Diversion Diversion - the Router Ad-Blocker

[Jack Yaz]

Do you like thousands of bots port scanning you every day? I don't

I can also speak from personal experience its saved some not too tech savvy family members from downloading malware and getting phished on more then one occasion. For the almost non-existent overhead on a modern device its quite a no brainier in my eyes.

i can see the value for outbound, but for inbound i only see the benefit if you're hosting services and want to block known bad actors. otherwise, the firewall will drop the packets by default with or without skynet.

edit: oh and the stats are a very useful part of skynet! i would still be using skynet but i'd see my router crash and reboot on firewall restarts occasionally with it installed. while i can't see why skynet would cause this, i was under pressure from the other half to stop cutting off the net....

 

[Martin.G]

Regarding Diversion and YouTube ad blocking...

I thought everything was going great until I tried to use a YouTube downloader. It would work the first time it was installed (just once) or if it were disabled/re-enabled (just once). On attempting to download a 2nd video, a zero sized file was the result (and sometimes an error was reported).

At first I didn't make the connection - I installed (and removed) nearly all the available Firefox add-on YouTube downloader extensions available (using Firefox nightly, 79.0a1 on Windows 10.v2004) - if they worked at all, it would be just the once.

Then the penny dropped. I disabled the new Diversion YouTube ad blocker and all was well.

Thoughts? Anyone else? If a real issue, is it even possible to have both YouTube ad blocking AND YouTube downloading active?

Martin

Router: AC56U, John Fork: v44E5
Running: Diversion, Skynet, uiDivstats, scMerlin.
Addon tab active (with uiDevStats, Diversion and Skynet tabs) <-- looks amazing by the way!

 

[SMS786]

1. for adding a custom list, do I add the Hosts RAW link or Hosts TXT link?

If I understand your question properly, the hosts file/link can be in either a domain/host format (0.0.0.0 or 127.0.0.1 before the blocked domain name) or just a list of domains without any IP address in front of them - Diversion can handle and process both.

Either a raw file (for example, from github) or a plain txt file link should work just fine.

 

[tekrich]

Just a thought,

Does Diversion block telemetry logging IPs as well?

Such as those used my Microsoft for example?

 

[Sonyrolfy]

IS YTB still working ? ( 181 yt ) The adds are flying all over the place here

 

[Treadler]

Just a thought,

Does Diversion block telemetry logging IPs as well?

Such as those used my Microsoft for example?

Yes. Always subject to the list/s you use covering MS. (I assume most/all of them would?).
When I fire up the old Win PC here, uiDivStats reports multiple interesting MS domains as being blocked.

 

[doczenith1]

Just a thought,

Does Diversion block telemetry logging IPs as well?

Such as those used my Microsoft for example?

I think so and probably depends on what blocklist you are using. I see this in my top 20 blocked domains:
watson.telemetry.microsoft.com

 

[Treadler]

IS YTB still working ? ( 181 yt ) The adds are flying all over the place here

Yes, but the ‘training’ is ongoing.
A site I regularly go to that includes YT’s, obviously has many ads queued on each YT.
So, multiple reloads of the page required for Diversion to get a handle on them all to make ad free viewing possible.
Patience & perseverance seem necessary!

 

[Asad Ali]

IS YTB still working ? ( 181 yt ) The adds are flying all over the place here

Google have more than 85K *.googlevideo.com subdomains (and more are probably coming every few days/months) which they rotate as per their internal algorithm on each CDN/Geographic region. So 181 subdomains are nothing.

 

[rod178]

Yes, but the ‘training’ is ongoing.
A site I regularly go to that includes YT’s, obviously has many ads queued on each YT.
So, multiple reloads of the page required for Diversion to get a handle on them all to make ad free viewing possible.
Patience & perseverance seem necessary!

What are the mechanics of the 'training'?
Will using one Standard Hosts file facilitate Training
Do the Standard Host files contain any YT blocking
Where are the YT Domains/IP Addresses ? (ie for blocking) that are established, via the training, stored.
Is it only YT training

 

[Sonyrolfy]

Google have more than 85K *.googlevideo.com subdomains (and more are probably coming every few days/months) which they rotate as per their internal algorithm on each CDN/Geographic region. So 181 subdomains are nothing.

Lucky me, Then I only have to tick a few more vids to have them blocked I get it.

 

[JT Strickland]

After lightning fried my WAN port, I switched to a dual WAN and used a LAN port as my primary WAN at thelonelycoder's suggestion fix, which worked great. But now diversion is only blocking about 8% instead of 40% or more previously. Is there something I need to configure differently, or is this the way it is supposed to work?
TIA,
jts

BTW, youtube count is at 96 (29 of 30)

RT-AC86U w/ 384.17, RT-AC68U Aimesh node w/ same, 250/10 cable w/ Netgear CM-1000, Diversion, UiDivstats, Skynet, AiProtection, DoT, Scribe, UiScribe, Connmon, SpdMerlin, ScMerlin, Nsrum, NtpMerlin

 

[Khadanja]

Just one quirk I noticed with Diversion. I disabled in on Saturday afternoon because I was having problems with Alexa and Diversion number one block is always Amazon analytics.

Overnight, I assume when Diversion refreshed its blocking lists, is restarted itself. Not a huge problem but it would be nice to have and on /off switch that stayed off.

Also as a side note Alexa was working fine again with Diversion running.

Hi what sort of problems were you having with Alexa? Mine becomes unresponsive & sometimes blue light stays on, nothing else happens when you call it. Also just few minutes ago my echo dot rebooted for no reason, has done that before too. Are you sure Diversion is causing this?

 

[Skeptical.me]

Does the Youtube adblocker in Diversion block all ads on a page + video ads? It appears to be working well for banner style ads (etc).

 

[Asad Ali]

Does the Youtube adblocker in Diversion block all ads on a page + video ads? It appears to be working well for banner style ads (etc).

That blocker method is only for video ads.

 

[Skeptical.me]

That blocker method is only for video ads.

Ahh, okay ... I understand it takes a bit of time for that to work. The banner ads must be being blocked by Diversion? My pages seem to be clean of ads.

 

[Asad Ali]

Ahh, okay ... I understand it takes a bit of time for that to work. The banner ads must be being blocked by Diversion? My pages seem to be clean of ads.

Yes, the banner ads are either blocked by Diversion (you can check the logs) or your browser Adblocker add on if you're using one.

 

[Diamond67]

Before updating Merlin fw to 384.18 I checked for amtm + script updates by running 'u'. Everything was up to date.

After successful fw update to 384.18 and another check for amtm updates I saw this strange "-> v" as if there were an update available for Diversion.



Running u within Diversion didn't find any update. And the "-> v" remained. I rebooted the router once more but it didn't help.

But running force update of Diversion temporarily fixed the situation, and running 'u' from amtm after that didn't show any "updates" available any more and everything seemed to be OK.

But when you go to Diversion again and come back to amtm the "-> v" is back. But it vanishes with 'u' now. But not totally. If you go to Diversion and come back.

edit: Now I get "upd err"

 

[Diamond67]

^ Updating amtm and rebooting the router seemed to fix the problem.

 

[thelonelycoder]

^ Updating amtm and rebooting the router seemed to fix the problem.

The lonely v you got was the remains of an uncomplete retrieval of the current Diversion version number. As my server is happily up and running, I conclude that somewhere in the cybernet the request was improperly forwarded. The upd err message confirms that.