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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

#341

Post by lmz »

denton-scratch wrote: post #339
chrismeller wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Just because it's a status code doesn't mean it has no content. Response headers and some basic text?

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

#342

Post by wink »

jefftk wrote: post #266
zamalek wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could be done with a gzip bomb.

Or a brotli bomb, for far greater expansion!

And a terrible idea because the users are not at fault, but the developers of the app. And in this case it might crash so they'd only report "app crashes on startup", if at all.

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

#344

Post by pwdisswordfish9 »

quintushoratius wrote: post #254
Havoc wrote: post #247

Just block all of India for a week. That’ll sharpen minds a bit to track down the culprit And given that this seems like a near existential threat drastic action seems warranted.

Better yet, serve an empty file to the offending user agents

Even better, serve a file that blocks literally everything.

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

#345

Post by chemmail »

tatpacc wrote: post #265
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).

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.

This is a bit different though. You are basically taking away a main revenue stream from websites, your main clients. That sounds like bad optics for them.

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

#346

Post by happymellon »

bombcar wrote: post #294
chrismeller wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

100 TB/month is only like 40 mb/s I can find VPS that advertise 200 mb/s dedicated for not much (but still way more than “free”)

This sounds like a similar issue as Linux distros used to have, I'm not sure how many still do this, but use alternative sites.

On download.easylist.com have it shuffle and send a redirect to a mirror to download the list. I wonder if Universities are still offering these small amounts of space for Open Source projects?

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

#347

Post by jgrahamc »

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).

I am following up internally. Looks like there's a combination of this data not being cached, our systems thinking a DDoS was happening (which it sort of was). But getting the full story now.

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

#349

Post by noja »

anigbrowl wrote: post #168
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).

I can't understand their argument that a text file 'isn't a web content'; seems like a bullshit excuse.

Web content is for consumption by people.

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

#350

Post by happymellon »

Psychlist wrote: post #253
neilv wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I still have a 5k pixel square blank white gif on my site for times like that (~4kB) that I sub in for anything that gets requested too often, or from particular places. I was getting hotlinked from controversial sites a lot at one stage, and the common forum software they used didn't force image sizes. So a 5k pixel wide image pushed most of the content off the screen thanks to a centred element :)

I remember from a long time ago something about an image that was corrupted, and did some self referral internally so you could crash applications through out of memory issues even though the image was only a couple of kilobytes. I might have to find it again to serve to hotlinkers!
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