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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

#142
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.

Cloudflare can decide whom they want to do business with. But a plain text file is in my opinion sort of HTML. At least it is not "non-html" content. A .pdf file would be non-HTML content. What else is important to note that the client is being abused and not the client abusing the service. That should be taken into consideration, when deciding if someone is breaking the ToS.

A filter list is definitely not HTML

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

#145
I used to host my blog on my own server years ago and some popular site "hotlinked" to an image I had posted. My traffic - which back then I paid for by the Gb - spiked like crazy. I decided to put in Apache referrer checks for images and started serving some porn when it didn't match my domain. That solved the problem pretty quickly.

Easylist should do something similar - requests from India should include a list with all the popular sites like Google, YouTube, aajtak.in, etc. When their browsers suddenly stop working the problem will be solved.

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

#146
post #106

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 immediatel…

[deleted]

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

#148

Can’t they run an open collective just to pay the bandwidth bill?

They shouldn't have to foot the bill for this. This is some bad developers releasing a bad fork of a bad browser.

At a minimum, they should have either reduced the requests to something like a monthly download (not great, but far better than requesting a file every startup), or ideally, hosted and updated the file themselves, on their infrastructure. At least that would force them to look at their own hosting bills, instead of crippling a prominent and important contributor to ad-blocking software.

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

#149
post #106

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 immediatel…

Blocking all page content to knowingly cause unintended behavior… I wonder if this can be considered criminal.

I read that poisoning your own lunch to catch a workplace fridge thief could be considered assault.

EDIT: here’s what I read. https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/966/can-one-be-liabl...

Imagine, say, you update the list to block all URLs, and it impacts some municipal government worker’s ability to update some emergency alert service and causes hundreds of people to be permanently injured.

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

#150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cloudflare can decide whom they want to do business with. But a plain text file is in my opinion sort of HTML. At least it is not "non-html" content. A .pdf file would be non-HTML content. What else is important to note that the client is being abused and not the client abusing the service. That should be taken into consideration, when deciding if someone is breaking the ToS.

I'd agree that's weird. Seems like if it were simply renamed to .html with no content changes, then it would be okay. > What else is important to note that the client is being abused and not the client abusing the service. That should be taken into consideration, when deciding if someone is breaking the ToS. My understanding has this as moot. The issue from Cloudflare's perspective is only that the content is non-HTM…

> (i) serving web pages as viewed through a web browser or other functionally equivalent applications, including rendering Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) or other functional equivalents, and (ii) serving web APIs subject to the restrictions set forth in this Section 2.8.

The key is "as viewed through a web browser" imo, this is not really an API and it's not a webpage; it's a datafile and would fall into R2 or similar things.

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