Comment by cobbzilla | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cobbzilla | Hacker News Reader

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Disclosure: author of Bubble

Bubble [1] is a new kind of VPN that does just about exactly what you are looking for. On FB, Twitter, LinkedIn, Insta, etc, you can scroll through your feed and:

* No ads!

* No tracking! (except what you click, can't avoid this)

* Auto-block posts matching keywords you don't like (politics/etc)

* Auto-block posts that contain links to news websites (I use this on FB, it's great)

* Block specific users whether you're connected to them or not.

* Blocked users don't know you've blocked them, because the block is at the network-level, not in the social media service.

Bubble is open source [2], our commercial offering is currently in beta.

How does it work? It's basically a WireGuard VPN with a tightly-integrated mitmproxy. So it works on any device, but the social media blocking only works on the web (native apps are cert pinned, which breaks mitm). AMA.

Oh did I mention it works on HN too? I rarely need to block a user here, but when I do, it sure is nice to have that feature!

[1] https://getbubblenow.com

[2] https://github.com/getbubblenow/bubble-docs

Sorry, but this sounds a bit terrifying. All your traffic is going through Bubble's servers where it is TLS-intercepted and accessible as plaintext. Compared to a browser extension like uBlock, you don't see what is happening on Bubble's servers. You essentially need to trust a startup with all your internet traffic.

The claim that it's "open source" a bit disingenious after looking through your GitHub repositories. It's not like you could test Bubble locally and then decide to use your hosted service.

I think the overall use case is solid, but would be much better served with a browser extension. Also, very likely mitmproxy won't really scale that well to lots of users.

Please understand that you always run your own Bubble, it generates its own certificate, no one else can see your traffic.

Even if you launch using our paid service, it’s the same- we don’t have access to the system we launch on your behalf.

Bubble is as private as running your own WireGuard VPN, it’s just a lot easier to set up and comes with some cool features.

You can absolutely try the open source version right now: https://git.bubblev.org/bubblev/bubble

This is cool in a sense, but I don't really trust anybody enough to let them MITM all of my internet traffic through a remote server.

See my reply above. You are mitm-ing yourself.

We can’t see your traffic. We can’t login to your Bubble— but you can install an ssh key and root around all you want.

We are anti-SaaS

>VPN with a tightly-integrated mitmproxy

Are you for real?! This is basically the polar opposite of what people should be looking for, no?

Bubble is open source and self hosted. You should never trust anyone to touch your plaintext traffic but you.

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