User Agent Stuff

dtarrant · 19 Oct 2018, 22:24

@advocatux No, I've never tried uAdBlock. Although adverts can be tiresome, I do understand that many internet resources would not be sustainable without advertising revenue. It's just another business model.
Regarding the switch to the Chrome user agent, what benefits are likely to arise?
I notice that vivid on my tablet uses Chromium 55 and that works pretty well.

advocatux · 20 Oct 2018, 06:51

Although adverts can be tiresome, I do understand that many internet resources would not be sustainable without advertising revenue

I don't mind ads but I don't like direct marketing, tracking, and malvertising [*]

Regarding the switch to the Chrome user agent, what benefits are likely to arise?

It's to solve a problem with ReCaptcha, mainly.

[*] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malvertising

dtarrant · 20 Oct 2018, 08:30

@advocatux

dtarrant · 20 Oct 2018, 08:51

@advocatux That's a real eye-opener isn't it? How vulnerable to this class of attack is UT?

advocatux · 20 Oct 2018, 08:59

@dtarrant I don't know but the confined nature of UT is good to mitigate it in the worse scenario

advocatux · 20 Oct 2018, 09:50

@dtarrant another good thing about using uAdBlock is that you save a lot of data and that's a must for people using limited data plans in their devices.

See for example this study Troy Hunt did the last month (using pi-hole) https://www.troyhunt.com/mmm-pi-hole/

Whoa! That's an 80% reduction in network requests and an 82% reduction in the number of bytes transferred.

dtarrant · 20 Oct 2018, 13:57

@advocatux Cool!

Marathon2422 · 20 Oct 2018, 15:10

@advocatux
enjoyed reading that; very educational

Lakotaubp · 21 Oct 2018, 07:32

Might be a silly question but is there away to autostart uAdblock on start similar to Ufw.

advocatux · 21 Oct 2018, 09:16

@lakotaubp you can set 'on' or 'off' uAdBlock using its GUI. When it's 'on' it's always "running" system-wide because what uAdBlock does is customize the hosts file.

If you have set it 'on' it survives system reboots. Maybe that's the autostart you are asking for?

Taking a look to any of these files https://github.com/mariogrip/uAdBlock/tree/master/host-files helps to get the full picture about what this app does.

Lakotaubp · 21 Oct 2018, 10:32

@advocatux Ok its only when I remember to re check its Gui is marked as off. So I put that down to restarting after daily dev updates. With my ageing brain I keep forgetting about it. : )

advocatux · 21 Oct 2018, 10:39

@lakotaubp some time ago I needed to re-enable uAdBlock after every reboot but now it's already enabled after every daily update (YMMV).

Lakotaubp · 21 Oct 2018, 19:36

@advocatux Yes as usual you are correct : ) it seems