I can only guess; a lot of these companies get their funding from bigger companies, that in turn get their funding from advertising and hate every form of ad-blocking and 'telemetry' circumvention designed to collect marketing data on you, as you after all are the product, your data is being sold and is where the big money is, so there's a lot of collaboration in gas lighting and creating FUD about anti-telemetry, anti-spyware and just about any approach to security and privacy that actually works.
Access to this post is restricted! You're trying to open the post, written by @shewolf, but unfortunately it was marked as a draft (by the user himself or the UFO)
Felt I have to bring my 2 cents to the table here, for what it's worth First, I'd just like to make one thing clear: We don't collect, process, sell, store or do anything with any user data whatsoever. I don't run any scripts/trackers/ads on the website, I don't even keep visitor logs. The tool itself does not transmit or collect any data whatsoever and doesn't "call home" or any such bulls**t, it doesn't even check for a newer version. The only network activity from Blackbird are queries to your configured DNS server so it can resolve and block hostnames. About the website being blocked for a bit there; Tends to happen and probably will happen again in the future. We're not exactly on good terms with Google so every once in a while a new version gets flagged as unwanted software and they add the domain to their blacklist which is enabled by default in Firefox and Chrome (under security settings should be something like "block deceptive content / unwanted software"). Their review process is s**t but I usually figure out what got their panties in a bunch and re-upload a version that doesn't bother the World Internet Police Force as much. Unfortunately false-positives are always gonna be a problem with Blackbird, just because of the way it works. I'd have to cut corners and reduce functionality to not get at least a couple of AVs triggered and I refuse to put my name on something I consider sub-par. But I do agree running random executables from the internet as admin is not the best idea. I always say go with your gut, it tends to be right 99% of the time.
Thanks for detailed explanation, i personally am experienced with false positives and such "blacklisting" of sites by Google's "protection", Microsoft's SmartScreen and such, so i always disable all those "protection" mechanisms, because very often they label many trusted sites which i personally use as unsafe/dangerous. Hell, i even run Windows with UAC/LUA fully disabled since the Vista times, despite the fact that all of those "security experts" recommend to leave it enabled (i always disable it just because it's very annoying and i want to have full root access on the local Administrator account to run Win32 API software coded in Windows XP times without problems) and i never ever had a single infection on any of my machines since Windows 2000/XP times, simply because i know what i download and execute, maybe those "protections" are quite useful to less tech-savvy people and seniors, but are completely useless for powerusers like us, most infections that people get are from malicious ads, toolbars, malware domains and so on, but nowadays in the era of adblockers - uBlock Origin with additional custom filter lists will protect most users for 99% of infection factors.
ublock is good, but not that good, unfortunately. I prefer Avira + Netcraft, but Forticlients's webfilter is good enough. Also the new Blocksi is great, if you like the telemetry that is.
Works on any Windows version and edition from Vista to 10. Not recommended for Windows Server but it will still run. I do offer free tech-support, look on the site/readme for an email contact. Hit me up, I'm sure I can help out, have a pretty good track record so far. If anyone else decides to try it out, please, make a backup, people. It's really easy, fast, and the produced file is completely editable. I love that you dug up that FB post Thank you!
Yeah, I'm sorry if I sounded mean about my comment, kinda my fault anyway for not backing up before I ran the program. At the very least. I'm 100% sure that the program does its wonders. Would love to just see a prompt or a warning that it is a powerful program and backing up first is highly recommended. Again my apologies if I offended you in any way.