New GoodbyeAds Block Lists added

[Staff 9751]

Hello!

We're glad to inform you that, following the community requests and suggestions, we added five DNS block lists in our system, MIT licensed (*) by Jerry Joseph.

GoodbyeAds
A programmatically expanded list of hosts used for advertisements, Malware and tracking. Use this list to block ads trackers malwares.
Items: 200489 (as of today)

GoodbyeAds Samsung
A well maintained list containing Samsung hosts used for advertisements and tracking. Those who are not using GoodbyeAds list and want to block only Samsung ads and tracking can use it.
Items: 103 (as of today)

GoodbyeAds Spotify
A well maintained list containing Spotify hosts used for advertisements. This list helps to block/reduce Spotify ads.
Items: 3774 (as of today)

GoodbyeAds Xiaomi
A well maintained list containing Xiaomi hosts used for advertisements and tracking. Those who are not using GoodbyeAds list and want to block only Xiaomi ads and tracking can use it.
Items: 279 (as of today)

GoodbyeAds YouTube
A well maintained list containing YouTube hosts used for advertisements. This list helps to block/reduce YouTube ads.
Items: 97645 (as of today)

=====

By default, AirVPN DNS remains neutral in accordance with our mission. However, you have the option to enforce block lists which poison our DNS, in order, for example, to block known sources of ads, spam, malware and so on.

You can manage your preferences in your account Client Area ⇨ DNS panel https://airvpn.org/dns/.

We offer only lists released with licenses which grant re-distribution for business purposes too.

The system is very flexible and offers some exclusive features never seen before in other VPN services:

• You can activate or de-activate, anytime, any combination of lists.
• You can add customized exceptions and/or additional blocks.
• Any specified domain which must be blocked includes all of its subdomains too.
• Lists which can return custom A,AAAA,CNAME,TXT records are supported.
• You can define any combination of block lists and/or exceptions and/or additions for your whole account or only for specific certificate/key pairs of your account (Client Area ⇨ Devices ⇨ Details ⇨ DNS)
• Different matching methods are available for your additions and exceptions: Exact (exact FQDN), Domain (domain and its subdomains), Wildcard (with * and ? as wildcards), Contain, Start with, End with.
• An API to fetch every and each list in different formats (see Client Area ⇨ API ⇨ dns_lists service) is active
• Any change in your selected list(s), any added exception and any added block is enforced very quickly, within few tens of seconds. You don't need to disconnect and re-connect your account.
• You can define your own lists and discuss lists and anything related in the community forum here

Essential requisite to enjoy the service is, of course, querying AirVPN DNS while your system is connected to some VPN server, which is by the way a default setup if you run our software.

Kind regards & datalove
AirVPN Staff

(*)

MIT License

Copyright (c) 2018 Jerry Joseph

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy

of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal

in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights

to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell

copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is

furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all

copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR

IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,

FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE

AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER

LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM,

OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE

SOFTWARE.

[benfitita 35]

I'm not sure if this list is of a good quality. The main list "GoodbyeAds" contains global.ssl.fastly.net. Fastly is one of the major CDN providers with some interesting capabilities. It seems that AirVPN DNS is blocking all domains and their subdomains, so effectively some/many websites will be broken, for example: https://www.waveform.com/tools/bufferbloat – the test itself is broken.

[Staff 9751]

@benfitita

Hello!

Obviously we don't comment a lot on the lists content, but just in case we remind you that you can de-select it, or you can add the exception for the CDN you mention, thanks to our flexible system. GoodbyeAds lists have been the most requested by our community in the last months, so we made them available.

Kind regards
 

[benfitita 35]

I greatly appreciate the flexibility of your DNS system. It's one of the best I've seen. Still, blocking a whole major CDN will cause many issues for people. Just a warning for everybody.

[benfitita 35]

I'm starting to think that this problem with Fastly happens because this block list was designed to be used with /etc/hosts, so only exact matches should be denied. However, AirVPN DNS is matching on subdomains as well, which excludes the whole CDN. I understand where you guys are coming from. As visible in this block list, ad hosts often produce hundreds of subdomains to bypass simple hosts style blocking (exact matching). I suppose the only good solution is to override this entry manually in settings and maybe report this as a false positive to the list creator.

[Television 5]

On 6/21/2023 at 1:47 PM, benfitita said:

I'm not sure if this list is of a good quality. The main list "GoodbyeAds" contains global.ssl.fastly.net. Fastly is one of the major CDN providers with some interesting capabilities. It seems that AirVPN DNS is blocking all domains and their subdomains, so effectively some/many websites will be broken, for example: https://www.waveform.com/tools/bufferbloat – the test itself is broken.

I would like to share a possible solution with other users if anyone are experiencing broken sites when having all or many DNS lists enabled on their AirVPN accounts in the hope of experiencing less ads while browsing online, or using ad sponsored apps on their phones.

I can confirm that GoodByeAds caused a couple of sites to be broken for me. The sites that were broken when I had GoodByeAds enabled were one of the worlds largest online retail shops and a few news-sites as well.
I opened a ticket but I was left unimpressed by the competency of AirVPNs support in this case. They had me look into systemd despite that I told support that these sites were broken on a android phone as well. 

What I knew was that the sites were not broken until the very same moment AirVPN started testing new DNS lists such as GoodByeAds, OISD and Steven Black, and later introduced them as choices on users accounts.
I then asked support, what if I could whitelist all subdomains that appear in the sites' certificates when connecting without a VPN, or with for example cloudflares DNS 1.1.1.1?  Support then made me aware of the option to use custom answers where users can add allowed domains.

So I decided to try this. One site's resolution improved, while others when adding custom answers resulted in an error message "Invalid CSRF Token. Please refresh the page and retry" and therefore were not resolved. I then deleted all custom answers (deleted all allowed domains that I had added), since they didin't provide a satisfactory solution.

I then thought of your post here benfititia, and decided to disable all GoodByeAds on my DNS Lists configuration area on my account.

And voila! All previously troubled sites including subdomains now loaded perfectly.

So if anyone experience problems with broken sites, those sites may start working again if you disable the following GoodByeAds DNS lists on your account (provided of course that they were enabled in the first place):

1: GoodbyeAds
2: GoodbyeAds Samsung
3: GoodbyeAds Spotify
4: GoodbyeAds Xiaomi
5: GoodbyeAds YouTube

 

[Staff 9751]

19 minutes ago, Television said:

 They had me look into systemd despite that I told support that these sites were broken on a android phone as well.

Not systemd, they wanted to verify whether you had systemd-resolved DNS enabled with old Eddie versions and similar behavior in Android with other tools, because you said that without VPN DNS the sites were not broken and at the same time you wrote (quote):
 

Quote

At first I thought it was the new DNS links that I had enabled such as GoodByeAds and others, but it turned out that even when turning off all DNS lists, the problem still didn't resolve

It was you who claimed initially that the problem was NOT related to the DNS block lists, that's why initially the investigation moved to other fields, holy patience!

Kind regards
 

[Television 5]

Hello Staff

Yes you are right about the second quote. 

I did first try to disable all DNS Lists at that time (a couple of weeks ago now) and there were still problems. But I may have been too impatient. I think I turned them on again less than a minute later when, as I can remember now anyway, noticed that the broken sites were not fixed.

Regarding the first quote, yes it was systemd-resolved not systemd. 

I see that I posted the last post on the support ticket on 29 June. As I can remember, it was less than 24 hours after my last post, that I found out that disabling all GoodByeAds DNS lists, while leaving all other DNS lists enabled, including all DNS lists curated by AirVPN as well as all third party DNS lists, indeed fixed all sites that were broken in my case.

I hope that this can be to help for other users.

I am generally very pleased with AirVPN. That we are able to have an almost ad-free online experience, and that you allow users to download or scan QR-codes with tunnels to use with official Wireguard apps on Linux and on Android, are among the things I appreciate the most.

If you can handle some other criticism, i would say that you have some serious amount of work to put into your Android client (Eddie Android Edition), because that is always disconnecting when I receive calls, despite having two sims, one for calls/sms and one for data only.

Since switching to the official Android client with configs from scanned QR codes, my connection has NEVER disconnected when receiving calls, in fact my connection has never disconnected on my phone for whatever reason since switching to the official Android Wireguard client, except when I myself push disconnect or switch to another tunnel/server.

The only downside with this switch, is that I now have only Wireguard as an option on my phone, no more OpenVPN.

I only miss one feature with AirVPN, that we can watch public broadcasting TV with AirVPN, (such as the World Cup, or perhaps an Easter Crime series etc.). It's annoying that we have to sign up for a second VPN service just to be able to do this.

But other than that, it's hard to beat AirVPN!

[Television 5]

3 hours ago, Staff said:

Not systemd, they wanted to verify whether you had systemd-resolved DNS enabled with old Eddie versions and similar behavior in Android with other tools, because you said that without VPN DNS the sites were not broken and at the same time you wrote (quote):
 
It was you who claimed initially that the problem was NOT related to the DNS block lists, that's why initially the investigation moved to other fields, holy patience!

Kind regards
 

My two quotes that you are referring to, appears somewhat contradictory.

But it must be understood that in that moment, the definitive solution had not yet been found. In my ticket I requested you take a look at user benfititas post in this thread, because I thought that the most probable cause to broken sites were related to GoodByeAds, and I thought that benfitita were on to what I thought were the most probable cause to my broken sites. And in the end this proved to be 100% correct. Since around 29 or 30 June when I disabled all GoodByeAds while leaving all other lists enabled, those sites that had been broken, have since that moment always resolved 100% correctly, including images or graphics drawn in from subdomains.

Yes, before disabling all GoodByeAds, I was able to access those sites when using a thirdparty DNS when connected to AirVPN servers, with the troubled sites not broken. Using thirdparty DNS resolvers are thankfully no longer necessary, as this is not recommended to do when using any VPN service. 

There is another positive thing that also were solved after the solution were found:

In my support ticket, before having disabled GoodByeAds, Ads sometimes were loaded on the broken sites, and at the same time, the sites were not broken! This I wrote to you, I perceived as very strange, almost spooky. Because sometimes when connected to the same VPN server, the sites were broken and no ads were loaded, and other times ads loaded but other elements such as images also loaded, so the sites appeared not broken, except that all ads also loaded, which shouldn't happen since all DNS Lists were enabled.

Now since 29 or 30 June, not only has the sites loaded perfectly, but ads also almost never shows up anymore as well.

I actually would suggest that you remove GoodByeAds from your DNS lists options, because now on my account with all lists enabled except GoodByeAds, no sites are ever broken and I almost never see ads. Exactly how I (or we) would want it to work.

Benfitita led me to the solution. And thanks to him/her for that 👏✌️

[Staff 9751]

14 hours ago, Television said:

I actually would suggest that you remove GoodByeAds from your DNS lists options, because now on my account with all lists enabled except GoodByeAds, no sites are ever broken and I almost never see ads. Exactly how I (or we) would want it to work.
 

Hello!

GoodBye Ads has been added after widespread community suggestions and it is here to stay as long as we don't have another widespread request from the community to delete it. Just ignore it and that's it.

Please report the problems you have with Eddie Android edition in the proper thread or even better in a ticket. In this thread they are off topic and contribute only to lower thread's readability. Since the "News" forum is not a community forum and it must remain as readable as possible, off topic messages might be split or even deleted in some cases.

Kind regards




 

[MusicPeek 0]

On 5/17/2023 at 9:05 PM, Staff said:

GoodbyeAds Spotify
Reklamlar için kullanılan Spotify sunucularını içeren bakımlı bir liste. Bu liste, Spotify reklamlarını engellemeye/azaltmaya yardımcı olur.
Ürün sayısı: 3774 (bugün itibariyle)

Is this event valid for spotify program blocking? Or is it blocking ads on the spotify site? its stuck on my mind

[Staff 9751]

22 minutes ago, Sarcley said:

Is this event valid for spotify program blocking? Or is it blocking ads on the spotify site? its stuck on my mind

Hello!

It is meant to block Spotify ads.

Kind regards
 

[NoMercy1290 3]

Hello!

It looks like that the script to updating the goodbye block lists is not running anymore. The last update was made on the 27.06.23.

Can you please check.

Kind regards

[Quallian 24]

On 7/13/2023 at 10:24 AM, NoMercy1290 said:

Hello!

It looks like that the script to updating the goodbye block lists is not running anymore. The last update was made on the 27.06.23.

Can you please check.

Kind regards

I think it's fine. No newer updates available atm https://github.com/jerryn70/GoodbyeAds

[NoMercy1290 3]

@Quallian Thanks for the clarification.