pythux

I think you might be referring to the « doomsday argument »? - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_argument

I was thinking that some of their engineers must be making more than that. Seems like a fine they will not even notice...

To be fair, blocklists are not really lists of regexps. They contain some regexps indeed but the syntax is mostly custom and matching relies on both patterns found in URLs (This part could be partially expressed as RegExps) as well as a multitude of other things like constraints on domain of the frame, domain of the request, type of network request, etc.

This is indeed a performance critical problem, but it is already pretty much solved at this point. If you look at the performance of the most popular content blockers, their decision time is already below fractions of milliseconds. So it does not seem like performance is really an issue anymore.

To add to the excellent answer from Gorhill, you might find this read interesting: https://0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-20/not-all-adblockers-are-born...

It is a deep dive into how modern content blockers work and what kind of rules they have to enforce (they are usually much more complex than simple domains, though).

As a side node, I recently ran a small experiment and found out that around 90% or blocking from Easylist/EasyPrivacy/uBO lists can be done based on domain information only. But of course this leaves a lot of corner cases where sites might break or ads might still show, and ultimately more granularity is needed to address these cases.

FYI: content blockers like uBlock Origin or Ghostery use block lists of tens of thousands of rules as well (can be up to 100k depending on lists enabled) and there are ways to make this matching very efficient[1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19175003

Nit: you must be talking about uBlock Origin, because uBlock was actually bought[1].

[1] https://blog.getadblock.com/the-adblock-family-gets-a-new-ad...

Well, enhanced tracking protection is closer to what an adblocker/content blocker would do as far as I know. They classify some domains as trackers based on a static list from Disconnect then use that information to either block requests or enforce extra restrictions on those (like blocking cookies/storage).

As mentioned in another comment, it’s actually possible: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23524626

The Cliqz browser used to have this feature built-in. It would ask you once in the beginning what your default choice would be regarding data collection practices (e.g. opt-out of everything or opt-in; most likely you would like to opt-out); then it would automatically apply your choice on each website (meaning that it would tick the right boxes for you) then hide the popup. It was a really cool feature IMO.

It’s pretty unlikely that a DNS blocker (like NextDNS or others) can effectively remove cookie notices since content blockers rely on injecting custom style sheets in practice to tackle them (which a DNS blocker absolutely cannot do).

For the record, this section of Wikipedia seems pretty outdated. Ghostrank has been removed from Ghostery in 2017 after Cliqz acquired Ghostery and the extension was open-sourced.

(Disclaimer: I worked there at the time)

Depends, there is a bunch of Electron apps that work just fine as websites (e.g. Slack, Spotify, Microsoft Teams, etc. As far as I know). I personally prefer running those in a browser tab to both save resources and benefit from privacy enhancing tools like content blockers, etc. I would be curious to know how many of the Electron apps actually need these extra native APIs.

Interesting project! As far as I can see it only approximately converts the rules right? Since the iOS Content Blocker does not look granular enough to express the rulesets semantics fully.

Out of curiosity, how did you handle exclusions? Also, are you generating one "block list" per ruleset? Or merging them into a single blocklist?

If you can select the <a> tag, then you can likely use a procedural cosmetic filter to go up the DOM like with :upward(n). So this should be possible.

> Google is just a default search; data isn't being sent to them.

You mean, apart from everything typed in the URL bar by default?

Just to avoid any confusion, I have nothing to do with the change of behavior in Firefox 75. And the « fix » was only about changing the default behavior with new prefs values (the real fix was done in Firefox around 2007 but for some reason the default behavior was never reverted until now).

Yey! This is a fun one, I fixed it in Cliqz (a browser based on Firefox) a while ago: https://github.com/cliqz-oss/browser-f/pull/912#issue-195908...

If you are wondering why this discrepancy in behavior between platforms: This default behavior was initially changed to prevent a 16-years old bug in SeaMonkey, which was already fixed in Firefox since 2007. See following issues for more details:

* https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=190615

* https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=611162

Inertia I guess... happy to see this fixed upstream!

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).

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

Here you go: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/manage-email-messag...

I could not really pinpoint why the new UI is bad, but it got me to finally switched 100% over to emails to manage all my GitHub notifications; I disabled them in the Web UI completely.

I find my email client (Thunderbird) and custom filters to be a much more powerful and flexible way to manage the hundreds of notifications I get every day. More than 99% of these emails are automatically sorted in folders, tagged, etc. So that I can efficiently prioritize what I look at. This saves me massive amounts of time. In the end I always have an empty inbox, which I find pretty satisfying and it helps me focus.

I love AMD and I am super impressed with the performance of this new CPU. Especially when comparing to top offering from Intel. But, how did they manage to catch up on Intel? Is there a catch? How did it go so wrong for Intel?

Did You check Cliqz already? Independent search index: https://beta.cliqz.com/

There is a lot of technical details about how it’s built on the tech blog: https://0x65.dev/

(Disclaimer: I work at Cliqz)

Really cool read. One thing which I was curious about, but is not completely related to the article, is how the workflow of making changes to a big project like Clang looks like. Is there some « watch » mode to iterate faster without needing to rebuild? What kind of tooling/editor is recommended, is there some linting support? Is it possible to quickly identify a subset of tests to run for the changes made? (In this case I assume there are tests for lambda parsing?).

I was not aware of the « HipChat rewrite » but we used it in my previous company and it was Ok. One day a colleague told the team about Slack; I was skeptical. So 4 people gave it a shot for a few days/weeks (including me). The result was that, except the built-in bot to show random Gifs, Slack was superior for our use case in all aspects and we eventually switched everyone over, and all were happy.

This was 4 or 5 years ago. Now in my current company we also use Slack. It’s good, but not great either. Mostly because the UI is super slow when running in my desktop browser (Cliqz, Firefox-based). But it’s still better than Teams in my experience (I did not try the other alternatives).

Hi, I work on the Ghostery extension.

In addition to my answer regarding the business model of Ghostery above: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21897809. I'd like to add a few things to address your points:

(1) Ghostery did not "fall completely out of favor", as far as I can see. It is true that in _some communities_ (in particular some sub-reddits), some people tend to recommend different addons instead (often not based on any technical arguments, though), but this is not a trend that can be generalized (more people continue to recommend Ghostery as a very solid privacy protection suit).

(2) EFF's Privacy Badger is not a replacement for Ghostery, for more information about why, we wrote about it in the past[1][2].

(3) Ghostery has an "actual ad-blocker" built-in, in fact, it is one of the most efficient out there as was shown in a study that we published this year[3]. The adblocker as well as benchmarks are open-source and anyone can run them locally to verify the claims. We also more recently wrote extensively about the internals of this adblocker[4].

References:

[1]: https://whotracks.me/blog/how_cliqz_antitracking_protects_us...

[2]: https://0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-19/blocking-tracking-without-b...

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

[4]: https://0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-20/not-all-adblockers-are-born...

Hi, I work on the Ghostery extension.

Ghostery used to belong to a company named Evidon, which had this business model of collecting data to sell it in some form (the feature was called "Ghostrank"). In 2017, Ghostery was acquired by Cliqz (which builds an independent and private search engine from Germany), and since then a few things happened: (1) the extension was open-sourced, (2) Ghostrank was completely removed and (3) Ghostery is now developing paid products as a business model. For example we launched Ghostery Insights[1] and Ghostery Midnight[2] recently, both of which are subscription-based.

[1]: https://www.ghostery.com/insights/ [2]: https://www.ghostery.com/midnight/

Wow that looks really useful, I did not know of this app. Did anyone here on HN use it successfully? Having a single app to allow navigating cities and buying tickets is something I have been wishing for lately (especially in cities where there is no way to buy tickets either online or via an app).

This is a source of anxiety for me lately. We use plastic everywhere and yet seem to not know what to do with it. Plastic is cheap they say, but would plastic be so cheap if we had to factor in the price of recycling it or at least handling its after life? Would it be realistic to ask to think about what to do with wastes of the products sold?