11 ms·
‘Just four dudes’: Inside EasyList, a community-run ad-blocking list
- gen3 7y ago> UBlock, another Adblock-owned blocking extension TIL According to Wikipedia: "In July 2018, uBlock.org was acquired by AdBlock"[1] This is not uBlock Origin. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UBlock_Origin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UBlock_Origin
- asaddhamani 7y agoAdBlock and uBlock are both sellouts. Long live uBlock Origin!
- merpnderp 7y agoWish a real version was available on Safari.
- bspammer 7y agoNot sure what you mean by "real version" but this one works just fine for me: https://safari-extensions.apple.com/details/?id=com.el1t.uBlock-3NU33NW2M3 https://safari-extensions.apple.com/details/?id=com.el1t.uBl... It's true that it's about a year out of date, but I've never had any ads get through regardless.
- merpnderp 7y agoIt is my understanding that this is not an official port by Raymond Hill and that his name is being used without his permission. If someone knows what the actual story is on this, I'd love to know.
- Operyl 7y agoCorrect. More information from the source: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-is-completely-unrelated-to-the-web-site-ublock.org https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-is-comp...
- gen3 7y agoI knew it was owned by someone else, I didn't expect it to have been sold to Adblock Plus though! I wish they would just hand the domain over to gorhill. It feels shady that they squat on it for the name recognition.
- Operyl 7y agoYeah .. I dislike the route that Adblock Plus went too, they make a ton of money off of lists like EasyList, and their silly Acceptable Ad (read: how is this not extortion) program.
- dastx 7y agoAdBlock Plus is different from AdBlock. AdBlock is owned by an unknown entity and the source has been based on ABP since 2016. ABP is owned by Eyeo Gmbh (which I think was founded by the original developers of ABP).
- papln 7y agoAljoudi hijacked the "uBlock" name from gorhill (apparently because gorhill was more concernted about building a good tool than maintaining trademark protection, and I guess no one volunteered to donate (para)legal work), so handing it back would be a "wish" indeed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UBlock_Origin#uBlock https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UBlock_Origin#uBlock
- kgwxd 7y agouBlock 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.
- papln 7y agoHow 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, but hat runs the risk of losing even more people to the knockoff "uBlock". Perhaps "uBlock Official" would be a better name than "uBlock Origin", but ultimately it comes down to a sog of hard marketing work to protect and build mindshare.
- coldpie 7y agoIt sucks to have to give up the name, but maybe it's just time to rip off that band-aid and do it.
- kgwxd 7y agoI feel the same way. If it contains the word uBlock, it's going to loose no matter what. Maybe fork uBlock Origin, give it a new name, update the current uBlock Origin official pages to point to the new one, keeping links in older threads still relevant for a while. I'd do my part and promote the new name as much as possible. I'm already spending a lot of time typing out the explanation about the current name whenever I get a chance.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- derefr 7y ago> uBlock Official I’m pretty sure Eyeo did register the uBlock trademark, and has a good case to sue for someone implying through their product’s name that it’s “the official” uBlock.
- simias 7y agoI really think it was a mistake not to rename the project completely after the Origin fork. It's super confusing, especially since most of us still refer to Origin as "ublock" for short. On both Google and DDG ublock.org is still the first match when you search for "ublock". I wonder how many people install this crap extension by mistake every day.
- dole 7y agoI almost did just a few hours ago because of the above and luckily noticed the difference before pulling the trigger.
- luma 7y agoThis piece feels like it wants me to be upset about the maintainers of EasyList, instead of the people that created the content which has become so toxic that people are scrambling for ways to block it.
- ziddoap 7y agoIndeed. 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.
- x0x0 7y agoI 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.
- randomstring 7y agoMaybe 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.
- dilutedh2o 7y agoI would love to see an example of something like this. Please.
- therealx 7y agoI've seen backends that were that horrible. Updates were often done via regex's.
- patd 7y agoI 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 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 discussions with publishers told me that they're more interested in convincing their users to give up on ad blockers rather than face the fact that people are not going to abandon ad blockers.
- eli 7y agoThis looks interesting. We had problems with AdBlocks breaking functionality on the parts of our pages that talk about ads. Super annoying. We basically had to rename all the assets and file paths to words with no meaning. I'll be taking a closer look at the tool.
- GordonS 7y agoI had an issue with this recently, where buttons simply linking to our Twitter and Facebook pages were being blocked. I'm no fan of obtrusive, JavaScript laden ads, and have used adblockers myself for years, but why block "legitimate" content? I didn't know how to get removed from the list (and assumed it wouldn't happen anyway), so changed a couple of class names and it was working again. But I don't know how long the issue was there before I realised it :/
- Kalium 7y agoDepending on how they're implemented, buttons linking to your Twitter and Facebook pages can double as trackers for Twitter and Facebook. Anyway. People rarely intend to block legitimate content. At the same time, it's not always easy to tell what is and isn't legitimate when you're writing fairly general rules.
- GordonS 7y agoThese were just: `<a href="our_twitter_page"><img src="/img/locally_hosted_image.png"></a>`
- whatshisface 7y ago>But it’s not like they were experts in balancing publisher monetization Yeah they are, the balance they're targeting is zero ads.
- hnaccy 7y ago>“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 list run by "experts in balancing publisher monetization"?
- eoShe7th 7y agoSounds like they would be balancing publisher monetization and serving malware and intrusive ads to users. Exactly the right kind of people we need to be running a adblocker list.
- tru3_power 7y agoYea seriously.. that dude seems so out of touch. Unfortunate that they set cadence of adding exclusion rules when they really could have leveraged this situation to make a real change on a lot of websites.
- GraemeL 7y agoI elected them when I turned on EasyList in my ad blocker. I certainly never elected Mr. Kratky-Katz to balance publisher monetization for me.
- eli 7y agoI'd prefer if it were run with the aim of never breaking functionality instead of never seeing an ad, but I understand I'm in the minority.
- papln 7y agoBecause 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 7y ago[deleted]
- paulcarroty 7y agoThese dudes doing great job, just imagine how much energy consumed google analytics and tons of any kind of social network scripts.
- Causality1 7y agoI fear that with adblocking nearing 25% market penetration we're going to see fundamental changes in the way ads are delivered in response. Maybe a transition from third party ad servers to locally hosted ads that have to be added to block lists individually. Maybe YouTube will start inserting unblockable ads directly into the video stream. Fine people like Raymond Hill will keep fighting the good fight but I wonder if someday we'll look back on the era where web content was paid for by the 90 percent of people who don't block ads so the 10 percent could block them effortlessly as a sort of golden age.
- yepguy 7y agoIf that happens, projects like Adblock Radio will hopefully step in to make "unblockable" ads more tolerable, by automatically turning the volume down for example. https://www.adblockradio.com/en/ https://www.adblockradio.com/en/
- papln 7y agoIsn't that a Browser feature that was/is fixed in 2019? Unrequested audio is flat-out absurd behavior in a browser.
- yepguy 7y agoI was responding to the possibility of YouTube just embedding ads directly into the video to thwart current ad-blocking techniques. If that happens the audio would already be playing before an advertisement started. Something like Adblock Radio is a more sophisticated approach that could still detect ads like that.
- gregmac 7y agoI think you're right. For me personally, if a site was toxic enough with ads (eg: the reason I started using an adblocker originally) I'd just completely avoid it. I did originally try that, but in particular "chum boxes" started appearing everywhere on more sites than I could remember to avoid and that was the last straw. The easiest solution was an ad blocker, and unfortunately for publishers, it's just easier to block all ads everywhere than try to be selective and only block annoying ones. If enough sites started using anti-adblock techniques with toxic ads, my next step would be a 'site blocker' plugin that would effectively eradicate it from the internet for me. This is kind of the nuclear option. No links from others sites, no showing up in search results. The technology exists already for blocking adult sites: the thing missing is the ability to add to your block list from a search result page or on the site itself. The next logical extension to that is sharing block lists among users, and projects that maintain block lists you can subscribe to. It actually would be nice if there's a way to notify the site when you were blocking them, such as your browser hitting `/.well-known/eradicated?origin=http://page/containing/link` http://page/containing/link`.
- kaza 7y agoOkay the ads are no ads anymore are web experiences. Seriusly i barely can understand the level of corporatism this days, this is not an article is esencialy a weapon against adblock in particular probably paid by the same anti-adblocking groups.
- Raed667 7y agoThis is basically a hit piece on Easylist. My take after reading this, is that the author wants EasyList to either not exist or to be run by "experts in balancing publisher monetization" (aka adman)
- SilasX 7y agoIt reminds me of the famous spam form letter [1], where one of the standard objections is "Why should we have to trust you and your servers? [to identify which domains should be blocked]" [1] https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt
- Joking_Phantom 7y agoNot just basically - it is a hit piece. It's a website run by and for advertisers, publishers, and media, aiming to monetize content as much as possible. They are supported by advertisers masquerading as ad blockers (uBlock trying to pretend to be uBlock Origin) and sites that literally just advertise. Just another day of unsavory corporations and the assholes that run them trying to mislead the average consumer.
- hinkley 7y agoIn nature, the best parasites divert a 'balanced' amount of resources from the host so as to prolong the interaction for as long as possible. Sometimes reading about things like "balancing publisher monetization" puts the picture in my head of a bunch of anthropomorphized tapeworms trying to have a public policy debate.
- hartator 7y agoIt always amazes me that journalists still have no clue how open source work. And also they should talk about uBlock Origin. Not AdBlock Plus or UBlock.
- grive 7y agoThis is not journalism. This is a hit-piece on EasyList, with a clickbait and false title. It seems even plausible, reading it, that the author knows about uBlock origin but avoids naming it, instead listing the two sellouts that are morally shady.
- dmix 7y agoIt's most certainly the work of more than "four dudes" too. Just by looking at the forum and contributors...
- hartator 7y agoI've contributed a small bit at some point. 4 dudes is indeed insulting.
- blattimwind 7y ago"Inside EasyList", yet the author presents precisely zero inside information / information from EasyList insiders.
- targonca 7y ago>But it’s not like they were experts in balancing publisher monetization, or like they were elected. They’re just four dudes. They were elected by people voluntarily installing EasyList. We had enough of you experts™, thanks.
- danShumway 7y agoSeriously -- every Adblocker will allow you to subscribe to custom lists, there's no vendor lock-in, there's no network effect, there aren't significant regulatory or commercial barriers to entry. This isn't like Facebook. Blockers like Ublock Origin also don't benefit from legitimate sites breaking; if they're turning on EasyList by default it's because they think it's currently the best balance available for their users. If anyone can make a better list than Easylist, then they should just go do it. In fact, companies already tried to make an alternative with the Acceptable Ads initiative -- and if their list is better, people will switch to it. The only barrier of entry to displacing EasyList here is quality over time.
- pavel_lishin 7y ago> But there are occasions when those changes are hard to make. In Autotrader UK’s case, for example, the change would have involved fixing hundreds of thousands of pages. I've got a lot of questions I'd like to ask about why exactly that's a big task.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- tomc1985 7y agoThis piece is a hit job in favor of the not-really-ad-blocking "monetizing" adblockers
- specialist 7y agoAt 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.
- hombre_fatal 7y agoDoesn't seem like that effort is worth it now that content these days are basically ads. And you can't block them with a simple DOM/URL filter trick. https://www.reddit.com/r/HailCorporate/ https://www.reddit.com/r/HailCorporate/
- hartator 7y agoI remember https://serpapi.com 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.
- wccrawford 7y agoBecause 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.
- CivBase 7y ago> Because they're breaking things without much regard to it. This claim comes accross as disingenuous. These guys are trying to block ads accross the whole internet without ruining the user's core experience. Maintaining a hard-coded black/whitelist of URLs and elements simply wont cut it. Sometimes there will be false positives. If this impacts enough of your users, then it's your responsibility as a web developer to test your site on environments that reflect your users' and make something that works on their environment. You can always choose not to support those users, but that's your problem.
- orliesaurus 7y agoI don't get the title - Just four dudes. What if it was four dudettes/chicks? Maybe it's because they started the project and they have the right to be in charge? Also, you don't have to use EasyList if you don't like it.. FYI those four dudes are whats keeping me from disabling javascript and images from every website on the face of the earth. Thank you EasyList maintainers!
- henry_flower 7y agoI suspect that the editor didn't actually read the text but nevertheless chose the most obnoxious title possible (as they often do)
- JMTQp8lwXL 7y agoIs it that onerous for folks to maintain their own whitelists? Chances are, most people spend 80% of their browser usage in 20% of sites visited. They couldn't be widely shared, but they're less whack-a-mole in practice and from a security perspective, a more superior solution.
- GuyPostington 7y agoGet fucked Digiday.
- nvk 7y agoNice try at spinning blame here, if publisher's didn't use such scamy Ad platforms and tracking we would be here.
- CivBase 7y ago> the change would have involved fixing hundreds of thousands of pages Even if these pages are static files (although any site opetating at that scale should have some kind of page-generation system), this still sounds like it could be resolved with a simple find-replace using <insert your favorite text editor>. EasyList is definitely in the right here. Adding an exception results in an unnecessary performance penalty and creates more complexity for the project. Both of these impacts are small, but they can't afford to accommodate for every website like that. If they want their users to use their site, they should make it work on their user's environments. I doubt they would demand Google or Mozilla accommodate for them like that.
- eswat 7y agoSeveral years ago I worked on a monolithic website that used static files with no templating engine. The problem is they had so many contractors working on changes for specific ranges of content that there were a variety of ways that even a mundane meta tag with the same content value was written (is the tag self-closing, is the value placed before the property, are certain characters in the value encoded, etc.). Find & Replace can quickly end up becoming a bigger game of Trial & Error especially if there are no standards in place.
- jankotek 7y agoThey would have to change URL to those pages
- unnouinceput 7y agoQuote: "In the past six months, EasyList changes have broken the buy buttons on commerce site The Inventory, the video player on Animal Planet, disrupted site navigation on Fandom, and disrupted the style and CSS loading process on job search site Indeed." Good, very good. Break them all. Learn to go back to basics, use TABLE, not gazzilion of nested DIV's for what should be a single BUTTON element instead. I run uBlock Origins, NoScript and Privacy Badger; and whenever I go, to clients, friends, family, I'll always put them up. Your shitty site has the same merchandise like many others and if your "buy" button is broke I'll just go to the next site...and while on this, how come Amazon "buy" button is not broke? Almost feels like Amazon devs actually test with ad-blockers their content before allowing it on the wild.
- Mathnerd314 7y ago> Amazon devs test ad-blockers No, for big sites the adblock users report issues, or more likely the adblock list developers just fix the issues right away. The issue is small sites with no sizeable adblock-using population.
- lioeters 7y ago> I run uBlock Origins, NoScript and Privacy Badger; and whenever I go, to clients, friends, family, I'll always put them up. Yes! I'm doing this too, as a kind of community service. If sites get broken because their privacy-invading "like" button doesn't work, that's on them. People will just move on.
- duskwuff 7y ago> disrupted site navigation on Fandom Fandom (aka Wikia), in particular, has run some incredibly intrusive -- and occasionally even malicious -- ads on some of their sites. I have very little sympathy for them.
- kamyarg 7y agoUseless article is useless, there is no point in emphasising the maintainers are men. No one is preventing 4 women or LGBTQ+ from starting a list with a better end user experience. But I guess their end goal is "balancing publisher monetization" which is too optimistic, no one would want to see slower pages with crap wherever they go.
- hendersoon 7y ago“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.” Reading the article, "balancing publisher monetization" provoked an immediate visceral vocal response from me. Truly hilarious.
- perlgeek 7y agoMany (even pretty well-known) Open Source projects would be happy to have four regularly active maintainers. "Just four dudes" sounds dismissive, but everyone starts out as "just one dude" (or dudette, or whatever the proper female form of dude is), and sometimes, more join. Often that's not the case, and the project's health hinges on just one maintainer.
- onyva 7y agoConsidering Brave has a non existing market share, quite surprised how often it’s been mentioned.