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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

#361

Post by chmod775 »

It seems their total traffic is 1000-2000TB per month and they're mostly just serving a single text file.

You can serve that easily from a dozen dedicated servers for a low four figures amount. Or just get one server with a 10gbit/s connection if you don't care about being geographically close to everyone.

These numbers aren't large, but many CDN companies (and AWS) would like you to believe they are and you should be paying them insane amounts of money to serve that kind of traffic.

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

#362

Post by [deleted] »

m-p-3 wrote: post #287
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.

So if the text was embedded in a static webpage that the client had to parse locally, that'd be okay?

[deleted]

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

#365

Post by winstonprivacy »

GekkePrutser wrote: post #245
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).

True but I bet 99% of CloudFlare's income comes from companies that wish to see EasyList die in a fire. I'm pretty sure this would factor into their strict enforcement of the 'rules'. I mean, this is something between github and CloudFlare right? And github sure hosts a ton of other .txt files and other stuff that's not 'web content'. They don't enforce it so strictly with other sites. Still, I'm sure the 'community'…

Correct. And let's not forget that the company which owns them would also like to see EasyList die in a fire.

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

#366

Post by mkmk3 »

Meph504 wrote: post #303
jannyfer wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I appreciated parents comment because it points towards an interesting direction. No one is forcing anyone to use this tool, no one is forcing anyone to steal their food. In terms of individuals acting in line with expectations, the individual poisoning their own food as a trap shouldn't inconvenience anyone if everyone's being civilized.

Providing a service (which you expect others to consume) and then not only deciding to refrain from providing, but "poisoning" the output, is an interesting move. We don't consider them equivalent, but in a case where this application was providing some essential service that is not easily replaced, and physical harm was a result, how do we consider it?

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

#367

Post by Maxburn »

tssva wrote: post #109
Maxburn wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Didn't know that, in fact clicking around in the UI I don't see a way to change that so good on them for being friendly in this area. PFBlocker seems to default to once a day.

To change when pihole updates you edit the cron entry at /etc/cron.d/pihole.

That's what I meant, it's buried in a config file. Not one of those things that should be surfaced in the UI that opens it up to abuse.

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

#368

Post by mkmk3 »

rvnx wrote: post #205
jannyfer wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't think so. Google often knowingly and intentionally breaks apps (through API deprecation) because it's more convenient for them or that it is costly to maintain. Nothing criminal there. Same for Easylist, if they decide that a quota of 100000 requests per IP+UA per day is the maximum, that's their choice. They owe nothing to the consumers of the lists. That being said; Easylist actually benefits from being dis…

I think you misunderstood what parent was referring to. The idea was to poison the block list so that any browser matching their criteria (user agent belonging to DDOSing browser) would block everything.

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

#369

Post by [deleted] »

jgrahamc wrote: post #347
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.

[deleted]

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

#370

Post by Terretta »

r3trohack3r wrote: post #217
anigbrowl wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

Welcome to robots.txt:

https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/...

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