Diversion Diversion 5.1.2 - the Router Ad-Blocker, April 21, 2024

[RMerlin]

I use it freely and anonymously on Poe.com, or using the poe app,

That website shows nothing but a login page. No About page, no confidentiality disclaimer, nothing at all. You really trust them with all of your queries?

 

[Ripshod]

That website shows nothing but a login page. No About page, no confidentiality disclaimer, nothing at all. You really trust them with all of your queries?

No wonder my SkyNet is blocking it

 

[jsbeddow]

That website shows nothing but a login page. No About page, no confidentiality disclaimer, nothing at all. You really trust them with all of your queries?

Bizarrely, I do see their "Terms of Use" and "Privacy" policy links underneath the email address login area. But I do fully agree that the privacy aspects might be a bit sketchy, some portions of it include the following:

Advertising. We collect information about you when you interact with Poe ads to measure the effectiveness of our ad campaigns. This information includes your IP address, advertising ID, and ad interaction information. We share your hashed email with our ad platform partners for our paid acquisition campaigns. It is in our legitimate business interest to advertise our platform. Where necessary, we will obtain your consent before engaging in this processing.
User Research. We may ask you to help us test new features or participate in surveys to help enhance your Poe experience. Your participation is voluntary and the data we collect is anonymized. With your consent, we may use your personal information to communicate with you. It is in our legitimate business interest to improve our platform.
Interactions with Bots on Poe. Our third party AI model LLM providers and third party bot developers may receive details about your interactions with bots on Poe (including the contents of your chats) to provide and generally improve their services, which they may process in their legitimate business interests. Your Poe user account information (e.g., username and email) is not shared with our third party AI model providers or developers. Third party developers that create bots on Poe using APIs may view and store your anonymized chats on their servers to train their models. We may use your interactions on Poe to provide you a personalized experience, such as recommending other bots to explore or topics to discuss.
Keep in mind, any information and files you provide to the bots on Poe will be shared with third party AI model providers and developers powering the bots, and there is no need to share sensitive personal information with the bots (e.g., credit card information, social security information, etc.). For more information about the third party AI model providers and bot developers, please see the respective bot profiles and visit the Poe Privacy Center.
For more information about our privacy and data protection practices, including how to exercise your privacy rights, please visit the Quora Privacy Policy.

 

[RMerlin]

Bizarrely, I do see their "Terms of Use" and "Privacy" policy links underneath the email address login area. But I do fully agree that the privacy aspects might be a bit sketchy, some portions of it include the following:

I see something briefly appear then quickly disappears. Turns out the addon I use to hide those annoying cookie banners is also removing these small terms and privacy links on that particular site.

Still doesn`t say much about who these guys are or how to contact them.

 

[johndoe85]

I see something briefly appear then quickly disappears. Turns out the addon I use to hide those annoying cookie banners is also removing these small terms and privacy links on that particular site.

Still doesn`t say much about who these guys are or how to contact them.

This addon i will start to use, god damnit i am annoyed by all these cookie request 24/7

 

[thelonelycoder]

This addon i will start to use, god damnit i am annoyed by all these cookie request 24/7

Same here, I use Firefox since their first release back then. Used to have a lot of addons installed until I gradually cut down to the few I still use.
Time to look at the addon repo again.

 

[Rhialto]

Turns out the addon I use to hide those annoying cookie banners

It says it is accepting the policy for you? Does the opposite exist? On every site I click that I reject all or refuse. And sometimes it's a bit hidden in sub-menu. For the websites that don't propose to reject I simply leave.

 

[RMerlin]

It says it is accepting the policy for you? Does the opposite exist?

It's more nuanced than that. Check the description on the store:

In most cases, it just blocks or hides cookie related pop-ups. When it's needed for the website to work properly, it will automatically accept the cookie policy for you (sometimes it will accept all and sometimes only necessary cookie categories, depending on what's easier to do).

So in most cases, it blocks the popup, meaning you will never have accepted the policy, and so cookies will be rejected (as these policies are Opt-In).

 

[thelonelycoder]

awk isn’t my specialty, but I would link you would want to make any parts of a name longer than 2 labels optional. And make sure you don’t pick up partial labels.

Awk (and general regexp) related questions are what I usually throw at ChatGPT.

Thinking about my problem at hand, there really is no awk or regexp needed. They're subdomains and that makes finding a match much simpler:

 

[martinr]

Thinking about my problem at hand, there really is no awk or regexp needed. They're subdomains and that makes finding a match much simpler:

For anyone, (like me), wondering how thelonelycoder conjured up this bit of magic, it’s:

amtm > 1 (Diversion) > b > 4

 

[thelonelycoder]

For anyone, (like me), wondering how thelonelycoder conjured up this bit of magic, it’s:

amtm > 1 (Diversion) > b > 4

.. and will soon be available on a router near you.

 

[thelonelycoder]

Diversion 5.1 is now available

In this update I eliminated harmful words, fixed a number of bugs and introduce a new way of allowing domains through the ad-block blockage.
Overall, it's a better version of Diversion.

What's new in Diversion 5.1
- Diversion feels and is faster in building the menu, notably on older routers.
- Renamed whitelist and blacklist to allowlist and denylist.
- Returns exact Asuswrt-Merlin firmware version number in header. Except for alpha or test releases where it cuts down the length of the string.
- Does no longer remove empty lines in /jffs/scripts files.
- Accuracy of ads count increased to near perfection - and so is detection of blocked domains when following the Dnsmasq log file f and in the the stats generation. Thanks @dave14305 for reporting.
- Changed the way *.conf files are loaded into Dnsmasq to be compatible with older Dnsmasq versions.
- Detects Dnsmasq version to correctly format blocking list and denylist (formerly known as blacklist). Dnsmasq version 2.85 and older use server= option while version 2.86 and newer use local= option to mark domains as NXDOMAIN.
- Corrected display of file name for local Diversion backup. Thanks @dave14305 for reporting.
- Revamped error reporting for blocking list update.
- Much better detection of format of block lists during blocking list update. A more verbose output is seen when run manually. It also removes entries in hostslists that point to incompatible block lists such as easylist.to. Please report false positives immediately with exact URL of block list.
- Removes easylist.to and fanboy.co.nz links in hostslist(s) if found as they are all in an incompatible format. They're meant for browser addons, not Diversion.
- Changed wording in snbforums.com ad support option in el, 1, 7. Dropped smallnetbuilder.com from allowlist (formerly known as whitelist), domain is no longer owned by snbforums.com owner. Thanks @nlurker for reporting the ambiguous meaning of the option.
- Completely changed how allowlisting works (formerly known as whitelisting) and fixed blatant bugs. Thanks so much @dave14305 for bringing that neat trick to my attention!
- Correctly removes Diversion_UpdateBLTwo job when the blocking list update days are changed to once a week. Don't remember who reported it to me but my guess it's Dave.
- Re-added definition of orphaned variable $sIP and improved the flow of adding a reserved address for certain services. Thanks @nachito for reporting.
- I hope to save a few trees by having done a general clean up and reduction of significant parts of the code. We'll see. Also: I added a vulnerability check somewhere.
- And I'm aware that the diversion.ch website needs some attention - now more then ever.

 

[colossus]

Thank you TLC and contributors for your Diversion 5.1 update!
Screens below updated Sun Feb 18 11:25:56 EST 2024​

 

[Mutzli]

Interesting, before the update my blocked domains were at 358,542 and after the update at 418,589. The update definitely improved how blocking lists are processed.

 

[nlurker]

- Changed wording in snbforums.com ad support option in el, 1, 7. Dropped smallnetbuilder.com from allowlist (formerly known as whitelist), domain is no longer owned by snbforums.com owner.

Thank you, your new wording is crystal clear.

 

[thelonelycoder]

Interesting, before the update my blocked domains were at 358,542 and after the update at 418,589. The update definitely improved how blocking lists are processed.

The change of detecting the format of block lists (formerly known as hosts lists in Diversion) may have caused that. Care to post the lists you use?
Oh, I believe that often mentioned @dave14305 has something to do with all that as well

 

[thelonelycoder]

Thank you, your new wording is crystal clear.

Better than ever. Thanks again for your input.

 

[thelonelycoder]

Thank you, your new wording is crystal clear.

Forgot to mention you, will add it straight away.

 

[dave14305]

Oh, I believe that often mentioned @dave14305 has something to do with all that as well

I just didn't want you feeling too lonely while you're coding!

 

[dave14305]

They're subdomains and that makes finding a match much simpler

It would be great if similar logic can be applied to stats.div to detect if a blocked subdomain is from the blockinglist.conf. (I like the use of recursion in find_listadd_loop()!)