Adblock Plus and (a little) more
Switching default blocking lists for Chinese users · 2014-03-21 12:35 by Job Plas
We have stopped using ChinaList as the default filter list for Chinese and Taiwanese Adblock Plus users. Instead, we will offer a new list called EasyList China as the default choice. The new lists will be markedly better, providing our Chinese-speaking users with a great user experience.
Extension security 101 · 2014-02-24 17:42 by Felix Dahlke
We’ve received a couple of questions from users worried that Adblock Plus might be compromised lately. Don’t worry, it’s not. But that alone doesn’t warrant a blog post, does it? So here’s me talking about extension security a bit:
Any software you install, browser extensions are no exception, can do things against your will and without your knowledge. That’s commonly called malware or spyware. It’s a real problem, which is why there’s a filter list that blocks sites known for distributing malware.
But the most important thing is to be careful about the software you install. It’s ultimately your decision, and you should make it based on whether you trust the person or site you got it from.
New blog · 2014-02-13 11:06 by Wladimir Palant
For a while, I have been occasionally misusing the Adblock Plus project blog for articles that had no relation to Adblock Plus whatsoever. I posted various articles on security, Mozilla and XULRunner there, general extension development advise, occasionally some private stuff. With the project growing and more people joining I am no longer the only person posting to the Adblock Plus blog, treating it as my private blog isn’t appropriate. So a while ago I decided to set up a separate private blog for myself and now I finally found the time to implement this. My off-topic blog posts have been migrated to the new location. Now you can read my blog if you are interested in the random stuff I post there, or you can keep reading the Adblock Plus blog if all you are interested in is Adblock Plus.
Year 2013 in retrospect · 2013-12-31 10:17 by Wladimir Palant
The year is coming to an end, this is a good time to look back at what we’ve achieved. We’ve founded Eyeo more than two years ago but getting things rolling always takes time. Before September last year we still had only two developers and could do little more than maintaining the existing code base. And it wasn’t until 2013 that the new developers got up to speed and could contribute significantly to our projects. Here is an incomplete and subjective list of what we’ve achieved this year:
Links not working on a website? You can fix that! · 2013-12-04 10:42 by Wladimir Palant
Adblock Plus users who decided to disable tracking have been complaining about severe issues on some websites for a while already. On the websites in question, clicking a link simply wouldn’t do anything unless one disables Adblock Plus. Our investigation has shown that bugs in Adobe SiteCatalyst are to blame for this issue. SiteCatalyst is a tracking solution that Adobe acquired from Omniture. A “forced link tracking” feature introduced recently is the source of these issues. Originally it was enabled for Google Chrome only, in a follow-up version for Mozilla Firefox as well.
Adblock Plus trademarks · 2013-12-03 16:20 by Till Faida
Recently we’ve encountered a growing number of people mimicking our logo and our look and feel, so we will now be taking steps to secure our trademark. Of course, users still have considerable freedom to redistribute and modify our open source software, but we need to secure our trademarks to protect you against those who would use them to commit fraud.
Pure YouTube Video Experience · 2013-11-21 17:07 by MonztA
YouTube is changing, but according to its users it may not be for the better. The most recent example of this was their recent decision to force their users to use the Google Plus commenting system, making it impossible to remain anonymous. Even though hundreds of thousands are campaigning against it, it looks as if their voices will be ignored. there is little hope that it will actually change.
Open sourcing our infrastructure · 2013-11-08 09:00 by Felix Dahlke
About a year ago, we began to seriously scale up our infrastructure, moving from one overworked server to currently 22, with 13 of these being dedicated filter download servers.
We started with one server with a dozen different functions, and a range of scripts that kept it all together. While this works well for a single server, it’s a bit hard to scale, so we moved to a configuration management tool, Puppet, which is also used by Mozilla, Wikimedia and many others.
libablockplus and better context information in Android [Done] · 2013-11-07 09:24 by Felix Dahlke
Done, this proposal has been implemented as of 2013-11-29.
Current state
Right now, Adblock Plus for Android has its own integration of the ABP core code that leaves some things to be desired. Also, the proxy hardly attempts to gather any context information about resources, which makes false positives more likely and keeps us from adding some features.
Goals
Make ABP for Android use libadblockplus, the same library powering ABP for Internet Explorer, and gather context information about resources to pass in.
Approach
- Use libadblockplus to replace the custom integration code.
- Use heuristics to deduce the frame structure for resources being loaded, this is necessary for domain-based whitelisting and Acceptable Ads, among others.
- Implement Acceptable Ads, which can now work reliably.
How to get rid of the new photo preview feature on Twitter · 2013-11-06 18:26 by MonztA
As usual, it seems, it is the user who must adapt to changes and new rules. This time it’s Twitter changing the layout of its timeline, both in its web client and mobile version. The most notable change is that users are being served a pre-displayed image that expands when they click on it. On the Twitter mobile client, you can disable this feature by unchecking the “photo preview” box; but there is no way to opt out on its web client unless you use the filter we specifically created for it.