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EasyList is in trouble and so are many ad blockers

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Re: EasyList is in trouble and so are many ad blockers

#31

Post by Maxburn »

disadvantage wrote: post #2

> There’s an open source Android browser (now seemingly abandoned) that implements ad-blocking functionality > The problem is that this browser has a very serious flaw. It tries to download filters updates on every startup, and on Android it may happen lots of times per day. It can even happen when the browser is running in the background EasyList should be offered as a version-controlled copy you grab once, that the…

PiHole and PFBlockerng are two big ones that use these resources too and setting those up it struck me as it did you that simply polling these resources on a set schedule was a waste.

Podcasting 2.0 has been talking about podping as a solution because podcasting basically has the same problem with periodic polling of the RSS feed. Basically you subscribe and then receive notice there's been an update, THEN you go get it.

https://www.podcasthelpdesk.com/podping-and-other-stuff-with...

Re: EasyList is in trouble and so are many ad blockers

#33

Post by tyingq »

tomschwiha wrote: post #15

I'm confused about the ToS comment by Cloudflare. The txt is on a website so it is a web content? So robots.txt is not supported by Cloudflare to cache/proxy it? That would be a weird regulation. And I bet everyone violates the Cloudflare ToS then.

It's from this tos page: https://www.cloudflare.com/terms/

2.8 Limitation on Serving Non-HTML Content

...Use of the Services for serving video or a disproportionate percentage of pictures, audio files, or other non-HTML content is prohibited, unless purchased separately...

A huge text/plain artifact, requested often, would seem to fall into that category of "disproportionate percentage" compared to text/html served.

Re: EasyList is in trouble and so are many ad blockers

#34

Post by ignoramous »

MuffinFlavored wrote: post #12

> Even so, we continue to serve about 100TB of “Access Denied” pages monthly! What's the carbon footprint of this?

The thing with Access Denied is that these deprived clients retry with some vengeance. So, you're instead draining more resources than you'd like. I run a content-blocking DoH resolver, and this happened to us when we blocked IPs in a particular range and the result was... well... a lot of bandwidth for nothing.

Re: EasyList is in trouble and so are many ad blockers

#35

Post by comboy »

muststopmyths wrote: post #13
disadvantage wrote: post #2

> There’s an open source Android browser (now seemingly abandoned) that implements ad-blocking functionality > The problem is that this browser has a very serious flaw. It tries to download filters updates on every startup, and on Android it may happen lots of times per day. It can even happen when the browser is running in the background EasyList should be offered as a version-controlled copy you grab once, that the…

Call me lazy but I’d just support an If-modified-since header in such a simple case and call it good

Bad app will just brutally fetch it every time with not even a cache on its side.

As a quick fix, there are many options for limiting per IP per timespan, e.g. fail2ban, you could configure it to punish bad apps without crippling functionality for others. Well, maybe crippling a little bit in some very special use cases, still better than it simply not working.

Re: EasyList is in trouble and so are many ad blockers

#36

Post by o_m »

robin_reala wrote: post #23
bombcar wrote: post #4

If I recall correctly there was some image on wikipedia that was getting billions of downloads a day or something, all from India, because some smart phone had made it a default "hello" image and hot linked it. Unfortunately, I can't find a reference to it anymore.

Not that you’d do it, but the temptation there is always to repoint your real application to a different URL and change the original image to something subtly NSFW.

Or something less malicious, like "Donate to Wikipedia", or some other organization.

Re: EasyList is in trouble and so are many ad blockers

#37

Post by tomudding »

tomschwiha wrote: post #15

I'm confused about the ToS comment by Cloudflare. The txt is on a website so it is a web content? So robots.txt is not supported by Cloudflare to cache/proxy it? That would be a weird regulation. And I bet everyone violates the Cloudflare ToS then.

Cloudflare caches robots.txt by default when proxied (the only .txt-file that they automatically cache), for all other content the following from their ToS probably applies:

> Use of the Services for serving video or a disproportionate percentage of pictures, audio files, or other non-HTML content is prohibited, unless purchased separately as part of a Paid Service or expressly allowed under our Supplemental Terms for a specific Service.

We will never know the reasoning of the support agent who replied to the EasyList maintainers, but I can imagine that it is indeed disproportionate for EasyList.

I really hope that Cloudflare actually sees that they are making a wrong decision here and actually help the EasyList maintainers.

Re: EasyList is in trouble and so are many ad blockers

#38

Post by ameshkov »

metadat wrote: post #11

100TB of "Access Denied" replies per month, how many requests served is this? This is hilarious in an unbelievably terrible and tragic way. The scale is mind boggling. I wonder which browser it is.

Author here. Actually, it's getting better, I've just looked up the stats and for the last 30 days we only served 70TB of access denied pages, this is about 33-34B requests.

Re: EasyList is in trouble and so are many ad blockers

#39

Post by Raed667 »

robin_reala wrote: post #23
bombcar wrote: post #4

If I recall correctly there was some image on wikipedia that was getting billions of downloads a day or something, all from India, because some smart phone had made it a default "hello" image and hot linked it. Unfortunately, I can't find a reference to it anymore.

Not that you’d do it, but the temptation there is always to repoint your real application to a different URL and change the original image to something subtly NSFW.

I was debugging a similar issue where a small marketplace run by a friend was being scrapped and the listings were being used to make a competing marketplace look more active than it actually was.

The thing is, they didn't host the scrapped images themselves, they just hot-linked everything.

So through a little nginx config, we turned their entire homepage to an ad for my friend's platform :)

Re: EasyList is in trouble and so are many ad blockers

#40

Post by ameshkov »

tredre3 wrote: post #28

I'm sympathetic to their trouble but we're talking about serving a 330KB text file (150KB compressed), surely this isn't an insurmountable technical hurdle to overcome? A 1000mbps dedicated server could serve it 70 MILLIONS times per day. Considering that most wouldn't be served (E-tags and whatnot), it can probably sustain a billion requests a day. What am I missing?

You're missing three orders of magnitude.
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