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Comment by disadvantage | Hacker News Reader

> There’s an open source Android browser (now seemingly abandoned) that implements ad-blocking functionality

> The problem is that this browser has a very serious flaw. It tries to download filters updates on every startup, and on Android it may happen lots of times per day. It can even happen when the browser is running in the background

EasyList should be offered as a version-controlled copy you grab once, that then gets bundled with an app, rather than offering a download to be called from an app: https://easylist.to/easylist/easylist.txt (Currently down as of writing).

The only caveat is such a list needs to be updated, so then a version system should be implemented for EasyList and you periodically bundle the new version via app updates. It would save a lot of bandwidth doing this.

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They're offering a text file. Presumably with an If-modified-since header, although it's hard to check now.

There is no approach you can describe that doesn't run afoul of the described badly-behaved browser app which willfully retrieves the entire file afresh at every init. If it can be downloaded, it will be downloaded directly by the badly-behaved mobile apps.

Call me lazy but I’d just support an If-modified-since header in such a simple case and call it good

Bad app will just brutally fetch it every time with not even a cache on its side.

As a quick fix, there are many options for limiting per IP per timespan, e.g. fail2ban, you could configure it to punish bad apps without crippling functionality for others. Well, maybe crippling a little bit in some very special use cases, still better than it simply not working.

The list does support an ETag and the 304 even appears to not be rate-limited by Cloudflare.

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 it.

https://www.podcasthelpdesk.com/podping-and-other-stuff-with...

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.

To change when pihole updates you edit the cron entry at /etc/cron.d/pihole.

That's what I meant, it's buried in a config file. Not one of those things that should be surfaced in the UI that opens it up to abuse.

You can use firefox on android and install ad block on it as a plugin

How does that help when you can't download easylist anymore since it's under DDoS?

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