EasyList is in trouble and so are many ad blockers

Post by lifthrasiir » Wed, Oct 19, 2022, 11:53 PM UTC

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.

Post by Psychlist » Thu, Oct 20, 2022, 12:01 AM UTC

neilv wrote: post #97

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.

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…

Post by TingPing » Thu, Oct 20, 2022, 12:15 AM UTC

chlorion wrote: post #185

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.

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.

Post by accountofme » Thu, Oct 20, 2022, 12:24 AM UTC

chrismeller wrote: post #203

lolinder wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Except it wouldn’t make them resilient since, as I pointed out, neither of the things they did would be of any help at all to Easylist in this situation. It’s great that they’re happy with their choices, but the choices would, in this same situation, likely saddle them with a crippled infrastructure and/or some insane bandwidth bills for suddenly pushing 100 extra TB/m.

Post by manigandham » Thu, Oct 20, 2022, 12:33 AM UTC

mindslight wrote: post #239

r3trohack3r wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…