Adblock Plus and (a little) more

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.

Customizable Facebook page · 2013-10-21 18:14 by Sven Hartz

You can now customize Facebook with Adblock Plus. Under default settings, ABP blocks all Facebook ads – sponsored stories, page post ads, standard ads, promoted posts or otherwise. But there are other unneeded, potentially unwanted elements that insert themselves automatically into your news feed and sidebar. Now you can block these too.

Go to facebook.adblockplus.me to choose which of these elements you’d like to block.

Adblock Plus development IRC channel is now open · 2013-10-21 17:13 by Wladimir Palant

One unfortunate side-effect of the fact that most Adblock Plus developers are Eyeo employees is many of the decisions being made away from public places. This is a suboptimal situation that we need to improve in order for our project to become more transparent again and to invite participation. We have been discussing ways to improve this and one first step is opening the IRC channel we use for development-related discussion: irc://irc.mozilla.org/#adblockplus (there is a web-based client if you prefer).

Please don’t use this channel if you need support, the right place for that is still our forum. In fact, I’ve been reluctant about opening the IRC channel because I’ve seen development-related channels being flooded by unrelated discussion to the point that they couldn’t be used for the original purpose any more. So you should really only be using this channel if you are interested in Adblock Plus development.

There will be more announcements soon, please stay tuned.

Acceptable Ads by the numbers · 2013-10-07 15:53 by Ben Williams

Our first-ever release of statistics on the Acceptable Ads initiative.

777 whitelist applicants, over 50 percent rejected because ads not acceptable.
In all, we accepted only 9.5 percent of applicants.
148 whitelist proposals, over 90 percent for free.

An open letter to Twitter · 2013-10-04 15:48 by Ben Williams

Dear Twitter,
We’ve been reading the early media analysis of your IPO filing, and we are not surprised that many industry pundits are speculating about how you are probably going to become more aggressive with your advertising. BuzzFeed cautioned “expect more ads”; Forbes said the IPO could “juice ad offerings”; and the Wall Street Journal admonished “don’t do what Facebook did.” We read about your deals with CBS and the NFL – which means ads galore and happy investors.

Weird SSL misconfigurations · 2013-10-01 13:40 by Wladimir Palant

TL;DR: Some Firefox installations don’t support strong encryption and I wonder why that is.

There is one issue with relying on community-supplied filter lists in Adblock Plus: these lists are sometimes hosted on unreliable services that will go down without any prior notice. That’s why a fallback solution had to be designed in the early stages of the projects: if a client cannot reach a filter download server several times in a row it should query a fallback URL which could reply with a new location for that filter list. These fallback requests can also be used to notice issues with filter downloads that the owners of the filter lists didn’t notice themselves.

Bug in Adblock Plus for Chrome and Opera caused acceptable ads setting to be reverted · 2013-08-16 12:51 by Wladimir Palant

What happened?

Adblock Plus for Chrome and Opera releases starting with version 1.5.1 had a very bad bug: acceptable ads were enabled on update, even for users who previously opted out. This issue is fixed in the Adblock Plus 1.5.4 release but the damage is already done — there is no way to distinguish users who opted out and had acceptable ads re-enabled on update from those who didn’t opt out.

What should somebody who opted out previously do now?

If you use Adblock Plus for Chrome or Opera and unchecked “Allow some non-intrusive advertising” previously then chances are that it is checked again now. You will have to go into Adblock Plus options and uncheck it again. Unfortunately, this issue cannot be repaired automatically. We are really sorry about that.

Better SSL support on adblockplus.org · 2013-07-08 12:55 by Wladimir Palant

This website has been supporting SSL encryption for a while now. However, normally both HTTP and HTTPS access were allowed, with exception of some parts of the website. This was mainly because of the weak server powering that website. Now that this server is gone this could finally change: adblockplus.org is an HTTPS only website now — for better security and privacy.