‘Just four dudes’: Inside EasyList, a community-run ad-blocking list • Hacker News Board

Re: ‘Just four dudes’: Inside EasyList, a community-run ad-blocking list

#61

Post by randomstring » Fri, Aug 02, 2019, 4:58 PM UTC

x0x0 wrote: post #14

ziddoap wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. Once I finished the article I sat there and had to think: "what am I supposed to be feeling after reading this?". I think they want us to be angry that EasyList is only maintained by 4 people. Or maybe just be angry that EasyList exists. I'm not really sure. My takeaway was that it's pretty impressive they still respond to exclusion requests in a timely manner.

I was surprised it was that hard to change a route on autotrader. The article kept mentioning hundreds of thousands of pages, like they had some person editing each page in textmate.

Maybe Autotrader has hundreds of thousands of template, CSS, and JS files with those paths hardcoded. Imagine the hell it would be to work on that website.

Even so, you could fix everything with a one line Perl command.

Re: ‘Just four dudes’: Inside EasyList, a community-run ad-blocking list

#62

Post by specialist » Fri, Aug 02, 2019, 4:59 PM UTC

At some point, for popular sites, the strategy will flip from filtering to scrapping.

We'll need some clever strategies to counter the arms race.

Image side-by-side visual diffing. Some process renders pages with and without ads. Ads are progressively identified and removed until it renders like the "print" or "reader" view.

Temporal diffing. Snap shot popular websites over time. The meat (content) will likely remain the same. Everything else is chrome or ads.

My other ad detecting notions are even more harebrained, so I'll stop there.

Re: ‘Just four dudes’: Inside EasyList, a community-run ad-blocking list

#63

Post by hartator » Fri, Aug 02, 2019, 5:01 PM UTC

I remember https://serpapi.com breaking with EasyList because we use Prism.js for code syntax coloration. And Prism.js is also the name of a tracker. Opened a ticket with them. However it has been easier to just rename `prism.js` to `pri-secure-sm.js`. Not sure why author is so upset about that. It's not like they are trying to break websites on purpose.

Re: ‘Just four dudes’: Inside EasyList, a community-run ad-blocking list

#64

Post by luke0016 » Fri, Aug 02, 2019, 5:02 PM UTC

papln wrote: post #48

hnaccy wrote: post #10

>“It’s crazy that more people don’t know about this,” said Marty Kratky-Katz, the founder of Blockthrough, which lets publishers monetize using Adblock Plus’s Acceptable Ads program. “I don’t think they mean any harm or have any malicious intentions. But it’s not like they were experts in balancing publisher monetization, or like they were elected. They’re just four dudes.” Why would you ever want your adblocking lis…

Because moral fiber includes some notion of acceptable ads, even if current models tend to bad. However, I suspect that Easylist already supports acceptable ads in the form of "route the ads through the publisher's domain/servers" which puts accountability where it belongs, so it doesn't need further expert advice.

> Because moral fiber includes some notion of acceptable ads, even if current models tend to bad.

Maybe your moral fiber. Definitely not mine.

Re: ‘Just four dudes’: Inside EasyList, a community-run ad-blocking list

#65

Post by hnaccy » Fri, Aug 02, 2019, 5:03 PM UTC

papln wrote: post #48

hnaccy wrote: post #10

>“It’s crazy that more people don’t know about this,” said Marty Kratky-Katz, the founder of Blockthrough, which lets publishers monetize using Adblock Plus’s Acceptable Ads program. “I don’t think they mean any harm or have any malicious intentions. But it’s not like they were experts in balancing publisher monetization, or like they were elected. They’re just four dudes.” Why would you ever want your adblocking lis…

Because moral fiber includes some notion of acceptable ads, even if current models tend to bad. However, I suspect that Easylist already supports acceptable ads in the form of "route the ads through the publisher's domain/servers" which puts accountability where it belongs, so it doesn't need further expert advice.

>Because moral fiber includes some notion of acceptable ads

Why?

Re: ‘Just four dudes’: Inside EasyList, a community-run ad-blocking list

#66

Post by patd » Fri, Aug 02, 2019, 5:06 PM UTC

sterkekoffie wrote: post #54

patd wrote: post #8

I did run into the same issue as mentioned in the article and the Easylist forum is full of publishers having complaining that their site doesn't work anymore. I started working on http://blockedby.com , a monitoring tool to warn you when a rule would impact your website. But after contacting a few websites that did have the issue on the forum, I couldn't find any that actually wanted to prevent this. A few discussio…

Getting a 500 error from /start, fyi.

Fixed it

Re: ‘Just four dudes’: Inside EasyList, a community-run ad-blocking list

#67

Post by donarb » Fri, Aug 02, 2019, 5:09 PM UTC

FussyZeus wrote: post #35

bredren wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would not be surprised if they are telling the truth here. I worked on an early version of a big woodworking website and it was over six thousand static html pages. The group that acquired it needed to show progress asap, which meant simply updating the header to their new logo and footer nav. I had to write about a dozen sequenced find and replace routines with regex to do even basic changes. In some cases groups…

The thing is though that's a bad system, whether EasyList is prompting the changes, or the SEO, etc. and it feels like they're trying to pin "we had to fix thousands of pages" on EasyList as though their shit workflow is EasyLists' fault.

The thing is is that AutoTrader is a website that advertises cars, they don't even have any other advertising on their site. And because EasyList doesn't like a word in their URL, the website breaks through no fault of their own. If the owner of the website is doing nothing wrong, the onus is on the owner of the blocking technology to come up with a system that works correctly.

Re: ‘Just four dudes’: Inside EasyList, a community-run ad-blocking list

#68

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Aug 02, 2019, 5:10 PM UTC

papln wrote: post #44

kgwxd wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

uBlock Origin really really needs to do something to distinguish itself from uBlock. Every thread I read about ad blockers has a comment trying to clarify.

How can it distinguish itself without giving up the name that Aljoudi (and not AdBlock) has been hijacking? Imagine if a company launched a (non-Google) "Chromium" browser or non-Microsoft "Explorer" or "Edge", how would the authentic developer defend against that? (Probably with a trademark suit, which is a dificult strategy for a tiny open source project). gorhill could create a brand new name to replace Origin, bu…

[deleted]

Re: ‘Just four dudes’: Inside EasyList, a community-run ad-blocking list

#69

Post by wccrawford » Fri, Aug 02, 2019, 5:10 PM UTC

hartator wrote: post #63

I remember https://serpapi.com breaking with EasyList because we use Prism.js for code syntax coloration. And Prism.js is also the name of a tracker. Opened a ticket with them. However it has been easier to just rename `prism.js` to `pri-secure-sm.js`. Not sure why author is so upset about that. It's not like they are trying to break websites on purpose.

Because they're breaking things without much regard to it.

We discovered a few years ago that our list of advertisers (in a digital magazine) was being blocked by ad blockers. It was coming over the wire with the word "advertisers" in the URL. These aren't ads that pop up and display on the pages, but simply a list of advertisers in the issue.

Rather than try to get adblockers not to block it, we simply used another word in our URL and went on with things. We shouldn't have had to. Those are lazy adblock rules and are incredibly likely to get false positives and break sites.

But we're realists and knew that even if we fixed the existing adblockers, another would come along and do the same lazy thing.

Re: ‘Just four dudes’: Inside EasyList, a community-run ad-blocking list

#70

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Aug 02, 2019, 5:11 PM UTC

papln wrote: post #48

hnaccy wrote: post #10

>“It’s crazy that more people don’t know about this,” said Marty Kratky-Katz, the founder of Blockthrough, which lets publishers monetize using Adblock Plus’s Acceptable Ads program. “I don’t think they mean any harm or have any malicious intentions. But it’s not like they were experts in balancing publisher monetization, or like they were elected. They’re just four dudes.” Why would you ever want your adblocking lis…

Because moral fiber includes some notion of acceptable ads, even if current models tend to bad. However, I suspect that Easylist already supports acceptable ads in the form of "route the ads through the publisher's domain/servers" which puts accountability where it belongs, so it doesn't need further expert advice.

[deleted]