Ublock Youtube Proxy

[Lisbeth Balsiger]

Privaxyis a MITM HTTP(s) proxy that sits in between HTTP(s) talking applications, such as a web browser and HTTP servers, such as those serving websites.

By establishing a two-way tunnel between both ends, Privaxy is able to block network requests based on URL patterns and to inject scripts as well as styles into HTML documents.

Operating at a lower level, Privaxy is both more efficient as well as more streamlined than browser add-on-based blockers. A single instance of Privaxy on a small virtual machine, server or even, on the same computer as the traffic is originating from, can filter thousands of requests per second while requiring a very small amount of memory.

Sweet! I've been hoping that some time such solutions would resurface again. There have been a number of such projects like privoxy (guess it might have been a naming inspiration), webcleaner, squidguard, rabbit... but they're all dormant and failed with the current web at some point.

I'm curious as to what your plans are with respect to the "latest" (cough, talking about 1 to 1.5 decades) advancements in protocol technologies; i.e. WebSockets, HTTP/2 etc.; unfortunately the "bad boys" have learned to switch to those since there's no effective blocking.

Currently, websockets are just tunneled through, it would very easy to add filtering there, the logic for this is here: privaxy/serve.rs at main Barre/privaxy GitHub. Though, I am not sure how necessary it would be as hosts that serve ads and tracking through websockets can just be blocked. I don't think endpoints that both serves useful content as well as perform tracking and / or ad serving are common, I'd be very curious to see any example of that

I think YouTube is the standard example of a host serving both wanted content and ads, but I'm not sure how relevant this info is in this context (I would guess script injection is required to remove YT ads).

there must be a reason why the Noscript code field gets removed when selecting the proxy script in the WP module and why the shown image tracking code is the same (= regular image tracking URL to the Matomo instance) for default and proxy script .

I have done some further tests using the latest code from the matomo-org / tracker-proxy Github repo and image tracking by accessing the proxy script is indeed not working, which may be confirmed by the following note in the README file:

BlockAway is an advanced proxy service that allows you to access any website and safeguard your privacy. It's a free service available to everyone, designed for easy use at school, university, or work without much effort.

BlockAway is a free proxy service that lets you access any website and keep your personal information anonymous. It overcomes various network restrictions, allowing you to watch YouTube videos and use social networks. Our goal is to make information more accessible for everyone.

Of course, you can also opt for a VPN service as an alternative to a proxy site. However, many VPN services are paid and designed for professional usage. In comparison, BlockAway is free and doesn't require any configuration.

I am using a apache2 reverse proxy in front of a grampsweb docker. The grampsweb container is set up with the standard docker compose file. Uploading media to the container without the reverse proxy does not lead to the 413 error (there it does not work as well but that is a 2nd issue and I will open another thread for it).

Just when I am writing this I had the idea to stop the adblocker uBlock Origin 1.53.0 I use in firefox (chrome did not work either but I think I have an adblocker there as well). That actually solved the issue and I can upload not only the small 40kB zip but also 2 and 7MB. I will later try my complete media archive.

Upload file size limits are often tricky, e.g. in our recommended Nginx config we need to manually increase it because the Nginx default is too restrictive, see -project/web/blob/main/examples/docker-compose-letsencrypt/nginx_proxy.conf.

Thank you for your reply.

I am willing to share the apache reverse proxy settings when I have tested the whole thing for a bit, and got everything working. I.e. I still have another issue with media upload I have not yet been able to fix and will mention next week or so when I have a bit of time.

As some mega websites deploy APIs that are used nearly ubiquitously on most of the Internet's websites (I'm looking at you Facebook & Google), I've begun to compartmentalize my browsers to "jail" specific website usage to a single, sandboxed browser (profile). This is sometimes referred to as a Site-Specific Browser (SSB).

Besides making sure that your SSB is isolated in that it cannot access your regular browser's data (a configuration I plan to document in the future), it's essential to block all network traffic from/to your SSB and all websites, except a whitelist. Unfortunately, getting block-all-then-whitelist functionality in uBlock Origin was annoyingly not documented, so I decided to publish it.

Note: If you're not using a proxy normally, the easiest way to achieve this block-everything-but-domains-in-my-whitelist functionality is to configure a dummy proxy: configure your browser to use a non-existent proxy at, say, 0.0.0.0 on port '9001'. Then add the domains you do wish to visit into the CSV field titled "No proxy for". No addon needed! Enjoy ?

A couple of the sites I regularly visit have started hosting ads on their own domains but in a special ads directory. E.g. if the site was then they are starting to put the ads in instead of hosting th ads on well known third party ad domains that are easily blocked. As such, adblockers like pihole seem powerless. Either you block the whole domain or suffer with the adds.

The thing with self hosted ads is that Pi-hole (or for that matter ANY DNS resolver (only) based Ad-blocker) , can't tell the difference between legitimate content and ads, when they are hosted on the same server.

Pi-hole blocks only DNS requests (based of course, on the lists).

For tackling the issue where the content is hosted on the same domain, one would need to run the queries through a filtering proxy (one that looks for particular strings, files, names) and filters those requests (basically what uBlock Origin, Ad-Block and the rest are doing).

It has the ability to block paths, elements, certain files and it applies them globally.

It also has cloud support (save/restore) and that helps with keeping settings aligned on all devices using UBlock Origin(and same browser).

This proxy acts as an intermediary between your computer or gadget and the Internet. When you send data to the proxy, it makes a request to the website and displays the desired content. It creates an indirect connection, allowing you to access YouTube securely. The connection is always protected. And all of this is without the need for any configuration, and it's absolutely free.

What do you need to access YouTube? Just try our web proxy and see how convenient it is. With YouTubeUnblocked, there's no need to set up or install any additional software. It's a free web proxy, and no registration or payments are required.

Add-on ad blockers can help mitigate the degradation of your browsing experience, but sometimes you need to bring stronger weapons. A filtering web proxy can scrub web traffic to eliminate unwanted ads and scripts.

Most people see no ethical issues with the fact that websites display advertisements. Unfortunately, for lots of technical reasons, advertisements are often undesirable, to the point that removing them is sometimes necessary for a satisfactory surfing experience. (See the box entitled "Why Remove the Advertisements.")

The first reason is that many sites are overloaded with advertisements to the point that they are barely usable. Advertisements mean longer page load times and higher bandwidth consumption. Some advertisements in websites are so invasive that users will spend more time closing ads and pop-ups than reading what they wanted to read in the first place. The user is often confronted by the choice between having a bad user experience or installing an ad blocker.

On top of that, some people have issue with the fact that they are paying an ISP and buying a data plan from them, only to make it possible for somebody else to use a big percentage of their bandwidth to stuff it with advertisements. Users are literally paying for the data channels that serve advertisements to them.

One of the biggest worries regarding advertising is the surveillance capabilities advertisers have. Most often, advertisement agencies use methods to know and register which sites you have been visiting, for how long, and other details that will help them know which advertisements to show to you in order to try to sell you things. Although trying to find what you like in order to offer it to you is not extremely evil behavior, it can lead to the advertiser having too much information about you. For example, by extrapolating the websites you visit, advertisers can find out details about your political affiliations or health issues.

The biggest concern is, however, security. Advertisements include pieces of code that are forced into your web browser and executed without your permission. Some advertising systems have been compromised by evil entities and corrupted into serving malware instead of regular advertising. Since advertising networks serve a very, very big number of ads to an enormous number of users, a single compromised advertiser can distribute an astounding amount of malware. An ad blocker protects you from the dangers associated with downloading and executing this malicious code.

Many users opt to use an ad blocker such as uBlock Origin [1] or Adblock Plus [2] in their web browsers. These blockers, which are installed as browser add-ons, are easy to set up and offer high quality advertisement filtering. However, they only work in the browser they are installed in, they aren't intended to work with smartphones and tablets, and they require significant duplication of labor if you need to support multiple computers on a local area network (LAN).

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