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Comment by Raed667 | Hacker News Reader

I worked on an ad-blocker a few months ago. I made the decision to have the filter-list files hosted on our own domain and CDN (similar to what Adguard does with their filters.adtidy.org).

This was done for 2 reasons:

1- Avoid scenarios like this where you ship code (extension in this case) that is hard to update. Then make that code depend on external resources outside of your control.

2- Leak our users' IP addresses to each random hosting provider.

So the solution was simple: Run a CRON once a day then host the files ourselves. Pretty happy with that decision now.

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Except neither of those would help in this case. They’re already using their own domain name, and it’s unclear how they would even build their own CDN since they’re using that scale of bandwidth - AdGuard said they’re still pushing 100tb of access denied pages a month for their similar case. That is a LOT of bandwidth just for access denied messages.

Their point isn't that EasyList could have done anything differently, their point is that they are glad that they didn't decide to rely on others' infrastructure for their own ad blocker, because that makes them resilient against the fallout from this and similar.

Except it wouldn’t make them resilient since, as I pointed out, neither of the things they did would be of any help at all to Easylist in this situation.

It’s great that they’re happy with their choices, but the choices would, in this same situation, likely saddle them with a crippled infrastructure and/or some insane bandwidth bills for suddenly pushing 100 extra TB/m.

It was never suggested that what the original commenter was doing would help EasyList.

I didn’t say the OP did, though it was implied. I was responding to a comment which did… context, my friend.

Edit: so if OP wasn’t implying that their approach was better, what was the point of posting it? Wow, obtuse much?

It was not implied, you added that implication yourself and started responding to things that were not said, which is why the other commenter who replied to you was also confused, my friend.

Edit:

OP was implying their approach was better for themselves than relying on third party servers. It’s hardly obtuse, it’s a related discussion from someone who would otherwise be impacted by the throttling.

EasyList got here because they want all (respectful) apps to be able to use their list. They invited traffic, the problem is only occurring because this unknown browser violates the implicit "as long as you're considerate" rule.

OP, in contrast, wrote their own ad blocker targeting their own servers. They're in control of their ad blocker code and can write it to be respectful of their servers. They're not hosting the lists with the intent of allowing other people to use it, and they're unlikely to attract lazy app developers because the endpoints are (presumably) not listed publicly on the internet to anyone who wants an easy ad blocker list.

Actually if the developers of the web browsers in India did the same thing, easylist would have it easy...

100 TB/month is only like 40 mb/s I can find VPS that advertise 200 mb/s dedicated for not much (but still way more than “free”)

This sounds like a similar issue as Linux distros used to have, I'm not sure how many still do this, but use alternative sites.

On download.easylist.com have it shuffle and send a redirect to a mirror to download the list. I wonder if Universities are still offering these small amounts of space for Open Source projects?

Make it a web request so they can get a user agent. block the impacting user agents.

Access Denied is an HTTP status code, not a page that you serve. 100Tb per month of status codes suggests something like 30 trillion requests per month. Is that possible?

Just because it's a status code doesn't mean it has no content. Response headers and some basic text?

Point taken, thanks.

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