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EasyList is in trouble and so are many ad blockers

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351–360 of 439 posts

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

#353
Just blackhole every request originating from India. After a while the developers will ask why their users are mad that they get ads all the time.

You then give them the finger, tell them to get their lists elsewhere, or pay for access due to their incompetency.

They will just have to do the needful.

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

#354
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.

Oh if something /ever/ begged to be goatse'd

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

#355

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…

A C&D not coming from either a law firm or at least a big company is likely to go straight to the trash.

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

#356
post #204

Since they added "Access denied" for misbehaving browsers, can they instead serve them some sort of bad response that will "surface" issue to the users? Depending on what would work better and cost less... (1) a small list that would block major legitimate sites. Whoops, the browser is unusable, now users complain to the developer to fix the issue, or abandon it. (2) "hang" the request if the browser loads the list s…

Too much work. Just blackhole all requests originating from India in the firewall, as a start.

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

#357

Just blackhole every request originating from India. After a while the developers will ask why their users are mad that they get ads all the time. You then give them the finger, tell them to get their lists elsewhere, or pay for access due to their incompetency. They will just have to do the needful.

Pretty simple to put 1B people into the same drawer, for a few bad apples. Think about what that would mean if the world applied that to (say) the US...

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

#358
post #330
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…

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.

"User agent" is a synonym for "browser". When you say "user agent" here, what you really mean is the contents of the header that identifies the user agent, i.e., browser. Calling it that is a little bit like referring to Chrome's developer tools as "Inspect Element" (based on the mistake that that's supposed to be its name, rather than recognizing that the label is just a simple, descriptive verb/action).

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

#359
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.

Oh if something /ever/ begged to be goatse'd

You do realize it will be displayed to children?

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

#360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Even just plain text file without any tags is a valid HTML 5 file. You don't need any tags. and are implied.

All you'd need is a

 tags or  somewhere if you'd want it rendered not just as one large paragraph.

I guess you may need a

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