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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

#51

Post by timbit42 »

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.

Been there. Done that. Someone had used our image in their phpBB signature. The hits slowed quite quickly.

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

#52

Post by ameshkov »

ignoramous wrote: post #34
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.

In this particular case this is not the case and they don't retry. They just really want to download updates REALLY often.

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

#53

Post by Maxburn »

bornfreddy wrote: post #42
tyingq wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Simple but will it will break all sorts of automation down the line? All the other adlists are txt and I don't know how they would handle other file types, even if the content is unchanged.

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

#55

Post by laundermaf »

rc_mob wrote: post #19

Phew. Is just a bandwidth issue. This goofy title made me think advertisers found a way around ad blockers.

This issue caused CF to irreversibly ban them though, so it's not "just a bandwidth issue" anymore.

> Based on the URL that are being requested at Cloudflare, it violates our ToS as well. All the requests are txt file extension which isn't a web content

> you cannot use Cloudflare to cache or proxy the request to these text files

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

#56

Post by pseudosavant »

It would seem like you could prevent hotlinking by adding 1-5 minutes of latency to every request to a list.

Almost no dev would hotlink an asset that took that much longer to display, at least in critical/common paths. It would force consumers (devs/businesses) of the lists to provide a caching/mirroring solution of some kind for their users.

But on the bankend, the request would be designed just for updating the list cache. Handling 1-5 extra minutes per request, on a request that runs less than a few dozen times a day, to update the mirror/cache is trivial.

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

#57

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

Maxburn wrote: post #53
bornfreddy wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like it is meant to deal with multimedia mostly? But anyway, just rename .txt to .html and you're done.

Simple but will it will break all sorts of automation down the line? All the other adlists are txt and I don't know how they would handle other file types, even if the content is unchanged.

Determining file type from the file name suffix is a fool's game and always was.

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

#58

Post by ameshkov »

avani wrote: post #30
Tepix wrote: post #8

This sucks. I hope they can reach the app authors and get it fixed the source. Meanwhile perhaps some other CDN provider wants to create some goodwill if Cloudflare isn't willing?

I am not speaking on behalf of the company, but if someone involved with EasyList can contact me (avani@cloudflare.com), I'll see if there is a way to help out.

Thank you! I've passed that to EasyList maintainers.

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

#60

Post by [deleted] »

laundermaf wrote: post #55
rc_mob wrote: post #19

Phew. Is just a bandwidth issue. This goofy title made me think advertisers found a way around ad blockers.

This issue caused CF to irreversibly ban them though, so it's not "just a bandwidth issue" anymore. > Based on the URL that are being requested at Cloudflare, it violates our ToS as well. All the requests are txt file extension which isn't a web content > you cannot use Cloudflare to cache or proxy the request to these text files

[deleted]
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