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EasyList is in trouble and so are many ad blockers

adguard.com

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

#71

Post by Maxburn »

RobotToaster wrote: post #47
Maxburn wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PiHole and PFBlockerng are two big ones that use these resources too and setting those up it struck me as it did you that simply polling these resources on a set schedule was a waste. Podcasting 2.0 has been talking about podping as a solution because podcasting basically has the same problem with periodic polling of the RSS feed. Basically you subscribe and then receive notice there's been an update, THEN you go get…

The difference is pihole only updates weekly.

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.

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

#73

Post by edf13 »

tredre3 wrote: post #28

I'm sympathetic to their trouble but we're talking about serving a 330KB text file (150KB compressed), surely this isn't an insurmountable technical hurdle to overcome? A 1000mbps dedicated server could serve it 70 MILLIONS times per day. Considering that most wouldn't be served (E-tags and whatnot), it can probably sustain a billion requests a day. What am I missing?

It’s not really the serving that’s the issue - it’s the amount of bandwidth used… in the case of serving simple content (like txt) bandwidth is always going to be the expensive element

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

#74

Post by ethbr0 »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #57
Maxburn wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Simple but will it will break all sorts of automation down the line? All the other adlists are txt and I don't know how they would handle other file types, even if the content is unchanged.

Determining file type from the file name suffix is a fool's game and always was.

Is it? Seems superior to arbitrary magic numbers or headers, and God forbid full naive parsing, in most ways.

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

#75

Post by pseudosavant »

tomudding wrote: post #25
gst wrote: post #9

> EasyList is hosted on Github and proxied with CloudFlare. What is the reason for proxying through Cloudflare? Are there any bandwidth limits or performance issues when directly serving those files from GitHub?

GitHub has a soft limit of like 100 GB/month on transfers for Pages. According to the Adguard blog post traffic was already several TBs a day before the issue arose.

Why not only provide the list as a repo? You can't hotlink a repo. And someone abusing raw links is GitHub's bandwidth problem.

'Legitimate' users of the list would clone/pull the repo to their own mirror?

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

#76

Post by nicce »

laundermaf wrote: post #55
rc_mob wrote: post #19

Phew. Is just a bandwidth issue. This goofy title made me think advertisers found a way around ad blockers.

This issue caused CF to irreversibly ban them though, so it's not "just a bandwidth issue" anymore. > Based on the URL that are being requested at Cloudflare, it violates our ToS as well. All the requests are txt file extension which isn't a web content > you cannot use Cloudflare to cache or proxy the request to these text files

Well, CF is just one service provider. There are bigger issues if they have already such a monopoly that their decisions kill projects worlwide.

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

#77

Post by Maxburn »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #57
Maxburn wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Simple but will it will break all sorts of automation down the line? All the other adlists are txt and I don't know how they would handle other file types, even if the content is unchanged.

Determining file type from the file name suffix is a fool's game and always was.

I hear you there. I'm more thinking someone probably hard coded txt file extension somewhere so something is likely to fall apart in simply handling that file.

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

#78

Post by tomschwiha »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #57
Maxburn wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Simple but will it will break all sorts of automation down the line? All the other adlists are txt and I don't know how they would handle other file types, even if the content is unchanged.

Determining file type from the file name suffix is a fool's game and always was.

Fun stuff like embedding data into jpgs or pngs.

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

#79

Post by JimWestergren »

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).

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

#80

Post by magic_hamster »

robin_reala wrote: post #23
bombcar wrote: post #4

If I recall correctly there was some image on wikipedia that was getting billions of downloads a day or something, all from India, because some smart phone had made it a default "hello" image and hot linked it. Unfortunately, I can't find a reference to it anymore.

Not that you’d do it, but the temptation there is always to repoint your real application to a different URL and change the original image to something subtly NSFW.

...or a nice steak.
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