[Release] AB-Solution 3 - The Ad Blocking Solution

[thelonelycoder]

I don't understand "the reverse applies to the blockers". Can you explain?

Sorry for the Germanized version. If ad-servers find a new way, so will ad-blockers. That is what I meant.

But what about the other ad blockers that don't whitelist SNB and SNBForums? I'm talking about ad blocking in general. Ads = revenue. No ads, no revenue, no SNB (and other ad supported sites). There has to be some form of ad that is acceptable.

I have no control over other applications. With AB I do my best to help you in a way that is acceptable to you and the users.
As @RMerlin suggested elsewhere, a donate button might be a way for you too. Or a premium membership. I would be the first to sign up.

 

[RMerlin]

There has to be some form of ad that is acceptable.

Personally, I think that a large part of the problem was created by the advertising industry itself. A lot of us remember the days of popups and pop unders and Punch The Monkey animated ads. Today, these are replaced by highly misleading ads making some download sites display no less than FOUR different "Download" buttons, misleading people into locating the real one. The ads industry need to clean up its act, and start policing themselves better.

Add to that the poor security of some of these advertisers, allowing malicious content to get pushed through their channels into legitimate channels.

And finally, some ads make website take nearly 3x longer to load or causing a lot of reflows (quite CPU-expensive on mobile devices). A few years ago, a website had a very interesting study where they compared various popular websites with and without ads, and measured the percentage of page real-estate devoted to ads. Some of these sites had well over 33% of the webpage content devoted to ads (might have been higher, it's been a few years since I read that article), versus 66% left for actual content.

These are the issues that need to be addressed for more people to be willing to deal with website ads:

1) A more active ban on any misleading ads (seriously, if those same ads ran on TV or in a newspaper, there would be lawsuits involved about misleading advertisement).

2) Better security. All ads providers need to offer HTTPS (to reduce the risks of hijacking), and better control what they push out to remote sites

3) A more balanced approach in advertisement volume vs content, both in terms of page space and load/render performance


I appreciate Google's efforts there, as they have quite strict guidelines for their ads. However that brings another thing that bothers me: last quarter, Google registered advertising revenues of $19.8B, up from $16.7B from last year's same quarter. Maybe some of these companies need to give back more of these revenues to website owners, which would allow them, in turn, to reduce the number of ads they have to display to cover their expenses. Fewer ads, less aggravating, would make users more willing to whitelist. Unfortunately at this point, this wouldn't happen overnight, as trust would have to be regained by the users.

 

[digimon04]

Did you test AB-solution and Pyload were both working before you started on the transmission install?
It troubles me that you are having problems with AB3 even without a pixelserv install. At least with a instance of pixelserv running i could imagine some possible interference going on, but without pixelserv, the AB3 interaction as far as dnsmasq is concerned is really no different to AB1.7. Are you able to install working versions of entware, pyload and transmission successfully prior to installing AB3? i would like to be sure its AB3 screwing things up and not some incompatibilities with latest merlin firmware or entware package changes first. And just for reference what are you using as your entware/adblocking device? flash drive/hard drive/EXT2/4?

I would also be interested of the findings. AB without PS is basically a better 1.07 from the core functionalify point of view. With PS installed, AB ensures that settings in jffs are properly set. So it should help with a Transmission install, rather than hinder it.

My apologies. I may have made a mistake.

I tried to install Pyload without AB-Solution. After that, Transmission can be installed successfully. However, it rarely works. Transmission became dead instantly after reboot or manual start script. Sometimes, after reboot of router, I can login the WebUI of Transmission. It will lose connection when I add a torrent.

This made me think that Pyload should be the one messing things up. I am not aware of the version changes of the firmware, Pyload and Transmission at the beginning but just pointing towards AB-Solution. I am really sorry about that.

Meanwhile, I found that numerous packages is installed when I "opkg install pyload":

python-curl python python-light python-base zlib libffi libbz2 python-ctypes python-pydoc python-multiprocessing python-codecs python-sqlite3 libsqlite3 python-logging python-gdbm libgdbm python-email python-distutils python-xml libexpat python-compiler python-db libdb47 libxml2 python-openssl libopenssl python-decimal python-unittest python-ncurses libncurses libncursesw libcurl

I wanna know if this is the normal situation? Thanks.

 

[thiggins]

RMerlin: I entirely agree with all your points. The ad industry has brought this on itself. And its efforts to mitigate the situation are glacially slow. Revenue from Google continues to decline, even as ad volume increases.

I don't like offensive ads and have always been selective on the number of ads and ad types I run. I continue to investigate alternative and less intrusive forms of advertising, including ads like Techmeme runs:

It was the earlier discussion in this thread about blocking ads like this that prompted my posts. If even these will be blocked (they currently aren't...not at least by Adblock Plus), then adblockers will be preventing a move to the type of ads that should be more acceptable than the crap we have to put up with now.

I'll now stop hijacking this thread.

 

[thelonelycoder]

I'll now stop hijacking this thread.

You are not, and your direct input is most welcome here.

 

[RMerlin]

I don't like offensive ads and have always been selective on the number of ads and ad types I run.

Aside from one malicious ad that tried to redirect my browser and forced me to do terminate the browser's process (unfortunately I couldn't locate it in my history due to the forced exit and couldn't get it to re-appear, which was why I didn't report it), your ads have been pretty much always on-topic for me (ads from Kerio, Asus and such - always network-related in some way, at least whenever I paid attention to them).

I think that such sponsored posts are blocked on some sites by AdBlock but not on others. There might be different implementations involved (unless they were whitelisted - I have AdBlock configured to allow "acceptable" ads, as per their own criteria tho).

Meanwhile, another very popular tech site which I still follow has sunk down to displaying Revcontent ads, and these are getting through AdBlock. Why at the bottom of an SSD review I have to be shown ads about how Melania Trump looks like is making me sad... Might have to do with that site being sold to a larger media company in recent times.

 

[elorimer]

There is an ad that runs regularly on Facebook--usually a notice that Jane Fonda or Robert DeNiro has died--that does the browser hijack, and disables Windows Defender. I've had to wipe two computers in the house after this. (And moved everyone to windows standard user accounts). So I think some form of adblocking is necessary for security. Then there are websites like weather.com and accuweather.com that are almost unusable because of the ads and videoclips. NYTimes is going in that direction.

Most other websites I don't mind and even find helpful. Here, tivocommunity.com, and sailinganarchy.com (which mostly uses hardcoded ads, so that isn't a good example). Here I think TLC has done a useful service by whitelisting by default this site, and making it easy to whitelist other sites.

Although, in truth, my number one gripe misleading-wise is Adobe.

 

[Wutikorn]

No, never had that.

For some reasons, after my second reboot, the status bar becomes normal.

 

[thiggins]

The malicious ads have been for the most part due to the site being compromised with multiple instances of malware inserted into key files around the site. I finally gave up trying to locate the code myself and have since subscribed to a service that cleaned the site (took their tools less than 5 minutes) and constantly scans for file changes. These ads are not served by legitimate ad networks.

Since FB runs only its own ads, shame on them for not properly screening them.

 

[tomsk]

My apologies. I may have made a mistake.

I tried to install Pyload without AB-Solution. After that, Transmission can be installed successfully. However, it rarely works. Transmission became dead instantly after reboot or manual start script. Sometimes, after reboot of router, I can login the WebUI of Transmission. It will lose connection when I add a torrent.

This made me think that Pyload should be the one messing things up. I am not aware of the version changes of the firmware, Pyload and Transmission at the beginning but just pointing towards AB-Solution. I am really sorry about that.

Meanwhile, I found that numerous packages is installed when I "opkg install pyload":

python-curl python python-light python-base zlib libffi libbz2 python-ctypes python-pydoc python-multiprocessing python-codecs python-sqlite3 libsqlite3 python-logging python-gdbm libgdbm python-email python-distutils python-xml libexpat python-compiler python-db libdb47 libxml2 python-openssl libopenssl python-decimal python-unittest python-ncurses libncurses libncursesw libcurl

I wanna know if this is the normal situation? Thanks.

Pyload is written in the python programming language so it needs to use a whole bunch of python libraries to work. Entware understands the dependences and will automatically install them for you. You can see the dependancies if you type opkg list <package> e.g.

tOmsK@RT-AC68U-4690:/tmp/home/root# opkg  info pyload
Package: pyload
Version: 0.4.9-20161020-2
Depends: libc, libssp, librt, libpthread, python-curl, python-sqlite3
Status: unknown ok not-installed
Section: net
Architecture: armv7soft
MD5Sum: c040c09cf787dcb308b41294526be0d6
Size: 1116000
Filename: pyload_0.4.9-20161020-2_armv7soft.ipk
Source: feeds/oldports/pyload
Description: A fast, lightweight and full featured download manager

 

[Andyf66]

I'm currently running Pi-Hole on a Raspberry PI and am very happy with it, but have noticed lots of people mentioning this solution. Are there any real benefits to switching to AB-Solution? Being an 'all in one' product running on the router doesn't mean much to me, I'm quite happy with a separate device.

Is it actually 'better' at blocking Ads than Pi Hole?

 

[thelonelycoder]

I'm currently running Pi-Hole on a Raspberry PI and am very happy with it, but have noticed lots of people mentioning this solution. Are there any real benefits to switching to AB-Solution? Being an 'all in one' product running on the router doesn't mean much to me, I'm quite happy with a separate device.

Is it actually 'better' at blocking Ads than Pi Hole?

AB-Solution is better than Pi-Hole.
Pi-Hole does not allow for any modification of the hosts files at all, nor lets you select or assemble your own through the interface.
Pi-Hole needs you to set the DNS on all your devices.
Pi-Hole does not have additional stuff like filtering to find out which domains are blocked to whitelist.
Pi-Hole has not stats to email function.
What Pi-Hole has is a more or less usable Web Interface. This is probably the only downside from AB-Solution's point of view.

 

[cybrnook]

AB-Solution is better than Pi-Hole.
Pi-Hole does not allow for any modification of the hosts files at all, nor lets you select or assemble your own through the interface. - incorrect, you can pick and choose your lists that their gravity script uses.
https://github.com/pi-hole/pi-hole/wiki/Customising-sources-for-ad-lists

Pi-Hole needs you to set the DNS on all your devices. - this is incorrect, you just set your routers DNS to the pi-hole IP (Pihole gives you an ipv4 and ipv6 DNS address to use after install) and during install, pihole also asks you which up stream DNS you want to use, google, opendns, etc...

Pi-Hole does not have additional stuff like filtering to find out which domains are blocked to whitelist. - it does offer logging via it's webgui, which you can filter by blocked entries

Pi-Hole has not stats to email function.
What Pi-Hole has is a more or less usable Web Interface. This is probably the only downside from AB-Solution's point of view.

Just some small corrections (Note, I love both of these tools)

However I will say that pihole seems to be having issues with white listing entries if you are using ipv6.

 

[thelonelycoder]

Just some small corrections (Note, I love both of these tools)

However I will say that pihole seems to be having issues with white listing entries if you are using ipv6.

Fair enough!

 

[cybrnook]

Again, they are both great. They just serve different markets (especially for users of non-AsusWRT firmware, they gotta have something too ).

The granular control you offer out of the gate is unrivaled, especially compared to pi-hole (which is a simple interface for a set it and forget it).

 

[thelonelycoder]

Again, they are both great. They just serve different markets (especially for users of non-AsusWRT firmware, they gotta have something too ).

The granular control you offer out of the gate is unrivaled, especially compared to pi-hole (which is a simple interface for a set it and forget it).

We're talking Asus here, as this is the forum for it.
I do not want to belittle Pi-Hole, its developer made a great piece of software for all those owning a Raspberry.
But on a direct comparison and if you have the hardware available -- see my previous post...

 

[Andyf66]

Thanks everybody. I'm giving it a try. I did have some issues with Pi-Hole whereby if I enabled IPV6 on Sky Fibre then a few sites would hang for about 10 seconds before loading, as if something were timing out. AB-Solution doesn't seem to suffer from the same problem.

 

[thelonelycoder]

I did have some issues with Pi-Hole whereby if I enabled IPV6 on Sky Fibre then a few sites would hang for about 10 seconds before loading, as if something were timing out. AB-Solution doesn't seem to suffer from the same problem.

If you install pixelserv-tls you might see a slight delay loading when visiting the website for the first time. If you don't install it, there is no delay at all.

 

[s3030150]

Hello.

If its not too much to ask, could some AC66U owner please post the full content of the file /etc/dnsmasq.conf ?

Thanks.

still needed?

 

[thelonelycoder]

still needed?

If you had read my reply to that request, you'd know the answer.
The content is useless as the file is dynamically generated, depending on settings in the WebUI and what services you have selected in the AB-Solution UI.