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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

#321

Post by alwayslikethis »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #269
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.

> 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.

We already have SponsorBlock, which is just a crowdsourced manually created database of segments to skip.

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

#322

Post by archi42 »

yellowapple wrote: post #318
manigandham wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pos…

> It is about excessive resources/bandwidth usage. Then the policy would focus on that rather than micromanage the format of the data using those resources/bandwidth. Again: bytes are bytes. > why such a fuss Because a policy as nonsensical as "no non-HTML files allowed" artificially limits the usefulness of CloudFlare for precisely zero legitimate reason. I ask again: does wrapping a video in a blob of JavaScript fi…

The difference is in the amount of cache you need. In one case you save 10GB per 1MB of cache, in the other just 1GB per 1MB and the big file is going to evict many small files (even if the user only listens to the first 10s). It's no huge difference for a single user/site, but across all users this quickly means needing a multiple of the current cache; which doesn't come for free.

Also, CF have a product to sell. The free tier is just the demo version: I think at the end of the day the policy is about not everyone in HN using CF for their low-cost DIY video and/or music streaming or download platform.

And I can totally see them reverse the decision and sponsor that project (it's probably something a support engineer has no power to decide).

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

#323

Post by vasco »

From the perspective of someone who got their start from building small web tools and slapping ads on them and putting them online, which paid for most of my expenses to get myself through university, it's kind of funny that the people that want to use the internet "for free" at the expense of builders of websites, now also want to be able to block ads to continue to extract value out of everyone else also for free by asking Cloudflare for a free plan.

Pay for your own darn servers, everyone else has to and can't even use ads to support the costs due to you.

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

#326

Post by Fnoord »

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.

Interestingly, one could host this on a WWW frontend for Git. Then you'd only need to download (say a daily) diff. Why download the entire list when you can match checksum?

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

#327

Post by MrDresden »

vasco wrote: post #323

From the perspective of someone who got their start from building small web tools and slapping ads on them and putting them online, which paid for most of my expenses to get myself through university, it's kind of funny that the people that want to use the internet "for free" at the expense of builders of websites, now also want to be able to block ads to continue to extract value out of everyone else also for free b…

There is a big difference between showing someone ads (think radio and tv ads) vs spying in on their browsing habbits (almost all internet ads).

I am fine with one but not the other. Thus I block them.

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

#328

Post by aembleton »

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.

Then the browser could just pretend it is Chrome (if it isn't already) and that would easily work around your solution.

I think something like this would be best served by moving to IPFS or Bittorrent. A magnet link could be provided and then browsers and plugins could use that to download the file. That way, you can distribute the load.

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

#329

Post by aembleton »

bombcar wrote: post #295

Just serve an easy list to these browsers that blocks every image and all css. Problem solved.

How do you determine that it is these browsers requesting it and not uBO? It would be easy for the browsers to set their useragent to something like Chrome.

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

#330

Post by hrbf »

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…

Generally, I like the idea with the user agents filtering and “block everything” rule. No need for geoblocking. Insert a comment about why this is happening and ask for it to be changed.

However, as we’re living in the real world and the authors of the respective browsers strike me as lazy or uninterested, I also bet all that would change is the user agent.

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