>A couple of weeks ago EasyList maintainers saw a huge spike in traffic. The overall traffic quickly snowballed from a couple of terabytes per day to 10-20 times that amount. The source of that dramatic surge, it turned out, were Android devices from India. This whole situation rang a bell with us, because last year we had to grapple with the very same problem. Last November, our bandwidth usage shot up through the roof for no good reason. After investigating the issue, we found out that two apps with ad-blocking functionality were abusing our servers.
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>...
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>So, the bottom line is this:
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>1 - Many ad blockers cannot download filters updates because EasyList is throttled.
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>2 - EasyList may need to change the domain name. These faulty browsers will DDOS any hosting EasyList chooses as long as they continue to use the easylist.to domain.

This is going to be a challenge for these folks to overcome. Given how many people use these lists in their ad blocker plugins/browsers, this could grow into a larger problem if not resolved. It doesn't seem like there's any straightforward way out of this unfortunately.

Let me save you a click, some Android forks in India were badly made and try to download block lists over and over.

so is this just a problem for android devices?

or Easylist could block users from India, at least temporarily.

Sucks how it's impossible to block IPs.

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That’s not the issue anymore, because Cloudflare discovered that EasyList is also in violation the TOS. They can’t continue doing what they were doing before.

Caused by android devices. A problem for anyone using EasyList on any device that sources it from the domain experiencing the traffic load.

I may have missed it in the article, but I wonder how easylist specifically breaks the terms of service.

How were they in violation of the TOS?

so how does TPB continue to exist?

did you read the linked article? CloudFlare doesn’t allow for only TXT files to be served, they require meaningful web content to be hosted on their servers

I don’t know how their site works but it probably isn’t hosted on a popular cloud platform that cares about what customers do with their servers.

Seems familiar. Didn't wikipedia have a similar issue some time ago, with some Indian App pulling the same image again and again? Of course they could just rename the image and that probably isn't an option here.

Or they could block subsequent downloads for some hours if a ip already grabbed the file.

Just block it for like 24 hours after a download.

Apparently serving a txt file is not serving "web content."

Although tbh it seems like hopefully that's a misunderstanding from Cloudflare because easylist does have a page up.

> When we encountered a similar problem last year, we found a simple solution: block the undesired traffic from these apps. Even so, we continue to serve about 100TB of “Access Denied” pages monthly!

It says in the article why blocking isn’t a good solution either. They are still DDOSing, whether they are blocked or not.

Cloudflare by killing Easylist, is killing many 1.1.1.1 DNS competitors that rely on their lists.

As opposed to blocking can they check where the request is coming from and geo distribute it? It doesn’t make sense for the rest of the world to suffer when one geographical location is causing an issue. I agree that blocking probably isn’t the solution as it’s not everyone in India causing this issue, but I do think that if they could place all this traffic on its own CDN, they could more easily tackle the issue without wreaking havoc everywhere else.

Interesting, thanks.

That's completely arbitrary nonsense. Web browsers were essentially text file renderers for years.