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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

#331

Post by Denvercoder9 »

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 won't work, as this list is commonly downloaded by heavily sandboxed browser extensions that can't access torrents.

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

#332

Post by LawTalkingGuy »

manigandham wrote: post #309
yellowapple wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 pos…

So the solution is to HTML the list and link it from the webpage?

> why such a fuss

Mockery isn't a fuss. And why? Because we can all picture having to deal with just this sort of idiot and their pet rule.

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

#334

Post by sinuhe69 »

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.

No, a file with a single line: “11) You should not download the list by every start” is enough

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

#335

Post by sinuhe69 »

Phelinofist wrote: post #320
runlevel1 wrote: post #166

1. Add a ToS to the EasyList website that prohibits this sort of abuse. (I don't see any currently.) 2. Send a cease and desist letter to the app creator. 3. If they don't respond, also send a C&D to Google demanding they cease distribution of the malware responsible for the DDoS. Anyone can send a cease and desist -- it's just cautionary letter. You aren't obligated to follow through with the threatened legal action…

Would someone in India care about a C&D letter sent from someone, say, in Europe or the US? I don't think so

It’s not just somebody. If it’s from the creator of the things your livelihood depends on, you better pay attention.

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

#336

Post by LawTalkingGuy »

r3trohack3r wrote: post #208
Spunkie wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do people keep talking like you can't just navigate to a txt file in your browser and have it serve as any old web content? Which is something I have actually done many years ago to search for a domain in these types of lists. Cloudflare is balancing on a razer for this TOS technicality.

The TOS aren’t referring to content-type headers, magic bytes, TCP headers, browser support of file formats, or any technical implementation. To oversimplify, they’re saying Cloudflare’s service is to be used for serving websites to browsers. 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…

> I’m not sure why you’re trying to “gotcha” through their ToS.

People are doing the opposite, pointing out the hole and asking them to get a better rule. Surely they don't just want the list merely converted into html.

> They give that away for free [...]

So they should specify things that influence cost such as total bytes served, number of files, etc. Currently all you can do it bypass the rule because you don't know how to cooperate.

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

#337

Post by zaarn »

codalan wrote: post #135
Joel_Mckay wrote: post #83

Rate-limit the GeoIP list for the affected areas to drop if more than 20% of active traffic. i.e. the service outages get co-located only with the problem users areas. Also, when doing auto-updates: always add a chaotic delay offset 1 to 180 minutes to distribute the traffic loads. Even in an office with 16 hosts or more this is recommended practice to prevent cheap routers hitting limits. Another interesting trend,…

That would only work if they had an API; AFAICT, they're just hosting a file. At this point, they might be better off coordinating with the other major adblocker providers and just outright move the file elsewhere. Breaking other people's garbage code is better than breaking yourself trying to fix it. Especially on a budget of $0.00. If the defective code for the browsers are in public repos, it might also be more ef…

Moving the file elsewhere won't fix it. They are serving terabytes of traffic on Access Denied, it won't go away if that changes to "Not Found" instead, the developers seem already entirely ready to ignore their adblocker just not working.

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

#339

Post by denton-scratch »

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.

Access Denied is an HTTP status code, not a page that you serve. 100Tb per month of status codes suggests something like 30 trillion requests per month. Is that possible?
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