Adblock Plus and (a little) more

HTTP Referer header won't help you with CSRF · 2008-05-21 15:44 by Wladimir Palant

It seems to be obvious but apparently this idea still isn’t common knowledge — HTTP Referer header is unreliable, and it is especially unsuited for any security measures. The Referer header isn’t always present because of users going to a page directly (via bookmark and similar), using an “unusual” browser (most commonly download helper applications), using filtering firewalls (privacy protection) etc. The Referer header might be incorrect because of the same filtering firewalls (some prefer to advertise rather than remove the header entirely), special browser extensions to manipulate the Referer header etc.

Moving to a new server · 2008-05-20 09:57 by Wladimir Palant

My issues with adblockplus.org didn’t get magically resolved. While Netdepot was able to reactivate the domain once the performance issues were resolved, they didn’t feel like overlooking my exorbitant traffic use (>120 GB on an account with 10 GB traffic limit) any more. At which point it is time to say goodbye to Netdepot who generously provided me with free hosting for the past seven years and always helped me patiently with my issues. For a project of this size, it is better not to rely on somebody’s good will any more.

Improving Songbird compatibility once again · 2008-05-16 11:47 by Wladimir Palant

The changes in these development builds concern only Songbird users.

Changes

Fixed: Adblock Plus only works with the default Songbird feathers (Songbird bug 8785)
Removed support for Songbird 0.4, added support for Songbird 0.6

Known issues

~~Songbird: Context menu doesn’t always show up in Songbird, consequently not all items can be blocked via context menu~~

Dear authors of ad blocking software · 2008-05-09 12:56 by Wladimir Palant

I know that there is lots of different ad blocking software out there, for browsers other than Firefox or even independent of any browser. Some of these programs can use the same filter subscriptions that Adblock Plus offers, and some even use EasyList and/or other Adblock Plus subscriptions by default. And I don’t see a problem with that — as long as they do it in a nice way. However, I do have a problem when bugs in those ad blocking solutions overload my server.

Adblock Plus Watcher 1.0 released · 2008-04-16 11:27 by Wladimir Palant

Features

Monitors all load requests received by Adblock Plus
Filtering of the list by text of any column
Minimal performance measurement functions

Element Hiding Helper 1.0.4 released · 2008-04-16 00:33 by Wladimir Palant

Changes

Locales added: Catalan, Hebrew, Korean
Changed keyboard shortcut to Ctrl+Shift+K to avoid conflict in Firefox 3
Made compatibility info match Adblock Plus again (at least Songbird 0.4 required now, Midbrowser and eMusic Remote are supported)

Adblock Plus 0.7.5.4 for K-Meleon take 2 · 2008-04-15 23:27 by Wladimir Palant

Original Adblock Plus 0.7.5.4 for K-Meleon release had a flaw that prevented the list of blockable items from working correctly. This issue has now been fixed, only the K-Meleon compatibility layer has changed without any changes to the actual Adblock Plus extension.

Web pages accessing chrome:// is forbidden · 2008-04-13 22:30 by Wladimir Palant

I didn’t believe that this would still be fixed in Firefox 3 but bug 292789 has landed. The timing could be better, having such a big change go in shortly before a release is certainly less than optimal — yet still, I think that we are much better off now than we were before.

Adblock Plus 0.7.5.4 released · 2008-04-09 21:15 by Wladimir Palant

Changes

Locales added: Hebrew, Malay
Improved Firefox 3 compatibility
Changed default keyboard shortcuts to Ctrl+Shift+E (preferences) and Ctrl+Shift+V (blockable items)
Removed “Check banner links” option

Another release candidate - now with all translations · 2008-04-06 14:48 by Wladimir Palant

This is a release candidate for Adblock Plus 0.7.5.4. This time all locales are included but some might contain English strings.

Changes

Hebrew (he-IL) and Malay (ms-MY) translations added
Fixed: Keyboard shortcut to close detached list of blockable items is not configurable