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It indeed is trying to solve a real problem, but also conveniently breaks effective ad blocking. Doing that is a choice; there are other measures they could've

It indeed is trying to solve a real problem, but also conveniently breaks effective ad blocking. Doing that is a choice; there are other measures they could've taken to improve privacy to the same level while keeping granular blocking intact. For example, they could have chosen a system where privacy-sensitive information like visited URLs are fed into a part of the extension which is a side-effect free function returning limited information. As they already have capability-based extension permissions, this would not be terribly hard to add if they would set their mind to it. More manual reviewing of valuable extensions would also be a path. They don't need to allow all extensions this permissions, and there doesn't need to be a level playing field for extensions here. It's just that Google doesn't see effective ad blocking as valuable, but rather the opposite.

fastest963 6y ago
I'm not sure how easy it would be to implement/ensure that a single function is side-effect-free in an extension given that the rest of the extension needs to be able to use the network and download filter lists. Safari went with an even more restrictive solution for content blockers and it seems like at least Chrome has been working with various developers to iron out the kinks with their solution before it goes live.
- rndgermandude 6y ago
  It doesn't have to be side effect free, it just has to run in an execution environment that cannot exfiltrate data. Make it into a special kind of "content script", that gets a blank javascript environment that does not have any of of the usual means to communicate with the outside world (no XHR, no access to any DOM, no access to any message passing, and so on). E.g. a browser could have a special kind of "content blocker" script environment that gets fed request objects by the browser. The script can then examine all the data in the request object (the requested URL, the headers, etc) and make a decision to DENY or ALLOW and communicate this decision back to the browser in a single well-define way, and that's the only communication to the outside world it is allowed to do. No way for it to exfiltrate data. Extensions can be allowed to pass data into the environment via some form of uni-directional message passing, e.g. to update filter rules, but the content script cannot respond (and thus cannot exfiltrate data in a response). Browsers already define different execution environments with different APIs available in them for different purposes, e.g. you have the same-origin limited environments for websites that feature Web APIs such as DOM and XHR, and those environments come in different flavors (no access to certain APIs such as the location API if you're not "secure"), Proxy-Auto-Configuration (PAC) scripts have yet another environment, extension scripts get yet another environment, extension content scripts yet another, internal browser pages such as the settings pages of browsers often get environments with access to some privileged APIs etc. To define a few more specialized environments for privacy-sensitive stuff shouldn't be too hard.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
zelly 6y ago
you can block most ads that uBlock Origin blocks with a hosts file. they still cannot take that away from you. I might actually start doing this now that I considered how much access I'm giving to uBlock Origin.
- user749391 6y ago
  DNS-over-HTTPS already took that away from you

fastest963 6y ago

I'm not sure how easy it would be to implement/ensure that a single function is side-effect-free in an extension given that the rest of the extension needs to be able to use the network and download filter lists. Safari went with an even more restrictive solution for content blockers and it seems like at least Chrome has been working with various developers to iron out the kinks with their solution before it goes live.

rndgermandude 6y ago
It doesn't have to be side effect free, it just has to run in an execution environment that cannot exfiltrate data. Make it into a special kind of "content script", that gets a blank javascript environment that does not have any of of the usual means to communicate with the outside world (no XHR, no access to any DOM, no access to any message passing, and so on). E.g. a browser could have a special kind of "content blocker" script environment that gets fed request objects by the browser. The script can then examine all the data in the request object (the requested URL, the headers, etc) and make a decision to DENY or ALLOW and communicate this decision back to the browser in a single well-define way, and that's the only communication to the outside world it is allowed to do. No way for it to exfiltrate data. Extensions can be allowed to pass data into the environment via some form of uni-directional message passing, e.g. to update filter rules, but the content script cannot respond (and thus cannot exfiltrate data in a response). Browsers already define different execution environments with different APIs available in them for different purposes, e.g. you have the same-origin limited environments for websites that feature Web APIs such as DOM and XHR, and those environments come in different flavors (no access to certain APIs such as the location API if you're not "secure"), Proxy-Auto-Configuration (PAC) scripts have yet another environment, extension scripts get yet another environment, extension content scripts yet another, internal browser pages such as the settings pages of browsers often get environments with access to some privileged APIs etc. To define a few more specialized environments for privacy-sensitive stuff shouldn't be too hard.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

zelly 6y ago

you can block most ads that uBlock Origin blocks with a hosts file. they still cannot take that away from you. I might actually start doing this now that I considered how much access I'm giving to uBlock Origin.

user749391 6y ago
DNS-over-HTTPS already took that away from you