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

301–310 of 439 posts

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

#301

Post by yellowapple »

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…

> You're missing the point.

You're missing the point. If Cloudflare's issue is with bandwidth, then they should say so and leave it at that, not conjure up this pathetic excuse about .txt files somehow not being "web content". Does wrapping that data in
magically fix the bandwidth issues?

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

#302

Post by yellowapple »

manigandham wrote: post #259
mindslight wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

But it's not JSON or HTML. And it's not meant for browsers. It's clearly a dataset as a text file and not meant as "web(page) content". What's nonsense about that when it's completely accurate?

> And it's not meant for browsers.

It literally is - specifically, for extensions thereof.

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

#303

Post by Meph504 »

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…

No one is forcing anyone to use this tool, they have every right to send an alert indicating the produce a user is using has been abusing their service.

Very much in the same way that image host use to change an image for those hotlinking directly to images in the early days of the net.

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

#304

Post by yellowapple »

manigandham wrote: post #286
thayne wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is it any different from a json file used by a web app (or mobile app, or desktop app)? And there is no reason a web app couldn't read data from a txt file instead of a json file.

It's not for displaying a webpage but to power a separate application. Just because you can serve any kind of file over HTTP doesn't mean it's for serving a website. There's a reason Cloudflare doesn't allow large video files either - even though that probably counts even more as "web content". This is a very straightforward interpretation of the terms and it's strange to see such pushback based on a pedantic technic…

> There's a reason Cloudflare doesn't allow large video files either - even though that probably counts even more as "web content".

And that's just as nonsensical. Bytes are bytes; the rationale should be based on bandwidth, not on arbitrary micromanagement of the format of the data consuming that bandwidth. If I encode that video in a giant self-contained blob of JavaScript that feeds the pixels into a canvas or something similarly ridiculous, does that magically fix the bandwidth issues?

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

#305

Post by laundermaf »

codalan wrote: post #138
ziml77 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where did you get that they were irreversibly banned? Or banned at all for that matter?

They didn't get banned. They got an email from CF support saying that they cannot cache TXT files and that they'd need to disable the proxy. This does not mean banned.

EasyList is a txt file. If they can’t host it on CF, it means they can’t use CF for EasyList.

They didn’t ban the whole organization, but effectively told them to stop. I don’t see a difference.

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

#306

Post by radicality »

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.

The discussion on wikimedia phabricator: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T273741

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

#307

Post by warbeforepeace »

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.

Make it a web request so they can get a user agent. block the impacting user agents.

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

#308

Post by srvmshr »

ignoramous wrote: post #216
therealmarv wrote: post #151

Bittorrent, switch in long-term to that. Not saying every end-user should be a seeder but there is big bittorrent community out there and everyone could help a little bit. Other options: - A kind of mirror network (it only needs to keep sure that integrity can be checked, maybe with a public key) - And while doing that why not also support compression (why not? only devs need to read it and they can run easily a deco…

> Bittorrent, switch in long-term to that. S3 buckets in IAD with I'd imagine, some tech IPFS/Filecoin/Sia might come in handy, too, but unsure of how healthy most of these web3 projects are right now. There's also fosstorrents.com that help seed projects.

Is IPFS strictly Web3?

Sure it gained traction around Blockchain, crypto DeFI - but the storage technology is ELI5 a massive distributed storage.

I could hazard a guess that in terms of philosophy its closer to BitTorrent than Blockchain

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

#309

Post by manigandham »

yellowapple wrote: post #304
manigandham wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not for displaying a webpage but to power a separate application. Just because you can serve any kind of file over HTTP doesn't mean it's for serving a website. There's a reason Cloudflare doesn't allow large video files either - even though that probably counts even more as "web content". This is a very straightforward interpretation of the terms and it's strange to see such pushback based on a pedantic technic…

> There's a reason Cloudflare doesn't allow large video files either - even though that probably counts even more as "web content". And that's just as nonsensical. Bytes are bytes; the rationale should be based on bandwidth, not on arbitrary micromanagement of the format of the data consuming that bandwidth. If I encode that video in a giant self-contained blob of JavaScript that feeds the pixels into a canvas or som…

No. It is about excessive resources/bandwidth usage. The customer service response reply isn't great but the context itself is clear because this file is clearly not for displaying any part of the web presence of the easylist site.

Again this is that "pedantic technicality" - why such a fuss when the actual issue is straightforward, and also clearly understood and reiterated by the easylist team themselves in the post?

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

#310

Post by wraptile »

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

I might be ignorant of the scale of things but surely a 404 page can't weigh more than half a kilobyte right?

I think EasyList maintainers have every right to break stuff in this case. Also could easily turn the list into a HTML file as it's just as parsable as txt.

Post reply on HN