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Comment by dexen | Hacker News Reader

> Resilience doesn't sell out your privacy with "acceptable ads". Resilience won't be blocked by your web browser's developers.

Excellent. I'm glad to see uBlock Origin getting some much needed competition, and a good take on Chrome's adblocking downgrade.

>Transparent HTTP/HTTPS proxy for Windows, Linux and macOS.

Not so great. Getting HTTP/1 right is hard, getting SSL right is hard, integration is quite hard just as well. And then there's HTTP/2, and WebSockets and other protocols. Possible results of failure: connection reset, encryption downgrade attack, malicious script injection, credentials stealing, browsing history stealing, XSS, SSL spoofing, IDN homograph attack. Sadly Chrome seems to leave no better option at this point.

OTOH, in the longer run it makes sense for ad blockers & similar tools to be ran as a wholly separate process, offering one more layer of separation.

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> I'm glad to see uBlock Origin getting some much needed competition,

Why does uBO need competition? It appears to me that it offers the best combination of features and performance out there.

Moreover, the choice to implement as a proxy has some serious drawbacks, features like uBO's cosmetic filters won't be practical to implement in a proxy.

Competition in any space is extremely valuable. If for whatever reason uBlock Origin went away tomorrow there would be a void to fill. Furthermore, competition drives innovation. A separate project may figure out a better or more efficient way to accomplish the same goals and they could potentially share their findings with the uBlock team or vice versa and everyone benefits.

This. It is exactly what happened about a year ago when this performance study[1] was published. In the months that followed, uBlock Origin, Brave and Adblock Plus all worked pretty hard on improving the performance of their content blocking engine, and used the benchmark and open-source dataset from the study to measure their optimizations.

The result is that now, all users of either of these extensions benefit from a better and faster product, thanks to emulation between competing projects. This would not necessarily happen in the absence of competition. In the end, users benefit.

(Disclaimer: I am one of the authors of the performance study)

[1]: https://whotracks.me/blog/adblockers_performance_study.html

> If for whatever reason uBlock Origin went away tomorrow there would be a void to fill.

If for whatever reason uBlock Origin went away tomorrow there would be a fork. uBlock Origin is the second (or third, I forget) fork of the original project.

uBlock Origin is still almost exclusively maintained by the original author: Raymond Hill. He was already behind uBlock and is now working on uBlock Origin (the original uBlock being basically stale).

> Competition in any space is extremely valuable.

Sure, no argument there. But the original comment said that in this case it is "much needed", suggesting something more specific than just "competition is generally good".

Lots of comments here are making non-specific arguments that "competition" leads directly to improvements in products/technology. It seems to me what is missing here is a concrete idea for making an ad-blocker work better, not an avenue for making a new/different approach available. (In particular, the goals of this project seem to be much more about working around upcoming Chrome extension changes rather than about improving the behavior in some way)

I think the OP (Resilience author) is referring to Google's attempt to knife the uBO baby, what the parent commenter meant is unclear.

I don't think there is anything wrong with uBO, but its days in Chrome are numbered, which is why I ditched Chrome for Vivaldi.

I use, appreciate, and recommend uBO to everybody.

Having said that, competition both puts some pressure to improve more, and also explores some alternative, possibly better, avenues. Historical example: Firefox was significantly better than IE 6 / 7 / 8, and yet ended up improving much more in the course of competing vis a vis Chrome.

All in all, a staunch-and-fair competitor is good to have.

>OTOH, in the longer run it makes sense for ad blockers & similar tools to be ran as a wholly separate process, offering one more layer of separation.

what's the advantage of that?

(Hopefully) the OS enforces memory protection between the adblock process and any HTTP client process, thus limiting attacks to only the data that resides in, or flows through, the adblock process.

With a bit more advanced setup, you could also completely cut off the adblock process from accessing any files or any other resources related to the browser, further nailing down security.

Sure, it is possible to have similar (or equivalent) setup for browser plugins, but it requires some special engineering done in the browser - and in that scenario no other apps benefit from the protection. Let's not forget there's many more crucial HTTP user agents than just the web browser.

>(Hopefully) the OS enforces memory protection between the adblock process and any HTTP client process, thus lowering the direct attack surface to only the data that resides in, or flows through, the adblock process.

>With a bit more advanced setup, you could even completely cut off the adblock process from accessing any files or any other resources related to the browser, further nailing down security.

How would that even work? The adblocking process has full access to whatever's being passed through it, and therefore it can eavesdrop or tamper (eg. inject malicious js) with the contents.

>Sure, it is possible to have similar (or equivalent) setup for browser plugins, but it requires some special engineering done in the browser - and in that scenario no other apps benefit from the protection. Let's not forget there's much more crucial HTTP user agents than just the browser.

Sounds useful, but it's a lot like dns based adblockers or hosts file, only worse because it only works locally, and only for applications that support/respect the proxy settings.

>>With a bit more advanced setup, you could even completely cut off the adblock process from accessing any files or any other resources related to the browser, further nailing down security.

>How would that even work? The adblocking process has full access to whatever's being passed through it, and therefore it can eavesdrop or tamper (eg. inject malicious js) with the contents.

A web browser is so much more than just the network traffic. Consider the mouse & keyboard input, the browsing history, the cache, the security credential store, the connection to display, GPU, USB and Bluetooth devices, microphones & cameras... the list goes on. This includes ability to read and write local files, start new processes, compile and run code. And then there are other HTTP user agents, like automatic software update tools.

Most of this functionality shouldn't be needed by, nor accessible to, an ad blocker.

Lastly, you could put much stricter resource usage limits (CPU time, operating memory) on an adblocking process than on a web browser, thwarting whole classes of resource exhausting attacks.

>only worse because it only works locally

You can apply varying levels of restricting any net traffic not passing through the adblock, up to and including dropping any such traffic. Ability to ad-filter HTTP traffic of an email client, RSS reader (i know, 2020) and similar user agents would be good.

>A web browser is so much more than just the network traffic. Consider the mouse & keyboard input, the browsing history, the cache, the security credential store, the connection to display, GPU, USB and Bluetooth devices, microphones & cameras... the list goes on.

Access to those resources are either gated behind a permission (which adblockers shouldn't have access to), or can be accessed by any website, in which case a malicious ad blocker can exploit by injecting its malicious js into the http response.

>Lastly, you could put much stricter resource usage limits (CPU time, operating memory) on an adblocking process than on a web browser, thwarting whole classes of resource exhausting attacks.

Seems theoretical to me. If your adblocker is a cryptominer, you probably have bigger issues. If whatever site you're going to is mounting DoS attacks on your adblocker, you probably don't want to stay on the site anyways.

>You can apply varying levels of restricting any net traffic not passing through the adblock, up to and including dropping any such traffic. Ability to ad-filter HTTP traffic of an email client, RSS reader (i know, 2020) and similar user agents would be good.

I'm not doubting whether it works, it's just that it's worse (or marginally better) than dns/hosts adblockers.

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