But in the end, it's all still malware.
In other words, it's a pretty massive conflict of interest.
If I wanted to look at ads, I wouldn't have installed an ad blocking plugin. Combined with the "private" list that nobody can see, there is plenty of reason to use a fork that has no such conflicts.
For these people, your malware example falls flat. A more accurate example would be a firewall whitelisting known non-malware software. At least in theory, that's how the acceptable ads feature works.
> So in fact there is really a public list and a private list it appears (through the x-adblock-key header), while the public list is presented as all there is to "acceptable ads".
Nowwhere did I say pages with the x-adblock-key were not respecting the "Acceptable ads" setting.
I said that there are more whitelisted sites than just what is presented as the only list in the section titled "How can I see what you are allowing?" on ABP's reference page regarding "acceptable ads" [1].