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

231–240 of 439 posts

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

#231

Post by paxys »

yellowapple wrote: post #223

Cloudflare's rationale for a ToS violation is absolutely bonkers. Who cares what the file extension is? By virtue of being accessible on the web via a URL it is by definition web content.

Cloudflare's response makes less sense the more you think about it. We are talking about URLs, where the entire concept of file extensions doesn't apply. Would they be okay if the developer simply changed https://eazylist.to/eazylist.txt to https://eazylist.to/eazylist and served the exact same resource? Or does Cloudflare actually want to parse and validate the encoding or format of the served bytes?

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

#232

Post by paxys »

ff7c11 wrote: post #218

Easylist should serve the Indian browser (based on user-agent) with a giant file (expensive), a corrupt file, or some response which causes the app the crash. If the browser crashes on every startup due to a malicious response from the Easylist server, users will likely delete it.

Serving a giant file is going to affect their servers more than the end device. If they could identify the user agent it would be a lot easier to just block it entirely.

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

#233

Post by yellowapple »

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.

> Companies are also paying influencers, twitch streamers, and YouTubers to promote their products in a way that conventional ad blockers can't prevent.

Which I'm okay with in the same sense that I'm okay with newspaper/magazine ads or billboards or TV/radio commercials: they're annoying, but easy to ignore compared to online ads chewing up CPU time and battery life while actively violating one's privacy.

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

#234

Post by r3trohack3r »

yellowapple wrote: post #224
r3trohack3r wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This doesn’t sound like bullshit to me. Serving a static text file that is primarily used by applications is not in line with their terms of service. Cloudflare provides a significant service to the free and open web by subsidizing the hosting costs of static content for websites. They give that away for free under what appears to be reasonable terms.

I can think of few things more static than a .txt file.

You're missing the point. The service cloudflare donates isn't free. That is the whole point of EasyList’s post. There are plenty of comments on this submission doing back of napkin math to find a reasonable monthly cost for hosting that text file. If you want to donate that bandwidth - go for it.

But the comments here about Cloudflare’s ToS read a lot like folks feeling entitled to getting bandwidth for for free. Cloudflare is providing a very specific service for free, and it does a lot of good.

It would be great if Cloudflare decided to donate. But I’d re-evaluate your stance if you’re feeling entitled to their resources.

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

#236

Post by yellowapple »

r1ch wrote: post #227
yellowapple wrote: post #223

Cloudflare's rationale for a ToS violation is absolutely bonkers. Who cares what the file extension is? By virtue of being accessible on the web via a URL it is by definition web content.

Cloudflare's TOS only permit caching for HTML content and related assets. It's probably a useful catch-all they can pull out any time someone uses too much bandwidth.

> It's probably a useful catch-all they can pull out any time someone uses too much bandwidth.

That's exactly what it is, and Cloudflare should be honest about that instead of coming up with an excuse as pathetic as ".txt files ain't web content".

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

#237

Post by zamalek »

paxys wrote: post #232
ff7c11 wrote: post #218

Easylist should serve the Indian browser (based on user-agent) with a giant file (expensive), a corrupt file, or some response which causes the app the crash. If the browser crashes on every startup due to a malicious response from the Easylist server, users will likely delete it.

Serving a giant file is going to affect their servers more than the end device. If they could identify the user agent it would be a lot easier to just block it entirely.

Could be done with a gzip bomb.

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

#238

Post by [deleted] »

rvnx wrote: post #106
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).

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

#239

Post by mindslight »

r3trohack3r wrote: post #234
yellowapple wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can think of few things more static than a .txt file.

You're missing the point. The service cloudflare donates isn't free. That is the whole point of EasyList’s post. There are plenty of comments on this submission doing back of napkin math to find a reasonable monthly cost for hosting that text file. If you want to donate that bandwidth - go for it. But the comments here about Cloudflare’s ToS read a lot like folks feeling entitled to getting bandwidth for for free. Cl…

Actually you're missing the point. It doesn't seem like many people are condemning Cloudflare for not serving a bandwidth-heavy file for free (FTA: "CloudFlare does not allow non-enterprise users use that much traffic").

Rather what's being condemned is this nonsense customer service characterization of a text file as somehow not "web content". Easylist.txt is a data file that could just as easily be in JSON (and be larger). Furthermore, as it stands easylist.txt actually looks like it's a valid text/html file, as browsers generally don't insist on / tags. So from both directions it seems like the customer service drone has thrown out this nonsense just to short circuit having to do their job.

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

#240

Post by RunSet »

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.

> The txt is on a website so it is a web content?

Even more wtf- the file extension determines the file content?

Post reply on HN