Can't turn off ABE Notifications!

[acorndog]

Got the new noscript today, and now (nearly) every site I go to has a massive notification bar the appears right at the top of the screen telling me ABE blocked some ad or other.
It's really annoying, as the urls are so long it takes up a good quarter of the viewable area.

That's great that ABE is working, but do I need to nolw every time it blocks something? I have my notifications set to show on the bottom, but ABE still shows on the top.
If I turn notifications off altogether, the ABE messages still show up. Only way to surf now is to turn OFF ABE altogether, which sort of defeats the purpose.

Please put these notifications at the bottom and allow me to turn them off.

[therube]

(Some sample URLs where you get these notifications?)

[Giorgio Maone]

Are you using your "host" file to block any site by redirecting it to localhost?
If so, ABE's SYSTEM "LocalRodeo" rule is correctly preventing pages linking to those site to access your LAN.
You can choose to change the redirection IP to something external, rather than 127.0.0.1, or disabling the SYSTEM rule (not recommended).

[Giorgio Maone]

OK, easy work-around: open your host file and replace 127.0.0.1 (or 10.0.0.1 or whatever you use as a dummy local redirection) with 255.255.255.0 which is an invalid address serving the same purpose and not being (properly) prevented by ABE's SYSTEM "LocalRodeo" rule from being reached by external internet pages.

[screwed]

Im having the same problem, I use Bluetack's host managaer and hosts file which is used to block ads and other nasty sites.

The entire hosts file uses 127.0.0.1.
In example, a few lines would look like this:

127.0.0.1 localhost
127.0.0.1 ads.site.com
127.0.0.1 ads.site2.com

when you say we should change it to 255.255.255.0, do you mean every line in the file or just the localhost?

[Giorgio Maone]

The entire hosts file uses 127.0.0.1.
In example, a few lines would look like this:

Code: Select all

127.0.0.1 localhost
127.0.0.1 ads.site.com
127.0.0.1 ads.site2.com

when you say we should change it to 255.255.255.0, do you mean every line in the file or just the localhost?

You MUST keep "127.0.0.1 localhost" as it is, and change all the other 127.0.0.1 occurrences into 255.255.255.0 (you can use search & replace).

[screwed]

alright, thanks for the response.

[hhhobbit]

I apologize in advance for a long post. Here I just told people to stop using Privoxy (it causes me to open a huge gaping FTP securing hole in our PAC filter) and use Firefox + NoScript instead on Windows. Changing the address used in the hosts file as recommended by Giorgio is wrong from many standpoints. I could address them from the point of view of a network admin / managment person (and I have created network management solutions for a University and a state) but I won't. I will say that pseudo-randomly picking an address that in fact is not a host but a network itself is NOT a good idea. But the point in fact is that well known mechanisms are already set up to handle the requests at this IP address / port combination of 127.0.0.1 / 80. Here are just some of the phttpds (pseudo http daemons / servers) that depend on the 127.0.0.1 address staying right where it is at except for a couple of them and on port 80 unless you are some sort of nut (or just like to play around and experiment):

http://sysctl.org/cameleon/
http://preview.tinyurl.com/8ujj9j
http://preview.tinyurl.com/mavx9m
http://www.abelhadigital.com/ (has a program called hostssrv.exe)
http://www.securemecca.com/phttpd.html

Only the first and the last can be set up to listen on your ethernet NIC port, with the first being explicitly designed for that purpose not just on the machine you are using but on a machine specially set up to handle the requests from multiple machines on a LAN (computer science lab, etc.). Now I did go down in hostssrv.exe and modified it to attempt to use 0.0.0.0 (MS localhost) with hexedit, but I sincerely doubt that will work so changing the IP address except with Camelon's phttpd (Psuedo HTTP Daemon) to another IP address is not advised. You can also set up a pseudo DNS server rather than having the hosts file at all ( http://www.peereboom.us/adsuck/ ). I can change both our PAC filter and our phttpd to use a different port. That's fine as long as the rule in the PAC filter itself does the REDIRECT (which is the proper term - it is technically not a BLOCK). But the hosts file is stuck at port 80 or what ever port the request is supposed to be handled on (21 - ftp, 22 - ssh, 23 - telnet, et al). Therefore I propose the following:

1. If this problem is because of a bad router, make a list of the ones to avoid. The one that left a gaping hole of allowing ssh from the WAN side is an example and explains all of those port 21, 22, and 23 probes my router blocks (hey, it is just little commodity router but I even have rules to block some ports in ALL directions). And it can NOT be tampered without using the password to alter the settings.
2. If this problem is because of slaggards that won't button down down their home routers with a good password and tightening the settings you cannot protect idiots from themselves. I cannot count the number of times I have counseled people on how to secure a broadband home router but it is in the hundreds of times and yet nobody wants to do it. Even if they do tighten down the settings on the router, they use their handy dandy password manager built into Firefox to access the router. Well here is one more piece of advice on that - DON'T store the password to your router on the machine. I don't care if you write it on a sticky note - just don't make it easily accessible to the Internet at large. Type it in manually each and every time you access your router. But if you have a key logger on your machine? Use Linux or Mac OS-X to access the router and have Windows users just USE it..
3. Both IIS and Apache can be configured to listen to some other port (I suggest 9980) on the loopback. If you use both a phttpd and a real web server that is configured to listen on the loopback IP address (127.0.0.1) this is what I recommend. I find it funny though since the people I fight can drop 10+ hosts into either the dumper IP zone or park them and bring up 10+ (plus 10% more) hosts HOT every day. By that I mean they probably don't do any local development. They really are that good. But there is a well known work-around to make both a real httpd and phttpd to live simultaneously at the same localhost IP address.

I am going to cut this short and write some if not all of this on my blog ( http://securemecca.blogspot.com ). But I know that the solution of just dumping the IP addresses some place else in your hosts file is not a workable one. Giorgio assumed one thing and encountered another. Leave your hosts file entries at 127.0.0.1 or get a dedicated machine on your LAN to do phttpd services on what ever machine you have on your LAN that you can with what Camelon provides. The machine that does this phttpd service can NOT have its IP address DHCP'd. The same thing goes for network printers, domain servers, etc. Set the IP address for where the phttpd lives statically and leave it there. Then you can change your IP addresses for these entries to where the centralized phttpd server is at. ABE Notifications? I suggest changing something some place with it in NoScript (hidden perhaps with only on demand viewing?). I will write something in my blog on this because it is critical - I don't have the time to make an RFC on this but in reality there should probably be one. Sorry for the long post.

[Giorgio Maone]

Changing the address used in the hosts file as recommended by Giorgio is wrong from many standpoints. [...] But the point in fact is that well known mechanisms are already set up to handle the requests at this IP address / port combination of 127.0.0.1 / 80.

I guess I didn't express myself clearly enough.
I was not suggesting to ban 127.0.0.1 from your host file for an usage: what I was suggesting is that if you use your hosts file as a "poor man adblock", i.e. to redirect ad serving and malicious domain names to a dummy IP just to block them (which happens to be the most common usage of the host file among "common" people who aren't developers), an invalid IP address is a better choice for obvious reasons (the request is not sent at all, and you don't trigger CSRF protections like ABE's or Opera's).
Of course, if you actuall want a web server on 127.0.0.1 to be linkable from web pages, then you're not in this use case and you probably know exactly what to do with your host file.

1. If this problem is because of a bad router
Nope: this problem affects most if not all the routers, because none of them have sufficient CSRF protection (nonce tokens).

2. If this problem is because of slaggards that won't button down down their home routers with a good password

I suggest changing something some place with it in NoScript (hidden perhaps with only on demand viewing?)

Did you check latest development build 1.9.5.5?

[Sweendog]

Are you planning on building a way to turn those notifications off? I don't like the idea of changing my host file to an invalid IP address as a workaround. Leaving it at localhost ensures a clean, quick 'reset' when the browser calls for ads from craptastic.site.com or whatever other host makes it into my local blacklist.

Thanks,
Bill

[Sweendog]

Actually, I just tried the workaround, and I'm still getting ABE notifications. Just visit http://www.comcast.net for an example. I also get them all over the Yahoo news pages, as well as other locations. I'm happy to let ABE block whatever its designed to do, I just want to be able to turn off the notificaitons, they're almost as annoying as the ads.

[Giorgio Maone]

Actually, I just tried the workaround, and I'm still getting ABE notifications.

Can I see both the warning and your host file?
BTW, did you try latest development build like I suggested in my previous post?
It should both automatically suppress notifications for 127.0.0.1 on default ports, and has a NoScript Options|Notifications|ABE options to turn them off completely.

[H. Hall]

I tried turning off ABE and still got the notifications. On sites like the wall st. journal, the notifications are about 4 lines high and very annoying.

The idea of ABE is very good as is the rest of your product. You have done a great job.

I can live with the notifications until you have time to add an off switch.

[Giorgio Maone]

@H. Hall:
if you turned off ABE those notification are from elsewhere.
Could you report exactly what the message is?

[Guest]

@H. Hall:
if you turned off ABE those notification are from elsewhere.
Could you report exactly what the message is?

The ABE message is very long. It has the ABE icon on the left and ends with Filtered by ABE: local deny.

The message re-appears when I refresh the page, with ABE turned off.

After some playing around, I think that the message may only come up in pre-existing tabs. If I create a new tab and bring up the same page, the message is not there when ABE is turned off, but messages remain in existing tabs. (Firefox browser 3.0.11)