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I once had the misfortune while travelling abroad for almost a year to have a monthly data quota of a mere 2 gigabytes. Calculate that out. It's only a miserabl

I once had the misfortune while travelling abroad for almost a year to have a monthly data quota of a mere 2 gigabytes. Calculate that out. It's only a miserable 60 megabytes a day. When some web pages can be 2 or 3 megabytes EACH! due to all the crap (advertisements, mainly), it's easy to see that your whole internet bandwidth capabilities are horribly restricted. And more to the point, you're paying for those companies to restrict your overall usage. I have always used an adblocker. I have most times also used a site-blocker. I have no apologies for doing so. My machine, my money, my choices.

toastal 5y ago
This is where hosts blocking comes in handy with portable devices. It's a shame this requires root access, mostly because banks and other apps like it's a sin to have admin access on your personal device.
sumtechguy 5y ago
This what mostly got me into adblocking in the first place when Time-Warner started talking about data caps. I started with using a pac file, host file, and then mixed in a local proxy server. Aggressive DNS caching. I was hitting upwords of 60-70% cache hit ratio on the squid proxy server. In addition to the local cache from the browsers. My testing was a set of pages with cold cache took about 2-3 mins to load. After turning everything on it was in the 50-70 second range cold and 20-30 seconds warmed up. I was sold. Faster loading times, less ads, and possible future benefit of data caps coming into play. These days it is mostly just ublock origin, and noscript. That is because everyone went aggressively towards https, less than 10% hit rate these days on squid. I could MITM the thing. But have not done it yet.
nicbou 5y ago
I still travel on 3GB/month. I didn't realize it was such a constraint. Hell when I leave the EU I rarely use data at all. In any case, Google Maps uses half of that data. Spotify uses a lot too. If I use OsmAnd for maps, I'm fine. Most of my internet usage is casual browsing. When I'm offline I just read books and offline articles.

toastal 5y ago

This is where hosts blocking comes in handy with portable devices. It's a shame this requires root access, mostly because banks and other apps like it's a sin to have admin access on your personal device.

sumtechguy 5y ago

This what mostly got me into adblocking in the first place when Time-Warner started talking about data caps. I started with using a pac file, host file, and then mixed in a local proxy server. Aggressive DNS caching. I was hitting upwords of 60-70% cache hit ratio on the squid proxy server. In addition to the local cache from the browsers. My testing was a set of pages with cold cache took about 2-3 mins to load. After turning everything on it was in the 50-70 second range cold and 20-30 seconds warmed up. I was sold. Faster loading times, less ads, and possible future benefit of data caps coming into play. These days it is mostly just ublock origin, and noscript. That is because everyone went aggressively towards https, less than 10% hit rate these days on squid. I could MITM the thing. But have not done it yet.

nicbou 5y ago

I still travel on 3GB/month. I didn't realize it was such a constraint. Hell when I leave the EU I rarely use data at all. In any case, Google Maps uses half of that data. Spotify uses a lot too. If I use OsmAnd for maps, I'm fine. Most of my internet usage is casual browsing. When I'm offline I just read books and offline articles.