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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

#261
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Determining file type from the file name suffix is a fool's game and always was.

Is it? Seems superior to arbitrary magic numbers or headers, and God forbid full naive parsing, in most ways.

Whats wrong with storing and delivering the intended content type as metadata, whether thats headers or filesystem metadata like in Mac OS X?

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

#262

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.

[deleted]

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

#263

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.

But it is web content, really. A txt file renders fine in every browser. Many websites also push text through HTML as part of AJAXy stuff. If they actually enforced this for all sites, their service would no longer be usable.

[deleted]

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

#264

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.

[deleted]

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

#265

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).

Pwned Passwords project by Troy Hunt is served by CloudFlare cache. I don't know scale of bandwidth usage by Pwned Passwords. But CloudFlare can definitely make the similar arrangement here too.

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

#266
post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Or a brotli bomb, for far greater expansion!

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

#267
post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They host the zipped files of content for haveIbeenPwned for Troy Hunt...

That's a special project they decided to take on, not subject to the standard ToS.

They should put EasyLisy in that special project category. It's just too important to the internet.

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

#268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> like 0.005c/gb You're off by a factor of 100. https://www.belugacdn.com/cdn-pricing/ $5000/PB = $5/TB = 500c/TB = 0.5c/GB

beluga > You pay 1¢ (or less!) for every Gigabyte of data accelerated over our cloud network. doesn't seem clear cut as they bundle it in a subscription packages, but at this volume you'd surely need their enterprise package (10Tb+), which you'd expect to get 0.01 or less bunny > First 500TB $0.005 /GB > From 1PB-2PB $0.002 /GB

> Even so, we continue to serve about 100TB of “Access Denied” pages monthly!

That is several thousand $ a year.

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

#269
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.

> in a way that conventional ad blockers can't prevent

Yet. One day someone will create an ad blocker with machine learning that "sees" the ads and deletes them in real time. Should work on all content types, even on augmented reality.

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

#270

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.

Just tack on a .html file extension and add a tag at top and bottom…problem solved
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