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EasyList is in trouble and so are many ad blockers

adguard.com

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

#101

Post by bluehatbrit »

JimWestergren wrote: post #79

A great opportunity right now for CloudFlare to win some goodwill and PR by helping out EasyList for free right now. But what about simply enable a firewall and show captcha or similar if the origin IP is from India and requesting that URL until the situation is under control? I did that with the free plan recently in CloudFlare in a similar situation and it worked perfectly (of course on a much smaller scale).

Most requests will be in the background or in Cron jobs. Captcha wouldn't be possible in those situations as it would never be seen by anyone.

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

#102

Post by cogman10 »

pseudosavant wrote: post #56

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 li…

The issue with this approach is it's too late. It might work if you designed it from the start, but adding it now would only destroy your poor balancer with all the connections they have to maintain (waiting for the 5 minutes to expire).

It was mentioned in this article that they are now serving up accessed denied, but the problem is one of just too many requests.

At this point, it's likely easier to just kill the domain all together and get a new one.

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

#103

Post by bombcar »

neilv wrote: post #97
robin_reala wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In case anyone is inspired to do related things, I made a mistake once (troubling and embarrassing), which I'll mention in case it helps someone else avoid my mistake... In earlier days of the Web, someone appeared to have hotlinked a photo from a page of mine, as their avatar/signature in some Web forum for another country, and it was eating up way too much bandwidth for my little site. I handled this in an annoyed…

Yeah, you could get someone gulag'd pretty easily if you wanted to and they were in the right location.

Subtle things like flipping the image upside down or reversing the colors or other "not quite harmful but quite annoying" responses are probably better, or just serve a 1x1 pixel image of nothing.

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

#104

Post by pwinnski »

pseudosavant wrote: post #75
tomudding wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GitHub has a soft limit of like 100 GB/month on transfers for Pages. According to the Adguard blog post traffic was already several TBs a day before the issue arose.

Why not only provide the list as a repo? You can't hotlink a repo. And someone abusing raw links is GitHub's bandwidth problem. 'Legitimate' users of the list would clone/pull the repo to their own mirror?

Do you mean like this? https://github.com/easylist/easylist

EasyList updates frequently, many times each day, as the commits to that repo demonstrate.

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

#105

Post by fangril67 »

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.

No post body was provided.

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

#106

Post by rvnx »

JimWestergren wrote: post #79

A great opportunity right now for CloudFlare to win some goodwill and PR by helping out EasyList for free right now. But what about simply enable a firewall and show captcha or similar if the origin IP is from India and requesting that URL until the situation is under control? I did that with the free plan recently in CloudFlare in a similar situation and it worked perfectly (of course on a much smaller scale).

These apps behind cannot render the captcha, as the fetch is happening in the background.

However what you can do is match the user-agents, and return a global/catch-all adblocking rule that blocks all the content of all the pages (by blocking the body element).

The app developers are going to notice the issue very fast (because users are reporting the problem), and mirroring the lists or adding a cache is immediately going to be their priority.

Bonus: I think some browsers and extensions can execute JavaScript in adblocking rules; https://help.eyeo.com/adblockplus/snippet-filters-tutorial

(which is essentially re-using a gigantic XSS in order to notify the user)

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

#107

Post by [deleted] »

eis wrote: post #70

Regarding the 100TB of Access Denied pages: just drop the connection instead. To make the system more scalable: instead of directly serving the file, serve a bunch of URLs to mirrors plus a checksum. The client must pick one of them. You can randomize the URLs and maybe add some geo logic to it. Let people provide mirrors. An additional indiraction step like this can prove incredibly powerful for systems that need to…

[deleted]

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

#108

Post by ameshkov »

matthewaveryusa wrote: post #95
ameshkov wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's 2 trillion requests a month, or 780,000 requests/second. That would be just a little shy of 1% of all of akamai's rps traffic. mind-boggling

Oh no, that were numbers for a month, not a day

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

#109

Post by tssva »

Maxburn wrote: post #71
RobotToaster wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is pihole only updates weekly.

Didn't know that, in fact clicking around in the UI I don't see a way to change that so good on them for being friendly in this area. PFBlocker seems to default to once a day.

To change when pihole updates you edit the cron entry at /etc/cron.d/pihole.

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

#110

Post by kccqzy »

I can't imagine slowing down could be a good idea. At their scale, the sheer number of connection count probably matters more and may contribute to a higher proportion of cost. Bandwidth is expensive yes, but keeping a connection alive means consuming extra memory for the socket in the kernel, in the app, and in many other places.
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