Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by y4mi 4263 days ago
never heard of it. might've been different 15 years ago, but its probably the only choice nowadays with AdblockEdge on Firefox and µBlock on Chrome.

and on that note: how does this differ from them? different block lists? alternative blocking mechanism?

3 comments

From the "blocks ads in all browsers" tagline this appears to be a filtering proxy server, so it essentially MITMs your connection to filter stuff out and/or modify it before it gets to the browser.

I've been using Proxomitron, which is a similar (discontinued) freeware product, for the same purpose. The only real pain is HTTPS - which AdMuncher doesn't appear to support - but Proxomitron can filter HTTPS too (you need to install a local certificate), albeit it was written at a time when single-core was the norm and so needs to be constrained to run on one core due to some race condition that I'm not too bothered with figuring out and attempting to fix at the moment...

Proximodo is another open-source alternative which aims to be compatible with it but also lacks the increasingly-needed HTTPS MITM feature. (Should we call this "benevolent MITM" since it is completely under the consent and desire of the user, as opposed to the usual "malicious MITM"?)

If I may, I'd like to take a moment to honour the memory of Scott R. Lemmon.

He was a hell of a coder, and person, and ten years after his passing his work is still hugely appreciated.

Cheers wherever you are Scott.

I built a filtering proxy module on node. It filters by domain (only) and works with HTTPS. It still chokes once in a while on malformed responses but can still provide efficient filtering with good performance.

https://github.com/thibauts/node-host-filtering-proxy

Proxomitron wow I haven't heard that name in awhile. Yeah I used to use that and even had a huge set of custom rules in it back in the day when it was literally the only way to filter crap from webpages, I don't even think there were ad blocking browser addons back then.
IMO it's far better than AdBlock. It's a Windows only program and it differs to AdBlock by listening for HTTP packets coming directly off the ethernet adapter (I don't know the full inner-workings of course, but I'm taking an educated guess here). This has a significant benefit over AdBlock / similar browser based solutions for several reasons:

1. It works across any browser (on Windows) 2. It's far more reliable for blocking crazy JS hacks

Please stop with astroturfing.
How does it compare to HTTPSwitchboard for WebKit-based?
I'd never heard of µBlock myself, definitely going to check them out; been frustrated constantly with performance loss from Adblock/ABP