Hello FP community,
I am Gokulakrishna. I created the “Cloud Firewall” addon for Firefox to help enable everyone to easily replicate Kashmir Hill’s research series “Life without the big tech” which inspired me to build it. I reused Dhruv’s data from his VPN he built for Kashmir’s research. Created account here to share this with you 
GPLv3 source is in Gitlab. Yes, Gitlab is itself hosted on Google Cloud. Please review the readme.md file!
I got good feedback from users and many in Twitter have told me that they are trying to replicate Kashmir Hill’s research using this addon.
It’s just 2 weeks after its first publish, I’d gladly welcome and take any feedback, issue reports or feature requests comments and feedback if you take it for a spin !
If you wish, you can boost this toot in your Mastodon for reach visibility : framapiaf.org/web/statuses/101727497214557035
Common questions:
- It’s not a hosts/filter list based “ad/tracker blocker” addon. We already have
the fantastic UblockOrigin for it and I would never want to compete with it as I am a big fan and promoter of UBO too and its advanced mode! - It’s literally a firewall - looks at IP for both address bar URL and also the 1p/3p resources and blocks the connection if and only if user chooses to block a cloud and IP of URL bar hostname or 1p/3p resource match the
bundled IP address ranges owned by a cloud which the user chose to block. - User can choose to enable persistence of block/allow rules across browser restarts, in Settings page. By default upon install, it does not block anything. And by default, it does not persist allow/block rules across restarts.
- Chromium (Chrome, Brave, Opera, Vivaldi etc) is not supported because it does not provide to extensions an API that resolves DNS to IP the way firefox does {Refer compatibility table in DNS webext API which Firefox provides to addons } And I would never want any of my 3 addons to make a network call from addon code - so I don’t want to add an option for DOH/DOT type DNS --> IP resolution from addon code.
- TBB is not supported and also not supported for use with “Proxy addons” in
addons store. If someone can show me in issue #18 how to use
TBB’s DNS resolver from another addon, I could do it - PR welcome for it
too! (I am aware users are not supposed to use addons apart from
official bundled ones in TBB by its developers, but nothing stops a user
from installing stuff from AMO and this is a feature request from advanced user)
Also see feedback received in /e/ forum: https://community.e.foundation/t/cloud-firewall-block-g-e-amazon-facebbok-microsoft-apple-cloudflare/2834
@paulakreuzer can u pls edit this and update links to live links as it doesn’t let me add more than 2 links, ty!