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Credit: Josh Pigford / X

TL;DR

Amazon’s shopping experience has heavily degraded due to an influx of sponsored ads and low-quality, white-label commodity products sold under gibberish, all-caps brand names.

A free, open-source browser extension called “Knockoff” allows users to dim, label, or completely hide these pseudo-brands and ad carousels.

The tool claims to use linguistic name heuristics and a community-driven database of 5,000 established brands to filter search results, and is said to run entirely on-device.

If you have tried shopping on Amazon recently, you already know the experience has completely degraded. What used to be a reliable marketplace for trusted goods has transformed into an endless sea of sponsored placements and low-quality commodity products sold by trademark-squatting, all-caps gibberish names like SZHLUX, LATTOOK, COOFANDY, or TOSY. Finding a genuine product from an established company now requires serious digital digging, and not everyone might be up for the task. Thankfully, there’s a new browser extension in town that helps declutter your Amazon search results from knockoff brands.

Knockoff — Amazon Brand Filter is a new browser extension that helps clean up your Amazon shopping experience by identifying, marking, and filtering out pseudo-brand listings. As shared by developer Josh Pigford on X , the extension is explicitly designed to help address the flood of random-character-string brands registered on Amazon.

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Credit: DuckDuckGo

TL;DR

DuckDuckGo says its browser can now block most video ads, including on YouTube.

The feature is on by default for iOS, Mac, and Windows, with automatic enabling coming to Android soon.

The tool works by using uBlock Origin’s open-source community filter lists.

YouTube has been trying its hardest to stop workarounds that let you watch videos without ads. However, every time one option is shot down, another one rises up. The latest solution to pop up in this ongoing saga comes from DuckDuckGo .

In a blog post , DuckDuckGo announced that its browser is now able to block most video ads, including on YouTube. According to the company, the tool is able to detect and block YouTube ads with the help of uBlock Origin’s open-source community filter lists. It adds that it applies its own rules for the purpose of improving compatibility and reducing breakage. The company also warns that using the feature can cause additional buffering, but the video will run uninterrupted once it loads.

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Recently, I suffered from a nasty bout of the flu. As I emerged from my sickness-induced haze, I made a to-do list: restock my fridge, catch up on emails and most importantly, disinfect my apartment.

There’s nothing worse than getting sick only to infect your entire household. While the flu viruses stay on hands for only five minutes, they have been found to stay contagious anywhere from a few hours to two days on hard surfaces.

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