EasyList is in trouble and so are many ad blockers

Post by manigandham » Fri, Oct 21, 2022, 12:39 AM UTC

yellowapple wrote: post #318

manigandham wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. It is about excessive resources/bandwidth usage. The customer service response reply isn't great but the context itself is clear because this file is clearly not for displaying any part of the web presence of the easylist site. Again this is that "pedantic technicality" - why such a fuss when the actual issue is straightforward, and also clearly understood and reiterated by the easylist team themselves in the pos…

> 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…

Post by KETpXDDzR » Fri, Oct 21, 2022, 4:51 AM UTC

Post by CamelRocketFish » Fri, Oct 21, 2022, 6:05 AM UTC

the8472 wrote: post #189

Raed667 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was debugging a similar issue where a small marketplace run by a friend was being scrapped and the listings were being used to make a competing marketplace look more active than it actually was. The thing is, they didn't host the scrapped images themselves, they just hot-linked everything. So through a little nginx config, we turned their entire homepage to an ad for my friend's platform :)

I assume you mean scraped, not scrapped.

Post by Joel_Mckay » Fri, Oct 21, 2022, 9:17 AM UTC

zaarn wrote: post #426

Joel_Mckay wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The query limit from the lets encrypt SSL service operates in a similar manner. If you hit it more than a few times a week for the same domain/token/key, than you are banned for 5 days. In general, it is easier to setup filters after differentiating legitimate from nuisance traffic. For example, fail2ban looks at the log of errors from invalid hits, and bans the IP or entire ISP block ranges for 5 days. This ban than…

Good luck finding the legal contact, not to mention suing, some random developer in India who apparently already abandoned the project. I will also point out that if you fail2ban the IPs requesting the spamblock list, it could become worse if the browser just retries endlessly in the background. The traffic for a 404 page could be much smaller than the traffic of the very same devices trying again every few seconds,…

Post by Joel_Mckay » Fri, Oct 21, 2022, 9:44 AM UTC

zaarn wrote: post #428

Joel_Mckay wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In general, the client socket needs to timeout on black-holed connection attempts (several minutes), and the server never sees a TCP handshake packet if the IP is on the global routers ban lists. As a side note, some people build spider traps that reply with a pre-baked bzip file as a spoofed HTML compressed response. Thus a client program dutifully decompresses a few TB sized document, and browser exits due to memor…

The client can just set a custom timeout and close the socket after 5 seconds of no or low activity. Then try again. On your side note; EasyList probably does not want people to start suing for starting to distribute malicious content to users (and crashing your browser on purpose is arguably malicious).