Adblock Plus and (a little) more
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.
Typo correction feature removed · 2013-07-03 15:39 by Wladimir Palant
In November last year we started an experiment with the typo correction feature in Adblock Plus for Firefox. Now we removed that feature again, it’s already gone in the development builds and won’t be part of the next release. We will continue to maintain the URL Fixer extension however, anybody wanting that feature back can install it.
#pallengate: Warum Sascha Pallenberg bewusst lügt · 2013-07-01 08:36 by Till Faida
Am Mittwoch veröffentlichte Sascha Pallenberg einen vielbeachteten Artikel über Adblock Plus, mit dem er versucht uns zu schaden. Der Titel des Artikels: “Adblock Plus Undercover: Einblicke in eine mafiöses Werbenetzwerk”.
Herr Pallenberg ist Betreiber von mobilegeeks, einer Webseite, die sich ausschließlich durch die dort eingeblendete Werbung finanziert. Aktuell befinden sich allein auf der Startseite vier Werbebanner, davon drei (!) animierte Flash-Banner und 12 (!) Tracking-Solutions, die Daten über die Besucher der Seite sammeln und speichern. Vornehmlich also Werbung, die von Adblock geblockt wird, weil Internetnutzer sie als störend und aufdringlich empfinden.
Denial of service attack on adblockplus.org [Updated3] · 2013-06-28 01:10 by Wladimir Palant
The reason why our server was down for a day is a massive denial-of-service attack that started yesterday night German time. For historical reasons, our main website was running on a weak server (the weakest we have) and we already had issues with it in the past — we just didn’t have the time to migrate it to some more powerful hardware. In addition, the hosting company made matters worse by blocking our IP address without telling us in order to protect their network. They actually claimed that the IP wasn’t blocked when I asked about it explicitly. So we ended up wasting quite a bit of time unfortunately.
Die "geheimen" Details von Adblock Plus · 2013-06-26 18:59 by Wladimir Palant
Note to English-speakers: Sorry about this German-language article. That’s about a German-language blog article spinning a conspiracy theory around Adblock Plus, many people apparently believed it.
Ein Blog-Artikel über Adblock Plus, auf den ich absichtlich nicht verlinken will, sorgt derzeit für Diskussionen. Wer nicht weiß, worum es geht, hat nichts verpasst: neben persönlichen Angriffen auf Leute, die an Adblock Plus beteiligt sind, werden alle möglichen (und größtenteils auch vom Projekt öffentlich kommunizierten) Fakten so zurechtgebogen, dass es irgendwie negativ klingt. Da dieser Artikel aber teilweise für investigative Recherche gehalten wird, muss ich an dieser Stelle einige Fakten richtig stellen.
Thoughts on using asm.js for performance bottlenecks in browser extensions · 2013-06-26 13:55 by Wladimir Palant
asm.js is big news right now, and for a good reason. Firefox 22 can run some JavaScript code with performance similar to that of a compiled C/C++ application — this is huge. And it got me interested: maybe asm.js can be used to improve the performance of Adblock Plus? So I spent an evening looking into asm.js and Emscripten. This post merely summarizes my thoughts for far, it isn’t meant to be an extensive overview and some of my conclusions might be wrong.
Working towards Adblock Plus for Internet Explorer · 2013-06-19 15:34 by Wladimir Palant
Remember this blog post of mine six years ago? Probably not. But you will certainly be happy to know that I was right: creating a usable ad blocker for Internet Explorer means tons of work. However, the goals of the Adblock Plus project got more ambitious since that post has been written. In order to change the web we need to provide all users with the option to run an ad blocker. This means that we could no longer ignore Internet Explorer and so a few months ago we started working on an Adblock Plus port to Internet Explorer.
Adblock Plus Creative Challenge opened up for voting · 2013-06-07 16:21 by Wladimir Palant
Two months ago we launched the first ever Adblock Plus Creative Challenge. We challenged creatives all over the world to shoot a short film somehow related to Adblock Plus and bad online advertising practices. This was also often coined as the “Anti-Advertising Ad”. It has been an incredible success and starting today, you can vote on your favorite submission.