Into.the.Void.

For the past months Greek AdblockPlus Filter has steadily been growing in subscribers. I recently did a change in the metadata so that clients fetch/check the list every 2 days instead of the default 7, and the daily subscriber count has surpassed 10.000 unique IPs.

The following graph shows this increase over time:

In order to help people contribute to the project I’ve created a repo on github: greek-adblockplus-filter. So now, if you want to help filter out ads from the greek web just get fork the project via git, make your changes and send me a pull request on github 🙂

Filed by kargig at 20:32 under Greek,Internet
Tags: adblock, adblock plus, ads, filter, git, github, Greek
No Comments | 10,243 views

I’ve had this thought for some time now, I needed a nice interface for GrRBL so that it would make it easier for others, read more, people to contribute. Many people have been, politely, complaining about lack of features, policy and so on.

Right now most people use either the submission form or they bounce their emails to grrbl [at] void [dot] gr. Then their emails get manually processed, filtered and if everything goes well the “useful” parts of their email end up in the DNS RBL or the email address blacklist. This process is not automated at all, entries are manually added to a database, and is therefore quite time consuming. What’s worse is that people who are listed don’t have an ‘easy’ way to opt-out, apart from emailing us. The algorithm of adding someone to these lists is also not well-defined. The main rule that is followed is that an IP or email address is added to these lists when at least 3 people have submitted them on different days.

Hopefully this is about to change soon (I don’t know how soon, but soon!). During the past month I’ve been trying to code an interface in django, even though I had no prior experience in it. It’s mostly a self educating process and I like it very much. This django application will be generic enough to cover submissions and listings for IPs, emails and possibly URLs.

Anonymous users will only get to see details about an IP they search for. People though will be able to register and add their own entries to a database. These registered users will be able to see the complete listings. Each user will belong to a group and every group will have a different weight which will depend on his ‘expertise’ (I know this is broad, but read on). For example, the group of the individual users will certainly have less weight than the group of the postmasters of Greek ISPs (yeap there are some who regularly contribute). Using their weights users will be able to vote on each entry that’s inside the database. Upon a certain score these entries will be flagged as eligible to be on the blacklist. Listed people will be able to opt-out but this process will be moderated by the superusers, that means that spammers like the infamous sofokleous10 will never get a chance to opt-out even for a single second.
Most of this functionality is already coded and is working quite well.

Various export formats will be supported (BIND/RBLDNSD, Spamassassin/Postifix/Exim/sendmail/etc). Selective/custom export of entries will be provided. Users will be able to select if they want to export/use a strict blacklist, that is hosts that are scored very high, a moderate one and a very broad/risky one. Levels have yet to be defined. An API will be published so that entries can be re-used in other applications (json format ?)

A method/interface that someone would copy/paste their email and it would automagically parse it, provide the user with the discovered malicious entries (IP, emails, URLs) and propose him to add them to the database. Maybe automate this even further so that they are added on a separate moderated queue without user interaction, that would be suitable for submitting entries via email plugins for clients such as mutt/thunderbird/etc.

The django application code resides in github for now: https://github.com/kargig/grrbl_django. Everyone is welcome to submit ideas (as issues) and code! Feel free to download, test and provide feedback.

Since the code is very flexible I am thinking whether Greek Adblock Plus Filter can also be benefited by this voting system. It probably can, so expect some changes to that list as well. One interface to rule them all.

Many thanks go to @apoikos who has been helping me a lot with the tons of questions I still have on django stuff.

Filed by kargig at 21:27 under Greek,Internet,Linux,Privacy
Tags: adblock, adblock plus, antispam, django, dns, filtering, grrbl, Linux, python, rbl, spam
No Comments | 5,788 views

Greek Adblock Plus filter list has more than 3500 regular unique (as per IP) subscribers daily. The majority of them uses some Mozilla-based browser (Firefox/Iceweasel). An increasing number of users has started using Chrome along with the Chrome Adblock Extension and Opera. Thanks to Panagiotis Dimopoulos, Greek Adblock Plus filter has now been converted to a Tracking Protection List for Internet Explorer 9+.

To load the protection list visit the url: Greek Adblock Tracking Protection List for Internet Explorer 9+

For more details about using Greek Adblock Plus filter on various browsers please visit: Greek Adblock Plus Filter.

Don’t forget to send in comments and URLs to block. If you are using Firefox’s addon, please use the “Report Issue on this page…” feature of it by right clicking on the status icon of adblock.

Filed by kargig at 00:22 under Greek,Internet
Tags: adblock, adblock plus, ads, firefox, Greek, iceweasel, ie, internet explorer, mozilla, tpl, tracking protection list
No Comments | 6,987 views

Six months after my original post on the creation of Greek Adblock Plus filter, the filter is finally added on the official subscription list thanks to Wladimir Palant.
Apart from Adblock Plus add-on for Firefox/Iceweasel/etc, the filter is also usable by the AdThwart extension for Google Chrome/Chromium

Until today the list peaked at 70 subscribers…I hope this will make more people trust my filter list and reach at least 100 subscribers.

As a sidenote, my RBL for Greek spam has moved to a new, better server thanks to a very kind person who donated it and some people administering mail servers have already added it to their spam filters. Since the original announcement the RBL jumped from 500 reqs/min to 2000 reqs/min.

Filed by kargig at 16:19 under Internet,Networking,Privacy
Tags: adblock, adblockplus, ads, antispam, grrbl, spam
6 Comments | 11,193 views

If you have adblock enabled and you try to visit any url of www.archivum.info you will get a really nasty alert saying:

You Are Using Adblock Plus or some other advert blocking software! Archivum.info relies on advertising for revenue. Please add www.archivum.info to your ad blocking whitelist or disable ad blocking when you visit www.archivum.info.

When I first saw this I laughed…and then I tried to find a way to bypass it.
I used curl to see the sites html code:

$ curl -v www.archivum.info
curl -v www.archivum.info 
* About to connect() to www.archivum.info port 80 (#0)
*   Trying 69.147.224.162... connected
* Connected to www.archivum.info (69.147.224.162) port 80 (#0)
> GET / HTTP/1.1
> User-Agent: curl/7.19.5 (i486-pc-linux-gnu) libcurl/7.19.5 OpenSSL/0.9.8k zlib/1.2.3.3 libidn/1.15 libssh2/1.2
> Host: www.archivum.info
> Accept: */*
> 
< HTTP/1.1 200 OK
< Date: Tue, 17 Nov 2009 11:24:22 GMT
< Server: Apache
< Last-Modified: Mon, 16 Nov 2009 08:41:17 GMT
< Accept-Ranges: bytes
< Content-Length: 9392
< Vary: Accept-Encoding
< Content-Type: text/html
< 
<html>
<head>
<title>archivum.info - The Internet archive.</title>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
<script type="text/javascript">var disabled = false;</script><script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.archivum.info/js/adblocker_probe.js?
site=http://googlead.foobar.tld/"></script><script type="text/javascript">if (disabled == false) { location.replace("http://www.archivum.info/denied");
alert("You Are Using Adblock Plus or some other advert blocking software! Archivum.info relies on advertising
for revenue. Please add www.archivum.info to your ad blocking whitelist or disable ad blocking when you visit
www.archivum.info.");}</script></head>

[snip]

Here’s how this site blocks Adblockplus: there’s a variable called disabled set to “false” then if a js (http://www.archivum.info/js/adblocker_probe.js) runs it sets disabled to “true” . The hint is that adblockplus blocks urls starting with “googlead.” so it won’t visit “http://www.archivum.info/js/adblocker_probe.js?site=http://googlead.foobar.tld/” and the variable will remain “false“. Then the alert pops up.

The solution is very simple, just add an exception to your local AdblockPlus rules, AdblockPlus Preferences -> Add Filter:
@@|http://www.archivum.info/js/adblocker_probe.js?site=http://googlead.foobar.tld/

So firefox, visits the js url, disabled becomes “true” you are allowed to continue browsing the site and AdblockPlus continues blocking all blockable items.

Filed by kargig at 14:14 under Internet,Linux
Tags: adblock, adblockplus, alert, archivum.info, block ads, curl, firefox, javascript, Linux
No Comments | 5,729 views

I’ve decided to start a filter for adblock plus to filter out advertisements from Greek sites.

You can find more information on subscribing to the filter on the page: Greek adblock plus filter.

I started the list a long time ago with some personal filter for sites I visit the most. In order to enrich the list I searched and found a list with the supposedly “top 50” greek sites (regarding traffic), so I visited them and started adding filters to reduce the ads on them.

I warn you though, the filters are a bit strict…and I don’t like flash ads…I really don’t. I hope you like the list.

Please contact me, by email or by commenting on Greek adblock plus filter page to add your own custom filters to the list.

Filed by kargig at 23:46 under Internet
Tags: adblock, adblock plus, ads, filter, firefox, Internet, web
4 Comments | 17,091 views