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Comment by SixSigma | Hacker News Reader

I would recommend Privoxy rather than adblock. I chose it because it can be used with any browser rather than needing to be a plugin and have had great results with it. As a bonus I have it running on a virtual server and use an ssh tunnel on any system I end up using. This gets me round filters and installing things other than ssh. So if I am using my Android phone on free wifi, I know I'm not being dns hijacked or under HTTP MITM attack.

http://www.privoxy.org/

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I tried switching to Privoxy the other day. You have to manually convert AdBlock lists to their configuration format, so it's less convenient. On top of that, some sites no longer worked and browsing generally felt slower. I think in the end doing the filtering in a native (C) program is the way to go, but right now it's not comparable to how hassle-free ABP is.

Yeah, the config is horrible IMO. A packaged privoxy install with ABP-comparable rules would be very useful.

I've never tried converting ABP rules into privoxy, but I did write a crude perl script to grab Ghostery's blocks and convert them into privoxy config files.

I found these while configuring Privoxy a few weeks ago:

GNU/Linux: http://andrwe.org/scripting/bash/privoxy-blocklist

OS X: https://github.com/skroll/privoxy-adblock

Scripts to convert Adblock-filters to the Privoxy-format. They have worked well so far.

A drawback is that a proxy won't be able to filter HTTPS traffic.

That depends on the proxy. Systems that effectively MITM your own network's traffic have been around for some years now. All you need for outbound connections is to install an additional certificate in your browser so the proxy can act a trusted partner for HTTPS.

I don't know whether anyone has made such a proxy for use in the kind of situation we're talking about here, however.

Adguard does that. Been beta testing it. One adblock to rule them all kinda thing.

uh? you can totally filter HTTPS with a proxy, especially with a local one. Either use the option to activate the dump of you keys on disk (a one-liner on every browser) and point the proxy to that file, or just break the SSL in 2 and rely on the proxy for the actual cert check.

"privoxy" not "a proxy"

However you can block specific HTTPS sites with privoxy. Admittedly this isn't very fine-grained but I use it to block a lot of crummy HTTPS ads and trackers.

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