Release Notes 2.7

eBlockerOS 2.7.7: September 17th 2021 #

The update mainly contains the following fixes for the Dashboard:

• Fixed PDFW domain recording switch is now disabled when the device is disabled
• Fixed Pause tile is shown on remote dashboards even if local device is disabled
• Fixed Blocking message is shown with translated texts again
• Fixed Dashboard does not sporadically render an empty page any more
• Fixed When a device is paused in the Dashboard the status tile is updated
• Fixed When eBlocker’s DHCP service is active, starting/stopping the pause takes a few seconds. A spinner is shown until the pause request is processed.

eBlockerOS 2.7.3: August 26th 2021 #

This new release of eBlockerOS brings a lot of new features and an important change to daily updates:

Next to these Release Notes a more user oriented article regarding all new functions can be found here in German and English.

With this release we have focused on features to give you more control over individual domains contacted from IoT devices (such as SmartTVs, Internet radios, light controls etc). With the new Personal Device Firewall (beta) you can monitor and change which domains a device is contacting. We have also improved compatibility with native Apps and much more…

Thanks to the Team #

This release is brought to you by an international community of contributors in various fields. Very special thanks go to @mainzelM, @tomy, @pio78, @valentin, @navigator and our core maintainer @bpr, who mainly implemented the PDFW. Many thanks also go to @det, @johann0815 for text reviews, @random for website & infrastructure support and @benne for holding it all together.

eBlockerOS 2.7 Highlights & Changes #

• Added Personal Device Firewall (PDFW) (beta) to monitor and restrict traffic of any device. The new PDFW Dashboard tile can record all domains that a device has accessed during the last 24 hours. The recording is displayed along with the number of requests and whether requests were blocked, passed or if some URLs of the domain were filtered by the pattern blocker. Recorded domains can be selected to be always blocked or allowed. The selected domains are added to the corresponding Dashboard tiles “Block Domains” and “Allow Domains” respectively. See Dashboard -> Personal Device Firewall (beta)
• Added Remote Dashboard (beta) to access the Dashboard of IoT and other devices with no screen. Chose the menu icon next to the device name in the current Dashboard to access assigned devices of the current user. Any device’s Dashboard can be accessed by the administrator after entering the password. Please note: Not all Dashboard tiles are available for remote devices.
• Improved Auto Trust App (ATA) (beta) for better HTTPS compatibility with native OS Apps. The Auto Trust App is a special kind of Trusted App that automatically trusts domains if an App on a local device signals a problem with eBlocker’s HTTPS feature. If the Auto Trust App is active, it’s usually sufficient to restart a non-working App (e.g. a banking app on your smartphone) two or three times to get it work, without any need to specifically configure the eBlocker for the app. Please be patient and retry a not instantly working App a few times. Usually ATA will recognize it very well.
  While the Auto Trust App is still in beta state, we now encourage all users who use the HTTPS feature to activate it and give us feedback via the forum. See this section in the manual for details.
  A note to early adopters: If you have already activated the Auto Trust App (alpha) in the previous eBlockerOS 2.6 release, we recommend reseting the HTTPS Communication Failures once: Settings -> HTTPS -> Communication Failures -> Delete all recordings. This will clear the current state of the Auto Trust App and make sure the improved ATA algorithm works accordingly.
• Added Support for donation based automatic daily updates. New update model (free manual updates, no free automatic updates at all) is implemented. License keys for auto updates have been send by individual emails to donors. (see above’s Important Change note)
• Added warning message if blocker lists have not been updated for 30 days or more.
• Improved The “Tracker and Ad Blocker Rules” Dashboard tile has been divided for better overview. Now the functionality is separated to different tiles: There are “Allow Domains” and “Block Domains” tiles and in the “Status” tile Ads or Trackers Blockers can be actived/deactivated for the respective device.
• Improved Dashboard layout so tiles always have the same width and do not exceed the browser window.
• Fixed A potential conflict in JavaScript code of the Controlbar that occurred on some web pages (observed on DuckDuckGo.com).
• Updated All security updates for LinuxOS components in use.