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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

#191

Post by codalan »

Joel_Mckay wrote: post #190
codalan wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. =)

Ahhh, good point!

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

#192

Post by slt2021 »

just ban all Indian IPs from the website on firewall.

proper solution would be to use DNS to forward all Indian traffic to one of the local VPCs.

The idea is to rate-limit users - let them pull blacklist.txt only once a day, so you serve the file and add requestor's IP to denylist on the firewall. So that any subsequent requests are blocked by firewall

+Cloudflare has Geofencing feature

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

#194

Post by the8472 »

louison11 wrote: post #159

1. Restricting access until developers fix it. 2. Consider encouraging the use of webtorrent within the extension? = each user hosts and serves the list.

Webtorrent isn't distributed, so you'd just shift the problem to the tracker/signalling server.

And in this particular case even BitTorrent proper may not have helped because steady-state BT is distributed but if a client doesn't persist its state after a bootstrap - and lack of persistence is the issue here - it'd hit the bootstrap server every time. Granted, it'd only be about one UDP packet per client, much less traffic than what is easylist is seeing, but foolish code deployed at scale can still overload services provided on a budget.

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

#195

Post by jacooper »

anigbrowl wrote: post #168
JimWestergren wrote: post #79

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).

I can't understand their argument that a text file 'isn't a web content'; seems like a bullshit excuse.

Maybe if they created a web page for easylist and then hosted that + the lists directly on CF pages, maybe that would considered as web content?

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

#196

Post by bombcar »

Spunkie wrote: post #172
bombcar wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (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.

It's lawyer speak, but the meaning is clear "this Cloudflare service is for webpages in a browser, not automated data downloads and distribution".

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

#197

Post by spatley »

tyingq wrote: post #33
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.

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.

My best guess is that CloudFlare wrote this to prevent folks from serving big binary files like photo, music, or video and this txt file case was an unintended condition that happens to work to CloudFlare's advantage.

text/plain though is decidedly not text/html and I would expect CloudFlare to potentially do some on-the- fly optimizations that are aware of the structure of an html file that save terabytes a day at their scale.

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

#198

Post by xeromal »

pseudosavant wrote: post #137
cogman10 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue with this approach is it's too late. It might work if you designed it from the start, but adding it now would only destroy your poor balancer with all the connections they have to maintain (waiting for the 5 minutes to expire). It was mentioned in this article that they are now serving up accessed denied, but the problem is one of just too many requests. At this point, it's likely easier to just kill the do…

This is certainly not a cure to the problem Easylist has right now. This is prevention. About how to design publicly consumable resources to naturally discourage hotlinking, before it is a problem.

That's what the person you're replying to said.

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

#199

Post by kevingadd »

robin_reala wrote: post #23
bombcar wrote: post #4

If I recall correctly there was some image on wikipedia that was getting billions of downloads a day or something, all from India, because some smart phone had made it a default "hello" image and hot linked it. Unfortunately, I can't find a reference to it anymore.

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.

A startup I used to work for had a horror story from before I started, where a small .png file had been accidentally hotlinked from a third party server. The png showed up on a significant % of users' custom homepages (think myspace, etc). At some point the person operating the server decided that instead of emailing someone or blocking the requests, they'd serve goatse up to a bunch of teenagers and housemoms. Mildly hilarious depending on your perspective, I guess?

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

#200

Post by [deleted] »

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?

[deleted]
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