Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

EasyList is in trouble and so are many ad blockers

adguard.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 439 posts

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

#181

Post by Volundr »

jannyfer wrote: post #149
rvnx wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 updat…

If an application can't handle failed web requests that application is already broken. Web requests can and will fail at any time.

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

#182

Post by trinovantes »

braingenious wrote: post #175
trinovantes wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Found these old articles but I'm not sure if this is a widespread practice

https://news-ltn-com-tw.translate.goog/news/world/breakingne... (nsfw)

https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/japan-piracy-09252022...

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

#183

Post by chrismeller »

Raed667 wrote: post #66

I worked on an ad-blocker a few months ago. I made the decision to have the filter-list files hosted on our own domain and CDN (similar to what Adguard does with their filters.adtidy.org). This was done for 2 reasons: 1- Avoid scenarios like this where you ship code (extension in this case) that is hard to update. Then make that code depend on external resources outside of your control. 2- Leak our users' IP addresse…

Except neither of those would help in this case. They’re already using their own domain name, and it’s unclear how they would even build their own CDN since they’re using that scale of bandwidth - AdGuard said they’re still pushing 100tb of access denied pages a month for their similar case. That is a LOT of bandwidth just for access denied messages.

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

#184

Post by [deleted] »

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

[deleted]

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

#185

Post by chlorion »

shitlord wrote: post #156
rc_mob wrote: post #19

Phew. Is just a bandwidth issue. This goofy title made me think advertisers found a way around ad blockers.

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.

I am on Chromium and using the manifest V3 version of Ublock right now and I have noticed no difference between it and Firefox with regular Ublock.

The very interesting thing is that none of Google's ads have ever made it through this new version of Ublock for me.

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

#186

Post by pwinnski »

pseudosavant wrote: post #127
pwinnski wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm curious, if an arbitrary GitHub repo suddenly started attracting hundreds of terabytes of egress, violating GitHub's ToS, would GitHub manage traffic in coordination with the repo's owner, or would they disable the repo and suspend the account?

I suspect the latter. I don't know how to make a repo public but limit web traffic to it. Do you?

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

#187

Post by Someone »

o_m wrote: post #36
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.

Or something less malicious, like "Donate to Wikipedia", or some other organization.

> Or something less malicious, like "Donate to Wikipedia", or some other organization.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_Wikipedia:

“Wikipedia has been blocked in China since 23 April 2019”

⇒ putting ads for Wikipedia on sites likely isn’t safe everywhere.

I think it will be very hard to find “some other organization” that is universally ‘approved’ everywhere.

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

#188

Post by lolinder »

chrismeller wrote: post #183
Raed667 wrote: post #66

I worked on an ad-blocker a few months ago. I made the decision to have the filter-list files hosted on our own domain and CDN (similar to what Adguard does with their filters.adtidy.org). This was done for 2 reasons: 1- Avoid scenarios like this where you ship code (extension in this case) that is hard to update. Then make that code depend on external resources outside of your control. 2- Leak our users' IP addresse…

Except neither of those would help in this case. They’re already using their own domain name, and it’s unclear how they would even build their own CDN since they’re using that scale of bandwidth - AdGuard said they’re still pushing 100tb of access denied pages a month for their similar case. That is a LOT of bandwidth just for access denied messages.

Their point isn't that EasyList could have done anything differently, their point is that they are glad that they didn't decide to rely on others' infrastructure for their own ad blocker, because that makes them resilient against the fallout from this and similar.

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

#189

Post by the8472 »

Raed667 wrote: post #39
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.

I was debugging a similar issue where a small marketplace run by a friend was being scrapped and the listings were being used to make a competing marketplace look more active than it actually was. The thing is, they didn't host the scrapped images themselves, they just hot-linked everything. So through a little nginx config, we turned their entire homepage to an ad for my friend's platform :)

I assume you mean scraped, not scrapped.

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

#190

Post by Joel_Mckay »

codalan wrote: post #135
Joel_Mckay wrote: post #83

Rate-limit the GeoIP list for the affected areas to drop if more than 20% of active traffic. i.e. the service outages get co-located only with the problem users areas. Also, when doing auto-updates: always add a chaotic delay offset 1 to 180 minutes to distribute the traffic loads. Even in an office with 16 hosts or more this is recommended practice to prevent cheap routers hitting limits. Another interesting trend,…

That would only work if they had an API; AFAICT, they're just hosting a file. At this point, they might be better off coordinating with the other major adblocker providers and just outright move the file elsewhere. Breaking other people's garbage code is better than breaking yourself trying to fix it. Especially on a budget of $0.00. If the defective code for the browsers are in public repos, it might also be more ef…

It is very common to see API keys in urls for access to what are essentially flat files. Thus, fairly trivial to change from:

https://127.0.0.1/file.csv

to

https://127.0.0.1/file.csv?apikey=abc123

This could allow client specific quotas, and easy adoption with maintained projects in minutes. Thus, defective and out-of-maintenance projects would need manually updated or get a 404.

=)

Post reply on HN