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essandess / easylist-pac-privoxy

EasyList Tracker and Adblocks to Proxy Auto Configuration (PAC) File and Privoxy Actions and Filters
GNU General Public License v3.0
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Testing efficacy #10

Closed maxcountryman closed 5 years ago

maxcountryman commented 5 years ago

I realize that the .pac packages a subset of the rules, however so far I don't see anything being blocked.

Perhaps a concrete example, which would at least show the rules are working, would be helpful. (For instance, a specific site with known ads that are blocked by the .pac.) Can you suggest anything?

essandess commented 5 years ago

The subset blocks the most commonly used adservers and trackers, so if you don't see anything blocked there's some issue.

Do you have a blackhole server running? The nginx configuration in adblock2privoxy provides one.

OS? Browser?

Test on a desktop. iOS blocking won't work if the blackhole HTTP server isn't returning 200 codes for the blocked sites. There's debugging flags that will work with Chrome to show the blocking actions within a specific page.

maxcountryman commented 5 years ago

OS: macOS Mojave (10.14) Browsers: Safari (12.0), Firefox (62.0.3)

Test on a desktop

That was my thinking too: I tested with macOS by setting the Automatic Proxy Configuration in the Network Settings to point to the GitHub-hosted proxy.pac. However so far, it doesn't seem like it's having much effect.

A good example of where this clearly isn't working is to load up a site like businessinsider.com or state.com--both have egregious display ads which get through.

Do you have a blackhole server running?

I haven't tried to set this up yet, I was only trying to plug the proxy.pac in and see how it did.

essandess commented 5 years ago

Especially with Safari, I'd start by making sure that you have a blackhole server, and are hosting the proxy.pac file on localhost using native apache.

Full install commands are part of macOS-Fortress/readme-and-install.sh, but it only takes a moment to install and load nginx and start apache.

After that, make sure that the blackhole address in http://localhost/proxy.pac matches your nginx configuration, e.g. localhost:8119. And add an adblock2privoxy-based proxy chain to catch all rules.

The full readme-and-install.sh works for me on a fresh macOS install, but I suspect this repo's README.md needs some tweaks to match with the latest Safari browsers.

P.S. This blocks adservers on those sites.