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Comment by sequoia | Hacker News Reader

Does this initially block most/all domains and require individual whitelisting? I'm using it now, on washingtonpost.com it blocked requests to washingtonpost.com... if it requires manual whitelisting that's waay more than the average user will do and probably more than I will do (I'd been using disconnect or ghostery, will switch back to one of those or pBadger).

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Yes, it has been said that it's more for advanced users. I've been trying to mitigate this with presets, recipes, etc. but still I understand and accept that it's not for everybody.

I usually ask people to at least read this one page [1], not to convince them, but rather just so that it is understood that the extension is fully configurable: it can be at any point in the full block-all / allow-all spectrum.

[1] https://github.com/gorhill/httpswitchboard/wiki/How-to-use-H...

I just added a 3rd example of how the extension can be used without blocking anything, while still reporting everything. If anything, this can be useful to keep the other privacy extensions open for scrutiny.

We do have a preloaded list of third-party sites to not block because they would cause too much breakage. Note that because PBadger is in alpha, this list is very short right now: https://www.eff.org/files/cookieblocklist.txt

It's maintained by EFF, and more things will get added as time goes on.

Add mail.google.com!! I took the time to go to google accounts, re-login, disable the blocking on the various sites (accounts.google, mail.google etc.) to get it working, but I can imagine breaking gmail will be a quick route to "uninstall extension" for many people. :)

UGH, you're right. Ok, let me explain this. We whitelisted google.com but it was not anticipated that, in the general case, we should really whitelist all subdomains in order not to break sites.

Luckily this was a one-line patch: https://github.com/EFForg/privacybadgerfirefox/pull/63 (though in the future, it is better for the whitelist to have wildcards in the cases where it's necessary).

Thanks for testing. Really helps a lot.

FYI, upgrading to 0.1.1 (released Friday) fixes the bug I mentioned. Subdomains of whitelisted sites are also whitelisted now. https://github.com/EFForg/privacybadgerfirefox/pull/63/files

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