To anyone who is concerned by this change, I recommend taking a look at μBlock Origin [1,2]. It's blazingly fast, very flexible, and under active development. I made the switch about a year ago and it has served me very well.
Just be sure NOT to install "U Block For Origin", by www.z1z2z3z4.com, which is currently the top hit if you search the Chrome extensions store for 'ublock'.
I don't know what it does, but I bet it's not good.
This is what happens when you have an "app store" with no approval or review process. Google should be cracking down on this, just like those ads they were displaying[1] which would serve up malware-infected versions of Firefox whenever someone searched for "Firefox".
I reported an issue with spoofing on the Google play store about 6 months ago. They told me there was no timeframe for the fix, and no fix yet as far as I'm aware. Maybe if I post it here someone from google will do something...
Just so everyone is aware, you can use any email address as your company email address on the google play store without verification. This means when looking at an app, you see the email is support@legitcompany.com and think it's from them, but it's not.
A lot of people lost bitcoins because of the malicious ad problem. Somebody spoofed blockchain.info and stole a bunch of credentials... The entire bitcoin subreddit reported it, yet 2 months later it was back up.
Question for HN: back in the Napster days, were there likewise Napster clones ("napster"?) that purported to allow peer to peer music downloads but in fact had malware properties?
I don't remember any, but then again, I don't know when I (or most people) would have come across them if such a thing existed. If you wanted Napster, you just went to napster.com and downloaded it. There wasn't a gameable walled-garden app store like you have to go through to get uBlock Origin.
There were (and still are) sites hawking anything popular - games, porn, desktop apps, etc. If someone was lucky, they ended up with a bunch of adware slowing their computer down. Worse scenarios involved things like programs which would surreptitiously hang up your dialup connection and redial the equivalent of a 900 number in some country where the scammer could pay off the local police.
Search for something like "flash update" on non-Google/DDG search engines and look at the top ads if you want the general feel.
I don't think stuff like that became popular until BitTorrent and other distributed filesharing protocols and clients came about. Lots of people were tricked into installing malware while trying to download warez and porn, though.
The only disadvantage, if one could call it that, is that uBlock Origin does not have a version for Safari, which uBlock has. I have read a bit about the controversies between uBlock Origin vs. uBlock. I prefer uBlock Origin wherever available.
I know uBlock has a version for Safari, which I mentioned in my comment. However, uBlock Origin does not, which I also mentioned. Is there something unclear about what I said above?
Both uBlock Origin and uBlock have similar code bases because they were "born" from the original uBlock (now called uBlock Origin).
My only problem with it is that it blocks Google hangouts and Facebook messenger. I haven't figured out a way to make those work while it's enabled.
Edit: not sure why I'm getting downvoted. Apparently this is an issue, as gorhill mentions, when selecting the leaky IP option. They should make the implications much clearer.
Did you click the setting "Prevent WebRTC from leaking local IP addresses"? If so, this will prevent Hangout from working. Reference issue: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/issues/757
Love the app, by the way. It's the single reason I have Firefox on my Android device instead of Chrome.
Do you happen to know WHY the leak breaks Hangouts? I'm assuming Hangouts now leverages the webRTC for connection--that's fine. But I was under the impression that the local IP leak was an unintended side-effect of webRTC, not a 'required component', if you will. Does having that checkbox on effectively break ALL webRTC components, or is it something specific with Hangouts' implementation?
> I was under the impression that the local IP leak was an unintended side-effect of webRTC, not a 'required component'
Same here. My understanding is that the breakage of Hangout is unintended, as the original Chromium issue for the IP address leakage states[1]:
> This change causes WebRTC traffic to be forced through the same path that HTTP traffic would, i.e. the traffic follows the default route to the destination site.
In other words the purpose of the setting is strictly to prevent IP address leakage, not to prevent WebRTC from working.
For me it was mostly those building up a slow rage, and then an audio ad was what actually pissed me off enough to drop whatever I was doing and install it.
FF for Android just works amazingly poorly for me.. not to mention I really like chrome's tabs now coming up under the task list separately, instead of the tab-like interface.
I tried FF on my phone, simply for uBlock, but it was just too sluggish to actually use.
I may try that again... I last tried regular release a couple months ago.. some sites and the ads are so horrible in mobile without an ad blocker... but firefox was way too sluggish.
Do ublock has a mode/plugin that enable me to select objects on a HTML page for custom blocking? For adblock I use Element Hiding Helper which I use rather often.
I like uBlock a lot. With default deny 3rd party, or even some other settings enabled, I find it breaks the back button often, or I have to reload the page at google to search again. ANyone else have these issues.
Actually, the most annoying was on google because it would lock up occasionally and if I typed a new query in, i would have to reload. I was using ublock origin on mozilla firefox. I just upgraded to El Capitan and changed some settings so I will try to give it a go again.
I haven't the faintest idea how to use it besides just setting it and forgetting it. I tried digging in settings and whitelisting and whatnot but couldn't get it working.
Because it was already sold to a dubious company with relations to the Ad industry several years ago, and extorted 30 million US$ out of advertisers like Google.
[1] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock [2] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublock-origin/cjpa...