EasyList is in trouble and so are many ad blockers • Hacker News Board

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

#401

Post by kenmacd » Thu, Oct 20, 2022, 3:12 PM UTC

celestialcheese wrote: post #290

r1ch wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cloudflare's TOS only permit caching for HTML content and related assets. It's probably a useful catch-all they can pull out any time someone uses too much bandwidth.

Ok, so then why not make a structured HTML page that's served and parsed as the list.. that would be perfectly fine? Cloudflare's stance on this makes no sense

That would be fine because then CF could replace that HTML with their "Checking your browser before accessing" content. What's the app going to think of that though?

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

#402

Post by Meph504 » Thu, Oct 20, 2022, 3:15 PM UTC

mkmk3 wrote: post #366

Meph504 wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 deci…

I don't think you can remotely compare the two, and no physical harm is actual done. And if an extension stops working because it depends on a list, the list can be removed, the extention can be disabled, a different browser can be used. Ad blocking isn't an essential service that can be easily replaced, and it isn't being provided as anything but a voluntary service with no uptime or availability assurances.

The made up scenerio of this preventing some critical task from being accomplished is stretching at best.

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

#403

Post by jgrahamc » Thu, Oct 20, 2022, 3:33 PM UTC

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'…

Looks like it's fast to download now.

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

#404

Post by d3nj4l » Thu, Oct 20, 2022, 3:36 PM UTC

porbelm wrote: post #356

sershe wrote: 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.

Right, block roughly 10% of the world. Great idea!

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

#405

Post by thayne » Thu, Oct 20, 2022, 3:40 PM UTC

archi42 wrote: post #322

yellowapple wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is about excessive resources/bandwidth usage. Then the policy would focus on that rather than micromanage the format of the data using those resources/bandwidth. Again: bytes are bytes. > why such a fuss Because a policy as nonsensical as "no non-HTML files allowed" artificially limits the usefulness of CloudFlare for precisely zero legitimate reason. I ask again: does wrapping a video in a blob of JavaScript fi…

The difference is in the amount of cache you need. In one case you save 10GB per 1MB of cache, in the other just 1GB per 1MB and the big file is going to evict many small files (even if the user only listens to the first 10s). It's no huge difference for a single user/site, but across all users this quickly means needing a multiple of the current cache; which doesn't come for free. Also, CF have a product to sell. Th…

So have a max file size.

Also, the same ToS applies if you use the paid product. Unless you buy an additional addon for non-web traffic.

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

#406

Post by tatpacc » Thu, Oct 20, 2022, 3:47 PM UTC

chemmail wrote: post #345

tatpacc wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I can understand but my reply was with reference in parent comment

> A great opportunity right now for CloudFlare to win some goodwill and PR by helping out EasyList for free right now.

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

#407

Post by AnonC » Thu, Oct 20, 2022, 4:22 PM UTC

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).

> EasyList is hosted on Github and proxied with CloudFlare. Unfortunately, CloudFlare does not allow non-enterprise users use that much traffic, and now all requests to the EasyList file are getting throttled.

> EasyList tried to reach out to CloudFlare support, but the latter said they could not help. Moreover, serving EasyList actually may violate the CloudFlare ToS.

Seeing the comments from Cloudflare here, looks like the HN machine has yet again worked its magic to get appropriate attention!

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

#408

Post by howinteresting » Thu, Oct 20, 2022, 4:55 PM UTC

porbelm wrote: post #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.

Haha, yeah. Just proposing to blanket punish an entire country for a few developers screwing up, and throwing a little racist joke in there at the end. Good one.

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

#409

Post by yellowapple » Thu, Oct 20, 2022, 5:20 PM UTC

kevincox wrote: post #380

yellowapple wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Just making a file valid HTML doesn't make it "web content". This file is being fetched by an application, not being viewed by a user. I'm not sure this is the most reasonable rule but there are definitely some benificial aspects to it. For example the load on human-viewed content is limited by how often people want to view it. Not how often their browser wants to redownload it.

> Just making a file valid HTML doesn't make it "web content".

By Cloudflare's rationale it does.

> For example the load on human-viewed content is limited by how often people want to view it. Not how often their browser wants to redownload it.

Bandwidth is bandwidth. If 100,000,000 humans want to download a 10KB text/html page v. 100,000,000 programs wanting to download a 10KB text/plain file, both within the same time period, then that's going to be the same degree of load on Cloudflare's end.

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

#410

Post by yellowapple » Thu, Oct 20, 2022, 5:36 PM UTC

kenmacd wrote: post #400

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.

> there's a lot of similar comments to this one.

and a lot of similar rebuttals to this one.

> In short, it's much harder to protect a text file against DDoS.

It's exactly the same difficulty. Bandwidth is bandwidth, bytes are bytes. The only suggestion I've seen where HTML/CSS/JS might be relevant is using JS for client-side probing, and if Cloudflare is indeed injecting arbitrary JS into HTML pages it serves then that's utterly horrifying and is a problem in and of itself.