9 Comments

Do you have an opinion on the DuckDuckGo browser for this and related issues?

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I believe no browser resolves it entirely.

It has a lot more to do with what sites and services one uses because the more the site or service knows about you the less the browser can protect you.

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Databeast is a perfect term. Never heard that used before

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Jan 14·edited Jan 14Liked by Gabriel

I tried uMatrix for a while, after reading one of your articles that mentioned it. But I disabled it after a month of use. Yes, it made browsing a lot more difficult, due to having to experiment with enabling just enough things to make sites work, without also enabling trackers. I could live with that. The thing that caused me to stop using it was that after a while it would forget everything that I had painstakingly configured, and I'd have to start all over again. This might be related to using it in ungoogled-chromium, but I'm not sure. I do know that uMatrix isn't being maintained, so I don't have any unrealistic expectations.

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Yeah, the ideal case would be for browsers to better build in uMatrix-like functionality with a bit more usability. Firefox and brave are getting better on that front but there's still a long way to go. Pihole can go a long way at least at the network level for blocking requests across multiple devices, but it's generally quite conservative about what to block.

Adblocking can be a bit of a cat-and-mouse game, and it's a shame that while uMatrix isn't being updated there isn't really an alternative. Apparently if you're running Palemoon nMatrix is at least updated as of mid last year.

Unfortunately a lot of this means that moving forward, choosing to avoid sites that show one ads might also be a more important strategy to mitigate this issue as well.

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Informative video, thanks!

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Thanks, I think I lack the imagination to see why this would be bad. I have downloaded an ad blocker, I'm with Bill Hicks when it comes to advertising, I've been meaning to do it for a couple of years - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHEOGrkhDp0

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I can't open the mastodon link, would that be because I am using VPN?

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Possibly, I'm noticing more and more places are becoming hostile to VPNs in general.

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