How to block ads?

Hi all,

I watch online football games (online stream) really often.

What I hate with that are ads, and all unwanted new pages (tabs)

How to block all of them ?

Atm I am using uBlock Origin from Firefox, but that is not 100 % working.

Thanks

Hi!
Try to set more restricted options in firefox, but maybe the stream would have some issues

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Most regulars here seem to prefer ĀµBLock Origin, but like you, I personally find it hopelessly inadequate, and so instead I use AdBLock Plus ā”€ firefox-adblock-plus from the repository ā”€ which does work very diligently. :wink:

sudo pacman -S firefox-adblock-plus
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I use AdNauseam. Donā€™t know if it fits your needs but itā€™s worth a shot :slight_smile:

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Thanks guysā€¦ will try all of them and experiment a little xD

Pi-hole.

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Personally, never had issues with ublock originā€™s default settings. You can add more host files if you want to it. And/or change the modes:

Really?
That thing is ā€¦ woefully inadequate at blocking ā€¦ comes preemptively with ā€˜acceptable adsā€™ ā€¦ and uses way more resources.

@brtza
the thing about ublock:origin ā€¦ is you need to use the lists ā€¦ set/add whichever ones you need ā€¦ including ABP ones if you want.

Ex:

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The ā€œacceptable adsā€ are easily disabled, and I donā€™t notice anything about it using more resources. Now this computer here is no slouch, but itā€™s not exactly top-of-the-line either. Itā€™s an Intel i5-8400, with six cores, no Hyperthreading, and 16 GiB of RAM.

As they say, your mileage may vary. :man_shrugging:

I suppose its probably not too noticeable these days when 100mb ram vs 10mb ram doesnt matter.
but its the principle of the thing. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:
I also dont think you have too much control over their lists ā€¦ but I dunno ā€¦ havent even looked at it seriously in years and years.

As to an even better solution ā€¦ managed hosts file.
That will get rid of tons of nasties.
(I havent even updated mine recently and its ā€¦ over 120,000 lines :laughing:)

Is there an /etc/hosts solution for the OP?

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Sorry. Should mention ā€¦
There are a number of packages in the AUR that will source/sort/apply these lists.
(and/or resources online to manually generate from)
I forget all of them ā€¦ but update-hosts-git is one and I know there are others.

Also to add - I find these are much more comprehensive than your general browser addon, including things like crypto-miners, its also applied system-wide so its fuller protectionā€¦and ā€¦ its straight up faster. setting 0.0.0.0 for facialrecognitionbook.com results in zero redirects and no ping at all ā€¦ simply ends the connection from origin immediately.

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Take a look at hBlock. It is available in AUR.

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Iā€™m mostly using Brave + uBlock Origin these days, before that I used Iron (de-googled Chromium on Windows) + the same extensions. Hevenā€™t seen ads in forever.

I donā€™t watch videos, so I canā€™t really comment on that; the only thing that pops up sooner or later is paywalls which get fed to cosmetic filters and/or simply deleted from the page source if I even stay on that site.

Works well, but planning on getting a Pi-hole set up later this year to take care of other devices like the TV and Playsation.

I downloaded the MVPS hosts file:

wget http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.txt

Then I replaced the 0.0.0.0ā€™s with 127.0.0.1ā€™s in a text editor for good measure & stuck it on the bottom of my hosts file.

I thought I was running a modified /etc/hosts but when I looked I wasnā€™t. In the past I must have installed & forgot about doing it.

Iā€™m grateful to the OP of this thread, as the discussion made me check. :slight_smile:

Iā€™m using the Brave browser with no ad-block add-on, as Brave blocks most stuff by default (I have the sponsored stuff turned off in Brave). Iā€™ll be interested to see if the modified /etc/hosts file gets rid of the very few adds that get through in Brave.

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Yes I have the 2-prong approach too.
The browser extension should handle anything I happen to not add/update in my hosts file, but also for anything browser-specific up to and including things like referrer headers or funny javascript things, etc.
Also, to minimize blocking-load I try to make sure to have no redundancies ā€¦
Thats why a tool to sort multiple sources is nice but also why you may notice in my screenshot above that I actually dont have very many ublock sources checked. Such as MVPS - as thats already in the hosts file.

EDIT. oh yeah @handy dont forget ā€¦
Firefoxā€™s ā€˜DNS-Over-HTTPSā€™ ignores your hosts file.
You have to turn that off for any of it to matter
(you have your system/network DNS already handled, right? :wink:)
You can do so in Preferences, or use the about:config string:

network.trr.mode                             5

I use uBlock Origin, and I have no ad anywhere.

But when you install uBlock you have to go to its settings and tick all the blocklist you want to use, then click the update all button and youā€™re good, find me a link where you have ads :smiley: I would be surprised.

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@cscs, Iā€™m using the Brave browser (mentioned in last post) so about:config isnā€™t. :wink:

Iā€™m always on a VPN which takes control of my DNS & makes sure that only its DNS servers are used, apart from the other VPN stuff of course.

Iā€™m sure your EDIT will be very helpful to some other users out there, due to the popularity of Firefox.

As its a chromium/blink thing ā€¦
It might still have a similar option in chrome://flags
Specifically "Secure DNS lookups (#dns-over-https)"
(or brave://flags/#dns-over-https)
But honestly dont know which ones have it on by default.

With ā€˜brave://flags/#dns-over-httpsā€™ I get Not available on your platform.

The others just turn into search page results.

Thanks for the infoā€™ though cscs.