1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
|
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8"/>
<meta content="pandoc" name="generator"/>
<meta content="Zhiming Wang" name="author"/>
<meta content="2015-08-20T20:58:55-07:00" name="date"/>
<title>I installed BlockParty, and the only thing I can say is WOW</title>
<link href="/img/apple-touch-icon-152.png" rel="apple-touch-icon-precomposed"/>
<meta content="#FFFFFF" name="msapplication-TileColor"/>
<meta content="/img/favicon-144.png" name="msapplication-TileImage"/>
<meta content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1" name="viewport"/>
<link href="/css/normalize.min.css" media="all" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
<link href="/css/theme.css" media="all" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
</head>
<body>
<div id="archival-notice">This blog has been archived.<br/>Visit my home page at <a href="https://zhimingwang.org">zhimingwang.org</a>.</div>
<nav class="nav">
<a class="nav-icon" href="/" title="Home"><!--blog icon--></a>
<a class="nav-title" href="/"><!--blog title--></a>
<a class="nav-author" href="https://github.com/zmwangx" target="_blank"><!--blog author--></a>
</nav>
<article class="content">
<header class="article-header">
<h1 class="article-title">I installed BlockParty, and the only thing I can say is WOW</h1>
<div class="article-metadata">
<time class="article-timestamp" datetime="2015-08-20T20:58:55-07:00">August 20, 2015</time>
</div>
</header>
<p><strong>09/18/2015 update.</strong> Okay, <a href="http://www.marco.org/2015/09/18/just-doesnt-feel-good">Peace has been pulled</a>. Guess I'll keep using it for a while, though.</p>
<hr/>
<p><strong>09/17/2015 update.</strong> I'm now running <a href="http://www.marco.org/2015/09/16/peace-content-blocker">Marco Arment's</a> <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/peace-block-ads-trackers-powered/id1031035630?mt=8">Peace</a>, powered by Ghostery.</p>
<hr/>
<p>I just let out <a href="/blog/2015-08-20-ios-9-turn-off-wi-fi-assist.html">a load of complaints about iOS 9 beta</a> last night, but apparently forgot about one nice thing: <a href="https://developer.apple.com/videos/wwdc/2015/?id=511">Safari content blocking</a>.</p>
<p>In this day and age, not being iOS/OS X developers ourselves won't stop the rest of us from obtaining ObjC/Swift source code.<a class="footnoteRef" href="#fn1" id="fnref1"><sup>1</sup></a> I simply typed "Safari content blocker" into GitHub's search box, and there it popped, the most starred repo relevant to my search, <a href="https://github.com/krishkumar/BlockParty">krishkumar/BlockParty</a>. Thanks to Apple's new sideloading policy in Xcode 7, I was able to immediately test it out on my phone.</p>
<p>The effect is just amazing. In my few minutes of browsing, I did not seem to encounter a single ad (on various consistently ad-laden news sites). You should definitely give it a shot. What's even more amazing is that BlockParty's <a href="https://github.com/krishkumar/BlockParty/blob/master/RediffBlock/blockerList.json"><code>blockList.json</code></a>, at the time of writing, is only 1578 lines long — a JSON array with 197 objects. <strong>Only 197 rules, blocking 197 domains.</strong> Compare that to <a href="https://easylist-downloads.adblockplus.org/easylist.txt">EasyList</a>, which at the moment is a <strong>48820 line monster</strong>. Of course, EasyList is much more fine-grained (<a href="https://adblockplus.org/blog/content-blocking-in-safari-9-and-ios-9-good-news-or-the-death-knell-of-ad-blocking-on-safari">as are AdBlockPlus's filtering mechanisms</a>); with BlockParty I can actually see some blank boxes that used to host ads. But still, very impressive. Many thanks to <a href="https://github.com/krishkumar">@krishkumar</a> for publishing BlockParty, and to <a href="https://medium.com/@searls/installing-a-content-blocker-on-ios-9-public-beta-a25b2b83848f">Justin Searls</a> for publishing a detailed tutorial.<a class="footnoteRef" href="#fn2" id="fnref2"><sup>2</sup></a></p>
<p>197 domains made our online lives so miserable. Hmm.</p>
<div class="footnotes">
<hr/>
<ol>
<li id="fn1"><p>Actually developing a Safari content blocker extension is as easy as writing a JSON blocker list, but I'm not sure if you need an app with a UI to support the extension. Anyway, there are professional iOS developers out there ready to share the code, so I'll just happily join for a ride.<a class="footnotes-backlink" href="#fnref1">↩︎</a></p></li>
<li id="fn2"><p>Without which I would have been scratching my head, not knowing that I had to go to Settings->General->Profiles to trust my personal profile.<a class="footnotes-backlink" href="#fnref2">↩︎</a></p></li>
</ol>
</div>
</article>
<hr class="content-separator"/>
<footer class="footer">
<span class="rfooter">
<a class="rss-icon" href="/rss.xml" target="_blank" title="RSS feed"><!--RSS feed icon--></a><a class="atom-icon" href="/atom.xml" target="_blank" title="Atom feed"><!--Atom feed icon--></a><a class="cc-icon" href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" target="_blank" title="Released under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license."><!--CC icon--></a>
<a href="https://github.com/zmwangx" target="_blank">Zhiming Wang</a>
</span>
</footer>
</body>
</html>
|
