‘Just four dudes’: Inside EasyList, a community-run ad-blocking list

Post by dilutedh2o » Fri, Aug 02, 2019, 5:40 PM UTC

randomstring wrote: post #61

x0x0 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was surprised it was that hard to change a route on autotrader. The article kept mentioning hundreds of thousands of pages, like they had some person editing each page in textmate.

Maybe Autotrader has hundreds of thousands of template, CSS, and JS files with those paths hardcoded. Imagine the hell it would be to work on that website. Even so, you could fix everything with a one line Perl command.

Post by derefr » Fri, Aug 02, 2019, 5:45 PM UTC

papln wrote: post #44

kgwxd wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

uBlock Origin really really needs to do something to distinguish itself from uBlock. Every thread I read about ad blockers has a comment trying to clarify.

How can it distinguish itself without giving up the name that Aljoudi (and not AdBlock) has been hijacking? Imagine if a company launched a (non-Google) "Chromium" browser or non-Microsoft "Explorer" or "Edge", how would the authentic developer defend against that? (Probably with a trademark suit, which is a dificult strategy for a tiny open source project). gorhill could create a brand new name to replace Origin, bu…

Post by mfontani » Fri, Aug 02, 2019, 5:48 PM UTC

x0x0 wrote: post #14

ziddoap wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. Once I finished the article I sat there and had to think: "what am I supposed to be feeling after reading this?". I think they want us to be angry that EasyList is only maintained by 4 people. Or maybe just be angry that EasyList exists. I'm not really sure. My takeaway was that it's pretty impressive they still respond to exclusion requests in a timely manner.

I was surprised it was that hard to change a route on autotrader. The article kept mentioning hundreds of thousands of pages, like they had some person editing each page in textmate.

    RewriteRule "^/+new_path/+(.+)$" /advert/$1 [L]

    RewriteRule "^(.*)/+new_path/+(.+)$" $1/advert/$2 [L]

Post by iamnotacrook » Fri, Aug 02, 2019, 5:49 PM UTC

papln wrote: post #48

hnaccy wrote: post #10

>“It’s crazy that more people don’t know about this,” said Marty Kratky-Katz, the founder of Blockthrough, which lets publishers monetize using Adblock Plus’s Acceptable Ads program. “I don’t think they mean any harm or have any malicious intentions. But it’s not like they were experts in balancing publisher monetization, or like they were elected. They’re just four dudes.” Why would you ever want your adblocking lis…

Because moral fiber includes some notion of acceptable ads, even if current models tend to bad. However, I suspect that Easylist already supports acceptable ads in the form of "route the ads through the publisher's domain/servers" which puts accountability where it belongs, so it doesn't need further expert advice.

Post by CivBase » Fri, Aug 02, 2019, 5:51 PM UTC

wccrawford wrote: post #69

hartator wrote: post #63

I remember https://serpapi.com breaking with EasyList because we use Prism.js for code syntax coloration. And Prism.js is also the name of a tracker. Opened a ticket with them. However it has been easier to just rename `prism.js` to `pri-secure-sm.js`. Not sure why author is so upset about that. It's not like they are trying to break websites on purpose.

Because they're breaking things without much regard to it. We discovered a few years ago that our list of advertisers (in a digital magazine) was being blocked by ad blockers. It was coming over the wire with the word "advertisers" in the URL. These aren't ads that pop up and display on the pages, but simply a list of advertisers in the issue. Rather than try to get adblockers not to block it, we simply used another…