Ask HN: PG&E site does not function with ad-blockers

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39800189

by harikb • 2 years ago

4 2 2 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

NOTE: PG&E is California electric&gas utility company site (pge.com). Issue only occurs when a real customer tries to login.

I am trying to debug why I can't login to PG&E site when I use pi-hole/dns ad-blocking. pi-hole seems to block the following URLs from PG&E login page [1] [2] [3].

Net effect is that I can see a greyed out logged-in page, can see my amount due in a faint color, but can't click on any subsequent links because some "grey out everything until page is fully loaded" event hasn't happened.

So sad

[1] https://cdn.appdynamics.com/adrum/adrum-4.5.9.2098.js

[2] https://cdn.optimizely.com/js/1115471569.js

[3] https://s.go-mpulse.net/boomerang/....

PopAlongKid2• 2 years ago

I am using NoScript on Firefox, nothing else. When I tried to log in, first it made me go through a stupid password reset, that involved sending a plaintext temporary password to my email account, answer a security question, then force me to change my password, which I changed back to the original one. What a joke.

Anyway, in NoScript I had to "temp trust" pge.com, while leaving all those other links (the ones you listed and a few more) as "untrusted". So right now I am logged in, but there is a pop up asking (forcing) me to "update my contact info" in case of a Public Safety Power outage. There is a little 3-dot progress icon I can see in the middle of the pop up, like it's trying to refresh something. I can't escape the pop up unless I click on "Update contact info" (even though I have no updates).

So I did that, not actually updating anything, and now I see what you describe, a grey-ed out page with my info, but the little 3 dot progress spinner just running continuously, and my mouse cursor also spinning continuously when hovering over the page.

PopAlongKid2• 2 years ago

Follow up - I finally decided to make all the links temp trusted, and now I'm logged in "normally". However,

   The following browsers are below our threshold for support. Some functionality may still work.

    Mozilla Firefox
    Microsoft Internet Explorer
    Brave
    Opera
    UC Browser