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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

#111

Post by xwdv »

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…

My mind must be in a dark place because once you mentioned politics I thought of how just sitting at home I could easily come up with some kind of image that could literally imprison or kill some one off from thousands of miles away, without even getting up from the couch. I think I spent most of my internet youth lusting for such power.

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

#113

Post by d12bb »

stereo wrote: post #67
bionade24 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Limit this to the specific headers of these Webbrowsers though, please.

They already have that part figured out. From the article: > When we encountered a similar problem last year, we found a simple solution: block the undesired traffic from these apps. Even so, we continue to serve about 100TB of “Access Denied” pages monthly!

The difference is that serving Access Denied Leads to the users of these malicious browsers just getting more ads over time, as the filter lists can’t be updated anymore. Serving a special list containing popular sites would result in the users almost instantly not being able anymore to access these popular sites, resulting in requests to the developers to fix their shitty browser or switching altogether.

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

#114

Post by mmastrac »

Scaling serving of a static text file would make a fantastic job interview question, especially as you explore what happens as the text file gets bigger and the number of downloads gets higher. The "correct answer" isn't necessarily obvious in any of these cases.

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

#115

Post by stavros »

jakear wrote: post #48
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.

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.

Actually, you're right. How would this work? Is Cloudflare really willing to foot the bill of 20 TB of bandwidth per day for a small text file that costs $0 to store?

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

#116

Post by PaywallBuster »

Cloudflare claims that R2 have free egress/bandwidth

You could try that instead of the "CDN" service

--

Alternatively, try the "cheap" CDN services like Bunny or Beluga, which have packages for high volume like 0.005c/gb

Cloudflare is not really selling a CDN, but all the "smart" services on top of it.

That's why you don't have as much control (like blocking IP/Geos without Enterprise), or run into issues for breaking their ToS.

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

#117

Post by nfriedly »

I have my pi-hole configured to use the Domains list from https://oisd.nl/ which incorporates a bunch of other lists (including easylist), de-duplicates, and removes a few false positives. They also have an Adblock Plus Filter List that can be used with uBlock Origin.

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

#118

Post by rvnx »

stavros wrote: post #115
jakear wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Actually, you're right. How would this work? Is Cloudflare really willing to foot the bill of 20 TB of bandwidth per day for a small text file that costs $0 to store?

Yes why not ? For reputation and attracting developers it seems to be worth it. If it costs 75K USD/year, that's already paid back with one big enterprise customer only.

Though, adblocking is a big business, many actors there are getting large revenue.

For example, Eyeo's income was 50 million USD per year last time I checked (and I guess most of it is actually profit), so they can find a solution if they really want.

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

#119

Post by pebcakID10T »

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…

My first thought as well. Why even provide a response?

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

#120

Post by georgebarnett »

stereo wrote: post #67
bionade24 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Limit this to the specific headers of these Webbrowsers though, please.

They already have that part figured out. From the article: > When we encountered a similar problem last year, we found a simple solution: block the undesired traffic from these apps. Even so, we continue to serve about 100TB of “Access Denied” pages monthly!

Blocking the browsers isn’t a solution because they likely fall back to being open, so the user doesn’t notice.

Instead, you need to break the user experience so they complain to the developer of the app, thus impacting reputation.

It’s unfortunate that the browsers developers are unresponsive and this circumstance limits the available options to easy list.

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