Adblock Plus and (a little) more

EasyList and EasyElement got merged · 2009-01-06 11:51 by Wladimir Palant

After some discussion Rick decided that keeping EasyList and EasyElement separate is no longer necessary. Today they were combined into one subscription and I created redirects to make sure everybody using EasyElement or one of the combined subscriptions containing EasyElement gets updated automatically. Just to let everybody know that there is only EasyList and EasyPrivacy now. Adblock Plus will also recommend “plain” EasyList again starting with version 1.0.1.

Microsoft joining the ranks of referrer spammers? · 2008-12-19 08:52 by Wladimir Palant

I just noticed an unusually high amount of requests in my logs with referrer being Live Search, all with the same search request. Now that doesn’t make sense because I usually get very few people from there, about 0.5% of the requests referred by Google. And I just don’t believe that everybody suddenly decided to search for “adblockplus”. Finally, all requests came in for http://adblockplus.org/ and were redirected to http://adblockplus.org/en/ — but Live Search doesn’t even list the main page, it links directly the the English one (or German, or French, depending on your location).

Filterset.G webpage hacked · 2008-12-15 10:02 by Wladimir Palant

Did I already mention that running a web server is dangerous? Well, it was only one part of the picture. Each server gets lots of automated requests trying to find vulnerabilities in the scripts that are installed (SQL injection vulnerabilities got particularly popular lately). But servers also get lots of requests on SSH and FTP ports trying to guess user names and passwords. So you better don’t use passwords that can be easily guessed using a dictionary attack. Even better, you don’t use any passwords at all.

Third-party JavaScript - yes, it is a security risk · 2008-12-02 15:23 by Wladimir Palant

Third-party JavaScript includes are as popular as ever. Almost every web page includes third-party scripts, be it for advertising, for visitor statistics or just for the fun widgets. The awareness of security risks connected to it — it is just not there. All the better to see The Register bring up this issue again, this time because of Google Analytics being used on Barack Obama’s website (and particularly in the admin interface).

New "Getting Started" page · 2008-11-25 09:41 by Wladimir Palant

I created a new documentation page called Getting Started with Adblock Plus. The idea is to provide an overview for new users with links to all the relevant information. It should replace the Tip Of The Day which never really took off. Of course, some more illustrations (or, more likely, animations) need to be added to the “Solving problems” section. I also want to add “Using Adblock Plus in Thunderbird” to “First steps” because people usually don’t understand what Adblock Plus will do in a mail client. Question is, what else should go onto that page? Suggestions?

Different ways to force garbage collection · 2008-11-20 12:49 by Wladimir Palant

Yesterday I reported a Gecko bug where reproducing required the garbage collector to run. In the following discussion this useful snippet of code appeared:

window.QueryInterface(Components.interfaces.nsIInterfaceRequestor)
      .getInterface(Components.interfaces.nsIDOMWindowUtils)
      .garbageCollect();

Closing down Bugzilla? · 2008-11-12 12:16 by Wladimir Palant

I mentioned this in my MAOW presentation already — Bugzilla isn’t exactly a very useful tool when it comes to the Adblock Plus project, at least not any more. All people who want to help others hang out in the forum and I am usually the only one who looks at bug reports in Bugzilla. As the time I have available varies (and I prefer to spend it on development anyway), some questions go unanswered for quite a while. And almost all of those questions are filter issues or Firefox bugs anyway, so they don’t really need my attention. Even for the real bug reports, I’m not the only one able to request additional details from the bug reporter.

Managing locales - now the generic way · 2008-11-05 17:44 by Wladimir Palant

Apparently, my previous post gave some people the impression that I am pushing my scripts as a generic solution for all locale validation problems. That’s certainly not the case, what I’ve done there is a quick and dirty solution for a problem I was having with Adblock Plus. I tried to detect as many of the common locale problems as possible even if the solution only works for Adblock Plus.

Managing locales · 2008-11-05 02:00 by Wladimir Palant

Managing locales is painful. Babelzilla is a big help but with 49 locales around (of which nine are incomplete) making sure that all locales included in the release are functional takes lots of time. With a new release coming up, I decided to invest some time into improving my scripts to automate as much as possible.

EasyList downloads moved to MozDev · 2008-10-29 14:01 by Wladimir Palant

EasyList has been doing great lately, its user base is constantly growing. The downside of this — tens of millions of download requests arriving at easylist.adblockplus.org each month, amounting to hundreds of gigabytes in traffic. And while the server can easily handle these requests, the bandwidth use of my account is dangerously approaching the limit. Yes, a merely 8 kB small file can do that to you if downloaded sufficiently often.