tl:dr shitty programming
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.
What happened to us bears a striking resemblance to what is now crippling EasyList:
- There’s an open source Android browser (now seemingly abandoned) that implements ad-blocking functionality.
- This browser is forked by a couple of other browsers that are very popular in India.
- 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.
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!
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Snapshots:
archive.org
archive.ph (click to archive)
ghostarchive.org (click to archive)
Orange Site:
archive.org
archive.ph (click to archive)
ghostarchive.org (click to archive)
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Yes we need to call in the jets on the Paj eets
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