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Blocklist-Update.sh

Blocklist-Update.sh is a script that I wrote to manage blocklists from bluetack etc to be used in conjunction with Transmission torrent downloader in Linux/MacOS. The script can be taylored to work with Qbittorrent as well, but the placement of the blocklists means you'd have to redirect the blocklist to go somewhere locally manageable as Transmission uses its own blocklist directory in .config. I believe there are about 10 lists there now. It works well for my needs. It can be ran weekly using crontab in standard user profile.  To download:  blocklist-update.sh To download the others:  Github

NEW API CHALLENGES DEVELOPERS OF THIRD PARTY EXTENSIONS

An article popped up recently on the register, a United Kingdom based tech news site. Google’s new API has been in the news for a while now. The new API will limit or restrict third party code from accessing URLs in time to do anything about them. This kind of new behavior is especially tough for content blocking extensions in the Chrome browser. Google has yet to fully implement the newest API which is called DNR for short. WebRequest API is soon to be deprecated to make way for a new way of doing things. This shouldn’t be a big surprise as Google makes a lot of its overall revenuse from advertising. Gorhill, a developer of a very popular content blocking extension known as Ublock Origin, has stated adamantly that his extension would cease to function correctly if the new API takes precedence. Third party content blockers are closer to the browser than they are the net, this is not necessarily the case within Opera as their content blocker is built in. DNR API means that content blocker developers will need to rewrite a large portion of their code to get compatibility with the new API and even then, the new API would hamper efforts to control content restrictions by the user. As far as I know, the EFF has been the first to really offer options to Google to implement this new API without stripping their own third party extensions from working. Google has only recently built a successful prototype of the new API in a developers build of the browser. It remains to be seen what this new model will mean for extension developers in the future. I personally hope that it isn’t too late.


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