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EasyList is in trouble and so are many ad blockers

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121–130 of 439 posts

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

#122

> 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…

You can use firefox on android and install ad block on it as a plugin

How does that help when you can't download easylist anymore since it's under DDoS?

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

#124
post #87
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.

This doesn't sound right to me. Cloudflare also protects web APIs. This text file is an extremely simple web API, but it is still a web API.

If the web apis were a disproportionate amount of what was served for some customers specific free CF plan, as compared to the cached HTML, then that doesn't match their TOS.

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

#125

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.

I’m not sure a captcha would help though. These aren’t intentional attack requests, they’re “legitimate” requests by a clueless developer’s app that happened to get popular.

They just need to serve either an empty response or an intentionally broken rule to break the misbehaving browser and force its developers to fix it.

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

#126
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the free plan allows this. Seems an easy solution.

I'll have a huge impact on anything making legitimate use of the list. Adblockers on sensible browsers will stop working etc. It may be easy, and it may even be the only option, but it's a bad one that will need some thought from the maintainers I expect.

[deleted]

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

#127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Exactly, but only via a repo.

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

#128

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 breakin…

> like 0.005c/gb

You're off by a factor of 100.

https://www.belugacdn.com/cdn-pricing/

$5000/PB = $5/TB = 500c/TB = 0.5c/GB

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

#129
post #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.

They're probably still getting many millions of requests a month so probably more than a dollar but even 20 million requests a month would only cost $3.60 (10 million free at first then 10 million @ $0.36/million)

I assume you probably know this but just wanting to share there are some pricing scales with R2 they're just pretty generous for a lot of things.

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

#130

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 fo…

The TOS isn't that you can't serve plain text, it's that it shouldn't be disproportionate in volume to the cached html served.
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