SN 995: uBlock Origin & Manifest V3

Beep boop - this is a robot. A new show has been posted to TWiT…

What are your thoughts about today’s show? We’d love to hear from you!

I’ve been using AVM Fritz!Box routers for years now. They get regular updates and have been quick to get out patches the couple of times that a problem was found.

Behind that, I use a Unifi USG and Unifi APs and switches.

I noticed Steve gave some credence to Google’s claim that the changes affecting adblockers are for security reasons. I’m a little more skeptical.

They removed webRequestBlocking, used mainly by adblockers, but left webRequest. The security implications are the same for both, but only the former is optimized for content blocking.

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I still have about 25 minutes left in the episode, but I’ve been following this subject closely so naturally I have some thoughts on it. Full disclaimer; I’m one of those nutballs who actually likes Chromium, but I’m also using Brave specifically because “Shields” isn’t an extension so it’s immune to all this.

Two things can be true; the shift to declarative requests can be a more secure approach to browsing in a world where the browser is the main attack vector, AND Google can be rolling out a change that will happen to give them a leg up in the cat-and-mouse game that they’re playing with ad blockers. I choose to focus on the former, and in that way it’s ultimately a good change. Add a network filter to your DNS (pi-hole) and it’ll catch 90% of the crap before it gets to your computer.

As far as home routers go. Unifi is obviously the gold standard but it’s not for regular folks. Eero has been my choice for years because you set them up and they “just work”.