Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

EasyList is in trouble and so are many ad blockers

adguard.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

391–400 of 439 posts

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

#391

Post by arglebargle123 »

srvmshr wrote: post #308
ignoramous wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Bittorrent, switch in long-term to that. S3 buckets in IAD with I'd imagine, some tech IPFS/Filecoin/Sia might come in handy, too, but unsure of how healthy most of these web3 projects are right now. There's also fosstorrents.com that help seed projects.

Is IPFS strictly Web3? Sure it gained traction around Blockchain, crypto DeFI - but the storage technology is ELI5 a massive distributed storage. I could hazard a guess that in terms of philosophy its closer to BitTorrent than Blockchain

The tl; dr I've been given is that IPFS is essentially one global DHT swarm with some searchable/discoverable magic on top. Not exactly the same as DHT torrenting but close enough fir the simple explanation.

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

#392

Post by r3trohack3r »

mindslight wrote: post #239
r3trohack3r wrote: post #234

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…

Actually you're missing the point. It doesn't seem like many people are condemning Cloudflare for not serving a bandwidth-heavy file for free (FTA: "CloudFlare does not allow non-enterprise users use that much traffic"). Rather what's being condemned is this nonsense customer service characterization of a text file as somehow not "web content". Easylist.txt is a data file that could just as easily be in JSON (and be…

I like the HN approach of taking a charitable interpretation of their message.

Clearly EasyList lived on their free tier for a long time without interruption. Only when they used excessive bandwidth did ToS enforcement happen. When they reached out for support, the support agent rightly pointed out that this isn't a website file.

Reading the ToS, the support agents message appears to be correct. Text files are fine (as is pretty much any format) as long as it isn't the main focus of the HTTP server Cloudflare is fronting. Robots.txt would be fine, turning the list into XML or HTML would not be fine. In this case, the text file isn't there to support the web content of Easy List - it's distributing a text file to applications.

The agent could have added additional context but their message is valid.

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

#393

Post by [deleted] »

LawTalkingGuy wrote: post #336
r3trohack3r wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 k…

[deleted]

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

#394

Post by RandomWorker »

squarefoot wrote: post #364

This seems the perfect use case for letting a secure BitTorrent tracker share the lists, then either implementing the client in the browser, or having it as a system service that syncs the necessary files.

Yeah! Just share through BitTorrent, this is the perfect example where it can be useful. To be honest I’m not sure why this isn’t built in to browsers yet Oracle browser has one.

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

#395

Post by kenmacd »

self_awareness wrote: post #343

Stupid question, but can't they rename the txt to .html, put on the front, on the back, and use cloudflare to cache/proxy the content?

Say you do that and I DDoS the easylist.html. Cloudflare will start applying their DDoS mitigation. Now everyone's app receives the Browser Integrity Check instead of the list.

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

#396

Post by kenmacd »

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote: post #136
tomschwiha wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cloudflare can decide whom they want to do business with. But a plain text file is in my opinion sort of HTML. At least it is not "non-html" content. A .pdf file would be non-HTML content. What else is important to note that the client is being abused and not the client abusing the service. That should be taken into consideration, when deciding if someone is breaking the ToS.

I'd agree that's weird. Seems like if it were simply renamed to .html with no content changes, then it would be okay. > What else is important to note that the client is being abused and not the client abusing the service. That should be taken into consideration, when deciding if someone is breaking the ToS. My understanding has this as moot. The issue from Cloudflare's perspective is only that the content is non-HTM…

> Seems like if it were simply renamed to .html with no content changes, then it would be okay.

Imagine you do that and I DDoS the URL. CF will then mitigate this DDoS by, in part, replacing your html with their Browser Integrity Check html.

If you're serving 'web pages and websites' everything continues to work. What would happen if this list suddenly became an actual webpage.

If your site is serving 'a disproportionate percentage' of non-html you decrease the ability of CF to tell good traffic from bad.

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

#397

Post by kenmacd »

Macha wrote: post #157
LinAGKar wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A filter list is definitely not HTML

The minimal spec valid HTML5 document is currently: a Practically, browsers will accept omitting both of these, and the spec even allows for omitting the title "if it is provided by a higher level protocol" So it's not that crazy an argument that a plain text file is a html document

You're looking at it backwards though. CF doesn't _actually_ care about what the content is, only that they can apply their DDoS protections to it. If you're serving a text file that's much more difficult as they can't replace it with their own content.

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

#398

Post by mindslight »

r3trohack3r wrote: post #392
mindslight wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually you're missing the point. It doesn't seem like many people are condemning Cloudflare for not serving a bandwidth-heavy file for free (FTA: "CloudFlare does not allow non-enterprise users use that much traffic"). Rather what's being condemned is this nonsense customer service characterization of a text file as somehow not "web content". Easylist.txt is a data file that could just as easily be in JSON (and be…

I like the HN approach of taking a charitable interpretation of their message. Clearly EasyList lived on their free tier for a long time without interruption. Only when they used excessive bandwidth did ToS enforcement happen. When they reached out for support, the support agent rightly pointed out that this isn't a website file. Reading the ToS, the support agents message appears to be correct. Text files are fine (…

You're still conflating "free tier" with "not a web file". According to the article, they are separate issues and Cloudflare wouldn't be willing to host easylist.txt even on a paid plan.

Meanwhile -

1. easylist.txt is used by every single web page I visit. So the overall purpose argument fails.

2. Web pages commonly use non-directly-renderable data files in formats like JSON or XML, so the file purpose argument fails.

3. Text files are and continue to be one of the major formats displayed by browsers. So the file type argument fails.

4. The size of the file is in line with other files cached by Cloudflare. So that argument fails.

If the Cloudflare support rep said "we just don't feel like doing business with you", that would be a different thing. But instead they're throwing out some arbitrarily-framed unfalsifiable reason as if it's a logical justification. And no, customer service drones and corporate policies don't deserve a fundamental benefit of the doubt, per contra proferentem (ambiguous terms should be construed against the drafter). It's impossible to know what they actually mean here besides "we don't like it", and that is the problem.

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

#399

Post by kenmacd »

bornfreddy wrote: post #42
tyingq wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's from this tos page: https://www.cloudflare.com/terms/ 2.8 Limitation on Serving Non-HTML Content ...Use of the Services for serving video or a disproportionate percentage of pictures, audio files, or other non-HTML content is prohibited, unless purchased separately... A huge text/plain artifact, requested often, would seem to fall into that category of "disproportionate percentage" compared to text/html served.

Sounds like it is meant to deal with multimedia mostly? But anyway, just rename .txt to .html and you're done.

Then CF replaces the html with their Browser Integrity Check. How does the app deal with the list becoming real 'Checking your browser" html?

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

#400

Post by kenmacd »

yellowapple wrote: post #223

Cloudflare's rationale for a ToS violation is absolutely bonkers. Who cares what the file extension is? By virtue of being accessible on the web via a URL it is by definition web content.

there's a lot of similar comments to this one. In short, it's much harder to protect a text file against DDoS. The ToS say 'a disproportionate percentage ... non-html' likely because they need to be able to apply their browser checks to clients.
Post reply on HN