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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

#171

Post by trinovantes »

stavros wrote: post #165
trinovantes wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Egress is free but not public i.e. you can't just give anyone an url. You have to use your own server to fetch content from R2 and then serve it to your visitors. Each fetch costs money but first 10 mil reads are free and your own server probably has egress fees.

No, egress is indeed public. Here's an example link, straight to R2: https://img.phantasmagoria.me/img/96XJrjejoHNdrQv7.jpg Even if you have a private bucket, you can give people a signed link with read access, for up to two weeks, IIRC.

Ah, I see they added public buckets last month

But it'll still cost them money by number of reads

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

#172

Post by Spunkie »

bombcar wrote: post #150
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 simi…

Why do people keep talking like you can't just navigate to a txt file in your browser and have it serve as any old web content? Which is something I have actually done many years ago to search for a domain in these types of lists.

Cloudflare is balancing on a razer for this TOS technicality.

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

#173

Post by stavros »

trinovantes wrote: post #171
stavros wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, egress is indeed public. Here's an example link, straight to R2: https://img.phantasmagoria.me/img/96XJrjejoHNdrQv7.jpg Even if you have a private bucket, you can give people a signed link with read access, for up to two weeks, IIRC.

Ah, I see they added public buckets last month But it'll still cost them money by number of reads

Hm, yeah, true, you do need to pay for reads, you're right.

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

#174

Post by [deleted] »

Macha wrote: post #157
LinAGKar wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A filter list is definitely not HTML

The minimal spec valid HTML5 document is currently: a Practically, browsers will accept omitting both of these, and the spec even allows for omitting the title "if it is provided by a higher level protocol" So it's not that crazy an argument that a plain text file is a html document

[deleted]

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

#175

Post by braingenious »

trinovantes wrote: post #160
neilv wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Some Japanese porn makers avoid getting pirated in China by placing politically sensitive content in the backgrounds

That sounds hilarious! Do you have a link to any articles about this practice?

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

#176

Post by celsoazevedo »

Eisenstein wrote: post #7

I am using a pi-hole which uses easylist, but it grabs it from https://v.firebog.net/hosts/Easylist.txt which seems to be working fine.

That's a different list. It only contains the hosts/domains on easylist, because that's all pi-hole (and all host based blockers) can block. It's also hosted by someone else (and they too use Cloudflare, see firebog.net).

The normal easylist is way bigger and has lots of rules for ad blockers like uBlock Origin.

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

#179

Post by celsoazevedo »

tredre3 wrote: post #28

I'm sympathetic to their trouble but we're talking about serving a 330KB text file (150KB compressed), surely this isn't an insurmountable technical hurdle to overcome? A 1000mbps dedicated server could serve it 70 MILLIONS times per day. Considering that most wouldn't be served (E-tags and whatnot), it can probably sustain a billion requests a day. What am I missing?

The last copy of the .txt file saved by the WayBackMachine is 1.4MB:

https://web.archive.org/web/20220901000327if_/https://easyli...

If you're getting a 330KB file, maybe the server issues are causing the download to fail?

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

#180

Post by kaushikc »

NaturalPhallacy wrote: post #167
shitlord wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a way, the advertisers did find a way around ad blockers. Google built an entire browser and used Manifest V3 as an excuse to cripple ad blockers. Companies are also paying influencers, twitch streamers, and YouTubers to promote their products in a way that conventional ad blockers can't prevent.

In case anyone reading hasn't heard of it: SponsorBlock for YouTube - Skip Sponsorships - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/sponsorblock-for-y...

Sponsorblock has saved me hundreds of hours from watching youtube ads and other time wasting bullshit. The devs deserve to be paid for making this awesome application.
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