Disconnect is not blocking anything as of 22/7/13

disconnectme / disconnect

Disconnect is a browser extension that makes the web faster, more private, and more secure.

https://disconnect.me/

GNU General Public License v3.0

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Disconnect is not blocking anything as of 22/7/13 #122

Closed JeremyWW closed 11 years ago

JeremyWW commented 11 years ago

Windows 7 Pro x64, Chrome 28.0.1500.72 m, Disconnect 5.3.0

As of last night, 22/07/13 Disconnect no longer blocks anything though the extension is otherwise 'functional'. https://disconnect.me is also not available. All the normal network troubleshooting does not solve the issue. Uninstall / Reinstall does not solve the issue. DNTMe, Ghostery and Collusion have also been tried and they work - one at a time, i.e. not installed together.

Zegnat commented 11 years ago

It looks like a server problem. The Disconnect website is unavailable over HTTPS, it is still up if you visit through HTTP.

The problem with Disconnect is that it does not contain an offline block list. (Something Ghostery does.) It tries to fetch the block list from the website over HTTPS and this fails so it has no block list. As soon as the web site problem is solved Disconnect will start working again.

JeremyWW commented 11 years ago

Then this is a fundamental issue. Disconnect needs to have an offline block list as the other 'anti-tracking' extensions do. Based on what you've said, I imagined that Collusion would not work either, but it does...does it have an offline list or is it pulling the list via http?

Zegnat commented 11 years ago

For my full thoughts on the matter please see the above mentioned issue over at the prism-break repository.

As for other extensions working:

Mozilla’s Collusion and Disconnect’s Chrollusion both use PrivacyChoice’s tracker database. You can see those here and here respectively.
Abine’s DNTMe seems to include a list within their package as well. For donottrackme_online_privacy_protection-2.2.9.618-fx.xpi you can find it at /chrome/content/rules.js. This file seems to be 100% proprietary and not available online so I can’t link it.

If you want to use Disconnect you can rewrite the extension to retrieve the database over HTTP instead of HTTPS. Fork this repository then edit /firefox/content/services-firefox.js and /firefox/content/disconnect.safariextension/opera/chrome/scripts/services.js so they request the list from http://disconnect.me/services-pro.json.

oldestlivingboy commented 11 years ago

Our website is being DDoS'd, which affects our extensions because they always refresh their filter lists from our site on startup. We think we've worked around the problem and the site will be back online fully in the next few hours.

This is the first outage we've had since we shipped with a remote filter list (for Disconnect 2 in April) but exposes a flaw with having a remote-only list. We'll start packaging a copy of the list (that's as up-to-date as possible) with our extensions to prevent a recurrence.

JeremyWW commented 11 years ago

...and presumably that list will update itself periodically?

JeremyWW commented 11 years ago

Now working - thanks. May I ask when you are likely to release an update that includes a local block list?

oldestlivingboy commented 11 years ago

...and presumably that list will update itself periodically?

Yeah, that'd be the plan: a default, local filter list that still autoupdates.

Now working - thanks.

I'm not sure our DNS changes have gotten to quite everybody yet, but we're close.

May I ask when you are likely to release an update that includes a local block list?

We'll have to make some architecture changes, but I imagine within a week. Hit the Watch button above to look out for the commit.