We let somebody pimp it out and now the internet’s just for whoring yourself. Shoulda stopped google from turning the most useful public utility into its bitch, shoulda stopped the telcos from adding obstacles to access (thus hampering innovation), and shoulda stopped letting these idiotic politicians work on behalf of these enshittifying capitalists instead of on behalf of our actual countries, world, and species a long fucking time ago.
Without exaggeration amen 🙏
Messiah of the internet
I have been using uBlock Origin and uMatrix together for so long, that I don’t remember when they became permanent must have… uBlock origin sanitizes the site, while uMatrix prevents any surprises since I last visited a site. The more garbage the site is, the more broken it is on my setup.
What is umatrix
The lesser known add-on ny Raymond Hill: https://addons.mozilla.org/fi/firefox/addon/umatrix/
Im genuinely so thankful for this project, the creator and maintainers. You are doing the lords work.
Can you imagine the amount of corruptive influences and persuasions he is resisting?
The VLC guy turned down what a quick search is telling me was “several tens of millions” to show ads. I can’t even imagine what getting people to drop ublock would be worth.
I wouldn’t blame him if he took it, but I greatly respect that he didn’t.
There’s a reason uBlock Origin overtook Adblock Plus in popularity.
What is the decentralised solution?
There is and isn’t one. For the add-on itself, you just need forks and more forks. For the lists it pulls from, those are already decentralized, but you’re constantly going to deal with the issue of only the best are used and only the used are maintained and only the maintained are the best.
Raymond Hill: “Get behind me, Google.”
Pretty sure he has them blocked
Though you may be right, I have a feeling that he is facing formidable opposition. That may include anything from social engineering to full on psyops.
Bet he’s had people “happen” to bump into him IRL, and gets pull requests from bad actors that are very subtly trying to take the project in the wrong direction.
Your second point is especially interesting, considering the recent xz backdoor. The bad actors manipulated a poor burnt out maintainer for it. In comparison, I’m impressed with gorhill for his perseverance and mental strength. I would like to know how he avoids burn out with such negative influences.
Dang, for real? Do you have some more details on this?
I think he’s using old school speculative “bet”, not the new Gen Z meaning
Bet
Lol, it does read entirely differently in the gen z light… good eye! If you add a comma after “bet”, it completely changes the meaning. Fun
Yeah that’s funny :D
What’s “Mordor Intelligence” – is that a real thing, or a parody of the surveillance/‘defense’ industry companies that are coming up with names nicked from LotR? (‘Anduril’, ‘Palantir’)
https://www.mordorintelligence.com/ They appear to be a real thing. Though naming yourself after the most evil thing in middle earth is a bit in the nose lol.
I hadn’t even thought about that. Thank you.
Insightful point. And it does remind me of the corporate purchase of the Don’t care about cookies extension for Firefox (And the Simple Mobile Tools for Android). Luckily it was forked. https://github.com/OhMyGuus/I-Still-Dont-Care-About-Cookies Open source FTW!
🙂 🐧Simple Mobile Tools was forked into “Fossify *” for anyone interested.
All hail Raymond Hill :0
And the people maintaining the lists his work depends on.
Gladly upvoted to
worshiphonor one of the open source heroes.Never knew the name of the guy behind it. Nice! This is why Everybody Loves Raymond!
About
Free. Open-source. For users by users. No donations sought.
If you ever want to contribute something, think about the people working hard to maintain the filter lists you are using, which are available to use by all for free.
That is some commit history!!
And all the volunteers keeping those lists up-to-date.
Yea it’s mainly those that do the work actually
Still big kudos to Raymond for providing the foundations to make it all work too.
Aren’t most lists available on other browsers and ad blockers? Unless Raymond created the format
The format currently used in adblocker predates uBO by almost a decade so no, but still, maintaining this add-on with how fast and often web browser changes, and keeping it performant must be quite the task.
I think performant is probably the key thing here. There were ad blockers before and there are alternative ones now, but the thing that sets unlock Origin apart is how light weight it is.
uBlock Origin explicitly says he refuses donations and to give it to the list maintainers instead.
A true hero acknowledging the other heroes on which his work rests.
What would we do without ublock origin
You would use noBlock origin instead
I love posts like this. You get to discover new stuff 😂
Use vblock ingress!
In the 1999s-2000s we used WebWasher. It was basically a proxy server which you ran locally on your computer and it had all the filters. You just set up your browser’s network connection to point to WebWasher and it acted as the gateway to the Internet.
If browsers somehow decided to kill all their plugin support, you could still use that to filter your content.
There is something very wrong when deleting 50% of wep page is the least it takes to make the internet usable…
Don’t forget AdGuard for all those pesky smart devices!
It alone is blocking almost a 3rd of outbound traffic from TVs and such that unfortunately can’t use ublock
Thank Raymond and the list maintainers, you keep the internet usable
Invisible and nameless internet warriors. They stay eternal.
Yeah, Raymond Hill made a great plugin, but the people maintaining the lists are the real MVPs
They’re all gods among men.
Amen to that