We believe at the moment there isn't enough synergy between our projects. We appreciate working with your team through these years. At this point, we would like to end the partnership. Your next renewal is on December 8th. We'll let that one go through so that you have access to data data until Jan 7 2026. This way it doesn't disrupt abruptly the protection to your users and you have time to look for alternatives. We won't process your renewals after Dec 8.

We regret Malware Patrol's sudden move to cancel our five years long friction-less partnership very much.

Fortunately, Malware Patrol is just one of the malware domain list providers we are using. So you are protected very well even without the Malware Patrol list.

We would like to encourage our community to share reliable malware domain providers (also at a licensing cost) to further improve eBlockerOS' malware protection if you have experience in this field. Just add to this thread. 

Thanks very much for your support.

Fortunately, eBlockerOS 4.x (beta) is fully compatible to the new Tor technology. Thus, if you are relying on Tor please consider upgrading.

We are investigating into a patch for eBlockerOS 3.x but can't promise a fix as the underlying technology might not be able to run the new Tor client.

THX!

Loading delay issue

We have noticed that some websites (i.e. deepl.com, paypal.com) are causing an initial delay of 30-60 seconds before Firefox is loading the page if eBlockerOS 3 or 4 beta is protecting the device.

Work-around

Fortunately there is a simple work-around - and the delay is gone:

1. Type "about:config" in Firefox URL field
2. The browser might ask for a confirmation if you want to proceed. Confirm this request.
3. Type "network.http.http3.enable" in the settings field
4. Set the parameter to false (by clicking on the two arrow icon)
5. Done. The delay is gone.

The setting should look like this:

The settings are automatically and permanently saved. 

Technical background

The technical background of the delay is very complex. The issue is related to certain DNS settings of the target website in combination with Windows 11 and Firefox's handling of HTTPS/3 connections.

Next steps

We have some ideas how to mitigate this issue either by modifying eBlocker's DNS or the internal Squid Proxy. But this needs to be evaluated first. 

Stay tuned. We will update this thread accordingly.

In the meantime apply the work-around. 👍

THX!

BTW: The current newsletter is informing about yesterdays start of eBlockerOS 4 public beta. 🍾

THX!

This will result is sporadic downtime and outages of eblocker.org. Your eBlockerOS device will not be affected.

As soon as the website has been migrated, we'll let you know.

THX!

See: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/privacy-preserving-attribution

The feature is enabled by default!

As we are against all tracking, we'd like to encourage Firefox users to disable the feature.

To disable PPA tracking in the browser:

1. Click the menu button and select Settings.
2. In the Privacy & Security panel, find the Website Advertising Preferences section.
3. Uncheck the box labeled Allow websites to perform privacy-preserving ad measurement.

Next to this mitigation recommendation we will investigate Firefox's PPA tracking more thoroughly. In addtion we hope to find a way of blocking to communication to Mozilla's tracking servers using eBlockerOS.

Stay tuned.

THX!

With the change we hope the two login options are more obvious now, so less people get locked out accidentally.

THX!

THX!

Please find more info in the Release Notes.

THX!

To work around the bug simply skip the license agreement and deactivate the DNS Firewall. eBlockerOS can then be activated normally.

Users who updated from a previous eBlockerOS version are not affected as long as no Factory Reset is performed.

We've now suspended the image download temporarily and are working on a fix.

We are very sorry for the bug. 😥

As soon as the fix has been released we will update this post. Please stay tuned!