits, although you're probably safe from 0days if you're just doing some run of the mill ad clicking. Nobody is burning a 6-7 figure 0day on a public ad network, when they need to save that for targeted attacks like politicians/journalists, so keeping your browser reasonably up to date will be sufficient.
Is that anything to do with ads? I've always read that the padding is to make it copyrightable.
Advertisers on the other hand will pay for nothing, yes. Some of them are small businesses. I wonder if there’s a way to click on big corp ads only...
Edit: ¹ – added scare quotes, see https://github.com/dhowe/AdNauseam/wiki/FAQ#how-does-adnause...
> NOTE: Dvelopment has stopped. The newer dev.clombardo.dnsnet continues development.
DNSNet
For example IMDb. And proxying over mitmproxy actually breaks the whole app, because they do certificate pinning.
AdGuard's log shows nondescript servers and suddenly a lot of IPv6 connections and then ads :(
I run 1Blocker + NextDNS and I basically don’t see ads anywhere. Not even on YouTube.
The VPN-based "solution" is basically as realistic as disabling JavaScript. Extremely limiting.
I have used them both paid and free and they are not good. I will pick just one point - support. It's pathetic. Maybe because it's non existent. I stopped paying for it, started using free, then removed it altogether.
uBlock Origin really is that good as others are saying. I haven't really needed anything else. Ads in other apps? Well, that's a hit or miss but then a lot of my finance/investment related apps anyway don't work if I use any ad blocking on local network or device label, sadly. Tweaking around it is how I needed support with NextDNS and then realised I've been paying for something with essentially no support.
I'm pretty aggressive with the block lists I have selected and expect to fiddle with it lots, but I have a second (much more "reasonable") profile that family uses and it works great (still catches a huge amount of stuff that browser adblockers miss) despite never needing any fiddling. It's been great for me.
Mobile: Blockada to prevent apps from reaching their ad servers. NewPipe.
Desktop: Freetube.
uBO has the bonus to have an element picker that I use to remove the empty areas where ads would show. I do it for sites that I use often. I also remove some useless menus and headers. I particularly hate sticky ones.
It’s always been ironic to me that a Privacy browser is dependent on source code primarily controlled by a company that derives the majority of its revenue from ads… exactly what the browser itself was spun off to shield its users against.
Now I am back to Brave and very happy. Almost no ads, super fast, doesn't crash or hang.
I’ve just been watching streams after they’re done so that I can get rid of them that way
Edit: nvm author mentions vpns as a solution
firefox sold out on their users quit using them https://youtube.com/shorts/FObvkFtr2ZU
I spend more time telling others about uBlock Origin, SponsorBlock and ReVanced.