Won't block 3rd party properly

SweetP

I’ve also added wildcard support,
I just need to figure out how to make it obvious in the UI.

Also, currently domains with a wildcard will override subdomain rules…
I’ll see if there’s anything I can do about that

NickC

@SweetP said in Won't block 3rd party properly:

Also, currently domains with a wildcard will override subdomain rules…
I’ll see if there’s anything I can do about that

I would think this to the expected behaviour. Once the user adds a wildcard root domain all subdomain rules should be ignored.
It would be great if the ruleset would automatically be pruned once the user whitelists the root domain with the wildcard, but that’s a nice to have mostly.

SweetP

Ive fixed the subdomain issue.
I just need to try and make it user friendly and discoverable.

I'll release once I find a solution

SweetP

Ive released v4.1 in my Store, and it will be available in the App Store after review by Apple

NickC

@SweetP Awesome. Looking forward to giving it a go.

Thank you, Russell. Have a great weekend!

NickC

@SweetP Something seems to be wrong. The update just hit a moment ago and Minim seems to be blocking everything by default and ignores the Block Rules tab. Regardless of the options in Block Rules tab, the only rules written are the default

  {
    "trigger" : {
      "url-filter" : ".*"
    },
    "action" : {
      "type" : "ignore-previous-rules"
    }
  },
  {
    "trigger" : {
      "url-filter" : ".*"
    },
    "action" : {
      "type" : "block"
    }
  },

I think the resource-type trigger field is missing from the default block rules and just the action (i.e. block) is being generated, thus blocking every URL.

SweetP

That’s odd,
I’ll take a look when I get home tonight.

SweetP

Your’e right,
I’ve released v4.1.1, and it’s waiting for review with Apple now

NickC

@SweetP Update just hit. Seems to work well, except for a small issue with the way www and non-www domains get handled.

If you go to www.google.com and add an exception for it, Minim’s list will have google.com without the www part
This means that with the current behaviour it won’t load resources unless the user manually fixes the exceptions list and adds the www back.

I think the regex for www matching is broken because of the extra escape char \ after www:

^https?:\/\/(www\\.)?google.com[:\/]

NickC

Also, if you completely unblock all resources for www.google.com, since no other "url-filter" rules gets generated and only the default "unless-domain” google.com gets added (without www part) the exception won’t apply.

I think the default behaviour of stripping the www part when adding an exception to Minim is no longer valid with this new better handling of domain/subdomain separation. In essence, www is a subdomain and should be treated as such.

SweetP

@NickC said in Won't block 3rd party properly:

I think the default behaviour of stripping the www part when adding an exception to Minim is no longer valid with this new better handling of domain/subdomain separation. In essence, www is a subdomain and should be treated as such.

Ill look into this
as im also doing some www assumptions elsewhere in code.
but good points

NickC

@SweetP Thanks.

Also, don’t know if you saw my previous comment re the regex handling/typo. However, if you decide to remove the www handling part of the code, of course that comment would no longer apply.

SweetP

v4.1.2 should be available now

NickC

@SweetP All seems to be working as expected. Thank you for doing this, Russell. With these changes Minim has become quite a fierce content blocker for Safari. Nothing quite like it.

SweetP

@NickC said in Won't block 3rd party properly:

@SweetP All seems to be working as expected. Thank you for doing this, Russell. With these changes Minim has become quite a fierce content blocker for Safari. Nothing quite like it.

That’s great,
Thanks for all the great feedback and suggestions.

NickC

@SweetP Sadly, I think I found a bug

When adding www.youtube.com as an exception to default blocking rules, all third-party resources get loaded as well, despite explicit blocking in both Minim's default and the exceptions list.

{
    "trigger" : {
      "load-type" : [
        "third-party"
      ],
      "resource-type" : [
        "script",
        "font",
        "style-sheet",
        "popup",
        "image",
        "media",
        "svg-document",
        "document",
        "raw",
        "ping",
        "fetch",
        "websocket",
        "other"
      ],
      "url-filter" : "^https?:\/\/www.youtube.com[:\/]"
    },
    "action" : {
      "type" : "block"
    }
  }

These are the rules that get added and the standard unless-domain = www.youtube.com for the default blocking policy.

From what I could tell, everything should work as expected, however, third-party resources all load.

All other behaviour in Minim seems to work as expected, but as soon as you add an exception with first-party resources unblocked, somehow third-party get loaded as well despite the rule seemingly being correct.

NickC

@SweetP Another bug, if you unblock by default all first-party resources, the generic block rule for first-party gets generated but with an empty array for resource-type which blocks all resources, thus completely preventing any page from loading.

  {
    "trigger" : {
      "resource-type" : [

      ],
      "load-type" : [
        "first-party"
      ],
      "url-filter" : ".*"
    },
    "action" : {
      "type" : "block"
    }
  },

SweetP

@NickC said in Won't block 3rd party properly:

@SweetP Another bug, if you unblock by default all first-party resources, the generic block rule for first-party gets generated but with an empty array for resource-type which blocks all resources, thus completely preventing any page from loading.

good catch.
this is a simple fix, and it'll be in the next release

SweetP

@NickC said in Won't block 3rd party properly:

@SweetP Sadly, I think I found a bug

When adding www.youtube.com as an exception to default blocking rules, all third-party resources get loaded as well, despite explicit blocking in both Minim's default and the exceptions list.

I think this is unfortunately a limitation of the WebKit content blocking API

It looks as though you can load third party content via a first party script....

The only reliable way I could find to block all third party content on YouTube was to block all first and third party requests for the following domains:

*doubleclick.net
*ggpht.com
*googleapis.com
*gstatic.com
*ytimg.com

in an update, ill remove the filter for adding domains to minim via the main app

NickC

@SweetP said in Won't block 3rd party properly:

It looks as though you can load third party content via a first party script...

That seems to be the case. I didn’t get to try any blocking with unless-top-url instead of the unless-domain. Might be a limitation of the domain selector itself when working with a URL filter.