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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

#41
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?

> The overall traffic quickly snowballed from a couple of terabytes per day to 10-20 times that amount.

A 1000Mbps server could only serve 10.8TB, and that's not even accounting for overhead/daily usage patterns/etc

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

#42
post #33

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.

Sounds like it is meant to deal with multimedia mostly?

But anyway, just rename .txt to .html and you're done.

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

#46

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.

Yeah... That just doesn't seem right. All web content is text...

text/html is not text/plain but that doesn't matter: it's not a technical limitation that caused cloudflare to draw this line.

it's cloudflare deciding to protect "web content" and not videos or .iso images or other things that normally are not commonly served while you browse a contemporary website and read HTML.

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

#47
post #31

> 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…

The difference is pihole only updates weekly.

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

#48

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.

Sounds like they’re just using the wrong service. R2 is designed for object storage, and has 0 egress fees. That’d be the way to go. Not sure why the support engineer didn’t mention it. The standard cloudflare web caching probably doesn’t work well for this use case for whatever reason. The price is only 0.015/GB/mo, so the ~MB(?) of list would be served in perpetuity for less than a dollar.
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