Idea for someone smarter than me
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I may be reaching here, so forgive the wall of text...
Everyone has heard of Pi-hole, that beautiful DNS ad/tracker blocker you need to install on a SoC of some sort and then point your router to it so all traffic passes through the Pi-hole, blocking the nonsense. Great idea, not easy for people who are not technically inclined.
To avoid the fight with adblockers on browsers, why not develop a type of virtual "Pi-hole" that is installed on your computer. This program could subscribe to the various lists out there, including the UBO and Firebog lists and would not be in the browser as a potential thing to be blocked or argued over. This "virtual" Pi-hole, or proxy if you will, would then filter all traffic from your computer.
Years ago, Flash cookies (LSOs - Local Shared Objects AKA The Forever Cookie) were tracking the daylights out of people. When you cleared cache and cookies, the LSOs were not deleted and continued to track users across the web. I was a Linux user then and a friend introduced me to the notion of creating a symlink for the Adobe hidden files in the user directory and passing what was written to them to /dev/null. Since /dev/null is a file, albeit null, it acts as a file and allows things to be written to it, but like a black hole, it's an event horizon from which nothing returns. Websites would happily write their LSOs to the symlink and work without error. I even figured out how to do this with the KDE browser, Konqueror, and never had to clear my cache or cookies again.
I don't have the skills as a scripter to write something like this as an installed program, but it has to be possible to create a program that could:
- Be installed locally and run as a virtual type of "Pi-hole"/proxy
- Use available blocking lists
- Choose DNS providers like Pi-hole
- Strips fingerprinting
- Blocks HTTP referer (The only thing that blocking HTTP referer breaks in my experience is banks, but most people are using apps for this notion)
This stays out of the browser yet blocks all the nonsense.
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@robertecullen These are good ideas. Taking control of your data on the technology you own is important. I think a lot of this exists already in various forms.
If you are comfortable editing config files on your computer, you can install hostfile lists (example: https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts). These work similarly to blocker lists, but they work at the OS level, essentially by redirecting certain websites to a nonexistent server (address zero).
You can also change your DNS settings on most OSes and in most VPN programs to achieve a similar effect.
I use firewall based blocking (using a program called WFC for windows - https://binisoft.org/wfc,and there are similar frontends for linux OSes) as this makes the existing firewall services easier to use and you can easily just ban certain apps from talking to the web or to certain servers.
The only thing I can think that would be difficult to do is blocking fingerprinting and modifying HTTP headers.
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As noted above, using HOSTS file as a block list is an easy solution.
There are HOSTS manager tools that automate things and make it even easier.If you need more flexibility with blocking and redirecting then DNSCrypt can be used as a pi-hole or local service in a computer.
https://github.com/DNSCrypt/dnscrypt-proxy -
A good alternative to Pi-Hole and somewhat more user friendly is Portmaster
- Monitor all Network activity and can block these if needed
- Auto-block Trackers and Malware
- All your DNS queries are automatically secured and re-routed to a DNS-over-TLS provider of your choice.
- Optional SPN service (paid)
Comparision with Pi-Hole
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@robertecullen
In the days of Netscape and ie one of them wrote all your cookies to a file “cookies.txt”. So in the same location we created a Folder with that name and deleted the text file.
Where did the cookies go? The folder was empty (0 bytes). -
@greybeard said in Idea for someone smarter than me:
Where did the cookies go?
In Vivaldi? Subfolder Default\Network\ and encrypted SQLite database file Cookies
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@DoctorG
Not Vivaldi, no.
I was referring to Netscape and ie, 1990's versions.
It was the only way to escape them. -
@greybeard said in Idea for someone smarter than me:
I was referring to Netscape and ie, 1990's versions.
Ah, i misinterpreted your post
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@DoctorG
That's OK. I think I may have done that myself once.
Actually I probably do that daily...
