It was admiral that did this:
<a href="https://blog.getadmiral.com/dmca-easylist-adblock-copyright-access-control-admiral-10-things-to-know/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.getadmiral.com/dmca-easylist-adblock-copyright-...</a><p>They even clearly state they used the only tool available to them, DCMA. From all the current summaries on this, DMCA does not apply to a line entry in easylist. A domain can be trademarked.<p>This should be added back in. And if github cannot standup to DMCA abuse, then well, easylist and all other developers should be giving a clear hard though to their continued use of the github platform.<p>Edit: it looks like EFF has gotten in touch with easylist. Good. <a href="https://torrentfreak.com/dmca-used-to-remove-ad-server-url-from-easylist-ad-blocklist-170811/" rel="nofollow">https://torrentfreak.com/dmca-used-to-remove-ad-server-url-f...</a>
I didn't get what the hell happened.<p>So, Admiral—an anti-adblocker company—contacted EasyList and told them to remove a domain from their list. This domain was a server they needed for their anti-adblocker platform to work.<p>EasyList told Admiral that they would only do it if GitHub agreed, so Admiral contacted GitHub and the domain was removed from the EasyList list after GitHub told EasyList they should comply.<p>The "attack" is that any company can tell lists to remove their website via using a DMCA violation, so lists become useless.<p>I have two questions:<p>1. how would a domain name on a list violate copyright<p>2. why aren't lists hosted anywhere else but the US so that they can't be controlled by DMCA requests.
I hate to say it, but the ad-blocking community is handling this problem the same way governments often handle things: Reactionary instead of pro-active.<p>The real source of the problem with ads, is that almost every ad network allows ads to be self posted with little to no filter. This opens us all up to the abuse from ads we've been experiencing for over a decade now.<p>Could you imagine what would happen if you were allowed to self-post an ad on television without the network manually approving each one?<p>It's time to hold ad networks responsible for their own content. If a virus spreads because of their ads, THEY should be sued, just like MTV and others were when they violated FCC decency rules during the Super Bowl.
From a recent WSJ article about anti-ad blocking companies:<p>“We really think the free internet is at risk because of ad-blocking, so these types of solutions are needed to turn the tide”, said Dan Rua, CEO of ad-blocking “revenue recovery” company Admiral, which recently raised $2.5 million to help build its platform."[1]<p>It's amazing how selective the CEO's concern for the "free internet" is. Threatening community github repos with DCMA takedowns is OK though?<p>[1] <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-rise-of-the-anti-ad-blockers-1465805039" rel="nofollow">https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-rise-of-the-anti-ad-blocker...</a>
It's amazing that they are so uneducated about DMCA. This is called defective DMCA notice, and it should be ignored. The sender of the notice can now file a suit, since the publisher of the list is no longer under safe harbor. But they won't, since they know it is defective. And if they did, it would be thrown out with a summary judgment.
There has been a growing trend of websites that will ask me to either:<p>a) whitelist their site in my adblocker
b) or subscribe to their monthly subscription and keep reading their site with adblocker
Admiral's product is so poorly designed that it requires cooperation from the browser to work? That violates rule #1 of client/server programming: never trust the client.
Instead, they have to abuse the DMCA to cover for their uninformed engineering choices.<p>This is despicable.<p>"Here hold this copyrighted content in memory for me, but don't make any other copies of it because, uh, you don't have the license to make copies of it. Except for, uh, the one that we sent you? To hold in memory? Look, computers are magic.<p>Nevermind. DMCA!"
Note that the offender's privacy policy [1] appears to let users (<i>e.g.</i> you or me) contact support@getadmiral.com "to know whether their Personal Data has been stored and [to] consult the Data Controller to learn about their contents and origin, to verify their accuracy or to ask for them to be supplemented, cancelled, updated or corrected, or for their transformation into anonymous format or to block any data held in violation of the law, as well as to oppose their treatment for any and all legitimate reasons."<p>[1] <a href="https://www.iubenda.com/privacy-policy/347981/full-legal" rel="nofollow">https://www.iubenda.com/privacy-policy/347981/full-legal</a>
Via <a href="https://github.com/easylist/easylist/commit/a4d380ad1a3b33a0fab679a1a8c5a791321622b3#commitcomment-23599344" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/easylist/easylist/commit/a4d380ad1a3b33a0...</a> by one of the Easylist maintainers:<p>> If it is a Circumvention/Adblock-Warning adhost, it should be removed from Easylist even without the need for a DMCA request.<p>Anyone know why he's saying this?<p>Edit: I guess he's referring to the following via <a href="https://easylist.to/2013/05/10/anti-adblock-guide-for-site-admins.html" rel="nofollow">https://easylist.to/2013/05/10/anti-adblock-guide-for-site-a...</a>:<p>> Anti-Adblock should only be challenged if the system limits website functionality or causes significant disruption to browsing
I have a very unpopular opinion that pulls me in two directions.<p>Advertisements have exceeded the point of being a nuisance for many years. But adblocking is a fight that solves symptoms and will affect more than just advertising in a negative way.<p>The best parallel I can draw is to the Napster era when pirating music cut off the head of the chicken in the industry. Hollywood and like were refusing to adjust to digital downloads and streaming. Part of this was due to the fact that it would drive down profits. But people started pirating the content and getting it for free so they lost money anyways. It's not impossible, but it has become more difficult for artists to break into the industry (along with competition) because of the margin of profitability.<p>In that same vein - publishers and advertisers have resisted the market and have bled their visitors for every penny. Finally the users stood up and said enough is enough - and now we have adblocking. The problem I have with adblocking is that it doesn't resolve the problem, just the symptoms. Adblocking pushes out smalltime publishers whose only revenue are these obtrusive ads. The "big guys" can stay alive as the reduction will be drops in the water for them. The way I see adblocking is that it will only drive the publishing industry further towards monopolies who will push the little guys out. And once you are getting all your content from 1-3 sources and the little guys are gone - there's nothing to stop them from becoming the same monoliths that exist as Internet Service Providers. They control the means and have no urge to change.<p>I stand on the fence, wishing there was a better solution to this problem but some times the only way to bring change is to burn it down first and start from scratch.
As I understand they're using copyright laws not to prevent me from <i>copying</i> content, but to preventing me from <i>not consuming</i> content.<p>In other words, the copyright law is used to <i>force</i> content consumption.
>"This domain accepts GET and POST requests over standard HTTP ports (TCP 80 and TCP 443) via strictly web based traffic originating from browsers"<p>lol
Am I the only one who thinks its laughable that adding their domain to a blocklist "circumvents" their protection technology? If I was a content provider I don't think I'd want to rely on something so flimsy.
Everyone should contact their investors.<p>"Your portfolio company @getadmiral is committing fraud by filing false DMCA requests. Can you fix this?"<p>Birchmere Ventures<p>Florida Gulfshore Capital<p>Florida Institute for the Commercialization of Public Research<p>Mosley Ventures<p>New World Angels<p><a href="https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/admiral-2#/entity" rel="nofollow">https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/admiral-2#/entity</a><p>If they are made aware a portfolio company is committing fraud, hopefully they have enough ethics to help sort out the situation. Not a lawyer, but if the investors are aware of the fraud and do nothing, they may have some liability themselves.
Github should have protected easylist from this bullshit DMCA request, here it is on github : <a href="https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/ff44d37f62d772bfec5fd4327e4a2009b9ad47aa/2017/2017-08-02-LevenLabs.md" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/ff44d37f62d772bfec5fd432...</a><p>Github is the culprit here.
uBlock and uMatrix have a "page blocked" function when the entire page matches a filter, could something similar be implemented for these situations?<p>Say, if a page requests content from these blocked domains, the ad blocker display an SSL warning-esque page that says something along the lines of "This page contains ad content protected by the DMCA. These ads may contain malicious material, and can not be safely viewed. Please alert the site owner to resolve this issue." If you want to make it really effective, you may even be able to pull contact email addresses from WHOIS data and make the contact line a mailto: URL.
In for a penny; in for a pound.<p>If I can't put your domain name in my adblock blacklist because it violates your copyrights or trademarks, then my DNS provider shouldn't be able to put your domain in their resolver, either.
Peter Lowe’s Ad and tracking server list still includes functionalclam. I recommend using it: <a href="https://pgl.yoyo.org/adservers/" rel="nofollow">https://pgl.yoyo.org/adservers/</a><p>uBlock Origin includes it.
This is very interesting, I had not considered that besides blocking ads, we should be blocking the anti-adblocking servers that seek to prevent us from blocking ads. We should also block those anti-ad servers. This is war.
One should not need to think too much to realise that if this is allowed to continue, it will set a dangerous precedent of effectively <i>removing the freedom to close one's eyes</i> --- hitherto, it seemed to be accepted even among the strongest DRM supporters that consumers had the right to <i>not</i> consume content they didn't want. They've tried to force (or perhaps "encourage" is the wording they prefer) consumers to consume with things like unskippable video adverts and warnings in DVDs, but AFAIK it's absolutely not illegal to look away (perhaps even at a different TV) or go do something else while that content is playing; now, by effectively trying to say that blocking or denying oneself from consuming --- or letting one's browser or other technology through which one consumes --- certain content, is illegal, they are trying to make it legally enforceable to consume content.<p>I wish all those who are involved or support such insanity would be themselves strapped tightly in front of a computer or TV, with eyelids glued open, and subjected to this force-feeding of content they don't want to see.<p>Ultimately, this loss of control of one's eyes, ears, and mind is something I strongly abhor, strong enough to express in a manner I normally don't partake in: <i>fuck this shit!</i>
This is what you get when companies have all the incentive to file DMCA takedown requests and there's <i>no punishment</i> for filing a bogus one. And modern technology is making this problem increasingly worse, with all the automated takedown tools.
The only way I see DMCA applying here is contributory infringement in enabling modification of the page.<p>With that in mind I think the question to be answered is does a user/viewer have the right to modify a page in their own web browser or must they view the page as intended by the creators?<p>You can get in to technicalities then like are Links creators committing contributory infringement, but I'm not sure that's helpful.<p>Should a user be able to purposefully block parts of a page?
> That domain is part of the DMCA copyright access control platform Admiral provides publishers so they can engage visitors in a transparent way on the value exchange for their copyrighted content, instead of resorting to surprise ad reinsertion the way some of our competitors advocate but visitors and advertisers dislike.<p>Does anyone actually understand what this garbage paragraph is actually saying? It stinks of corporate-esque bullshit to me.
Surely if you are truly conserned about the copyright of your work you wouldn't freely send the content to the user's device before issuing some sort of challenge e.g login at which point circumventing that becomes a crime. Websites shouldn't be allowed to dictate how the user agent decides to execute the content received. This seems like a case of wanting to have the cake and eat it too.
You can add this list to get around admiral domains: <a href="https://pgl.yoyo.org/adservers/admiral-domains.txt" rel="nofollow">https://pgl.yoyo.org/adservers/admiral-domains.txt</a>
Encrypt the list and then send a DMCA notice to any company who decrypts it without permission (non ad blocker) and tries to use this scheme again. That would seemingly be a valid DMCA claim, but IANAL.
Just encode the list of urls with htmlentities, base64, rot13, whatever. Then the DMCA can't be used to attack it.<p>Edit: Disagree? Please comment. It's attackable via the DMCA because the word/brand is in the file in it's copyrighted form. If you encode it such that it isn't in that form, it's protected from that approach.
This seems a bit hyperbolic. If you believe there's a battle between ad servers and ad blockers, it's obvious the ad blockers are winning by a lot.<p>IANAL but this seems like a questionable use of DMCA Takedown notice which, in any event, isn't actually binding. EasyList could probably file a counternotification and risk a lawsuit.
It is super ironic that the co-founder @jameshartig was previously at GrooveShark aka "The legality of Grooveshark's business model, which permitted users to upload copyrighted music, remains undetermined."
Now is a good time for me to plug Reek's Anti Anti-Adblock: <a href="http://reek.github.io/anti-adblock-killer/" rel="nofollow">http://reek.github.io/anti-adblock-killer/</a>
What's the DMCA rational here? Admiral wants to run code in my browser to offer their service, and thus instructing my browser not to run their code is circumventing them in a way that violates DMCA?<p>Screw that.
I use privacy badger, and unless I'm mistaken, it doesn't use a list to block content, it just blocks any 3rd party request that send cookie information.<p>Why are we relying on a list?
I used to read about 25 or so online news publications each week. A bit more on a monthly basis. I had paid subscriptions to a handful of publications (8-9?), spending more money on these subscriptions than I had ever done for paper newspapers and magazines in the past.<p>Over the past 3-4 years I have ditched most newspapers and I have dropped most subscriptions. For three main reasons:<p>- Both advertising content and the newspapers advertising themselves has gotten really annoying. No, I don't appreciate you throwing modal windows at me. No I'm not going to subscribe to your newsletter. No I don't appreciate having to click away a second or third modal window.<p>- Advertising masquerading as content. Sure, it is marked as "sponsored content", but every effort is made to hide that fact. This is dishonest.<p>- I don't gain anything from reading most of these publications. They don't make me smarter and I don't remember what I read one week later. The bulk of news articles are written by uninformed people incapable of useful analysis. Important news is widely disseminated anyway so I won't miss anything.<p>When the ads are more important than the content, I won't burden them with my page views. It isn't for me.<p>In the process I found that I had been spending too much time reading news. Limiting my news intake to just a few news sources (3-4) whose biases I understand, and at least which I can try to adjust for, is enough. The number of books I've consumed per year has had a sharp uptick since I stopped reading as many news websites.
This outlines a great reason as to why Github silo can be risky and have adverse side effects.<p>Does github offer the ability to host repositories in other legal jurisdictions than the US?
Hey Admiral, and websites using this anti ad blocking technology,<p>I don't want to circumvent your copyright access control. I really don't.<p>All that I ask is a way to quickly and easily identify such sites so that I can block them and never ever visit them again. Never ever. Even if the sites and Admiral quit this despicable reprehensible behavior, I won't know it -- ever. Because I simply will never be back again.<p>Thank you!
So right now this is one of the top stories on HN. How ad-blockers are being threatened and from comments below, "how annoying website subscription requests are."<p>Later this week, I expect we'll see another post about the derth of quality journalism and the "unfortunate" continued growth of buzzfeed-style and listicles taking over the net, slowly killing off quality content.
Wow, this really stinks. They (Admiral) supposedly figured out how to use DMCA-1201 to prevent ad blockers from adding their domains. That's a glaring example which shows why this anti-circumvention garbage needs to be completely repealed.<p>As some proposed, they should move the repo out of the jurisdiction with these corrupted anti-circumvention laws.
So, if the DMCA request turns out to be valid (e.g. hypothetically in court), shouldn't all the ad-serving domains just include a similar anti-adblock measure on their ad servers, thus making it so, that blocking their servers would count as a circumvention?
>"However, further research showed that this domain hosts the code of an anti-adblocking startup Admiral"<p>Who goes to work for an anti ad blocking startup? What is their mission statement "to make the web a more intrusive place"?<p>I am OK with Ads and understand their purpose in the business model. The reason I use and ad blocker is because of how intrusive they are to consuming actual content. You can subscribe yes but you will still get intrusive ads:<p><a href="http://www.kirkville.com/i-pay-for-news-why-do-i-still-see-ads/" rel="nofollow">http://www.kirkville.com/i-pay-for-news-why-do-i-still-see-a...</a>
There is a PR to add it back in: <a href="https://github.com/easylist/easylist/pull/500" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/easylist/easylist/pull/500</a>
Seems to me this can be handled the way the open-source community always handles such drama: fork the repo a bunch of times. I'll probably start keeping local copies of filter lists as well.
Yes because DMCAs work so well at stopping content distribution. It's not like the lists can't be hosted on other sites, dare I say a bay where many pirates roam.
What's with the "they would only take action if GitHub agreed." ? I'm confused, what's the link between GitHub and EasyLink (except code hosting)?
Wonder if we could create a git in the blockchain... where DMCA just can't exist/happen since there's no central authority to ask to take stuff down...
What's to stop people from forking off that list and transitioning to another one? Like what if ad blockers just switched to use EasyList2 instead of EasyList?
Is there any incentive or law that causes Github to accept digitally submitted DMCA orders through a web form at all? If it was possible for them to require individually signed (by an actual person with a pen, not a picture of a signature), individually snail-mailed requests, then that would at least make the process take O(n) time and O(n) money, making it a bit harder to abuse.
You can tell a young person wrote that copy from the use of "on accident" instead of "by accident" on the DMCA image.<p><a href="https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/5947035/29184514-276eeacc-7e0f-11e7-8a25-339659185ed3.png" rel="nofollow">https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/5947035/29184514-2...</a>
The reason why this is possible is because DMCA by itself is biased towards interests of copyright holders and therefore can be abused. You can always claim that some domain is used for protecting copyright and therefore blocking access to that domain as well as distributing software that can do it is clearly a violation of DMCA.
This is the second time in a few months that I have heared DCMA and github have come up (GadgetBridge). At this point in time I do feel that github's policy on DCMA tale down notices are a little heavy handed am I right in thinking that DCMA is a US only issue?
I'm struggling to understand how preventing access to a tracking pixel circumvents copyright.<p>Does this make sense to anyone? It sounds like they're "crying DMCA" because someone turned off their analytics? Can analytics be a "right" under copyright?
<i>> We had no option but to remove the filter without putting the Easylist repo in jeopardy.</i><p>Or, you know, host your project somewhere that's actually free & open. Yet another reason GitHub is about the worst place to host community software.
How to really fix this: make an extension that detects when a request is made to a domain owned by these scumbags and pop up a warning message, allowing the user to make the right decision and close the tab and go elsewhere.
A quick Google search reveals the following.<p>"Admiral identifies audiences with ad blockers turned on, works to re-establish those users (by opting in to a lightened ad experience, say, or asking to be whitelisted) and then makes a small cut of every ad served to the reacquired audience."<p>Source: <a href="https://adexchanger.com/publishers/another-ad-blocking-solutions-vendor-new-approach/" rel="nofollow">https://adexchanger.com/publishers/another-ad-blocking-solut...</a><p>tl;dr
Admiral is a startup that measures an audience's "ad block rate". If the rate is high, they then work to "establish explicit value propositions with users and then serve them with minimal tags and tracking". It also mentions plans to try to process micropayments.<p>"Admiral is built for a world where ad blockers have won."<p>Source: <i>Id.</i><p>tl;dr
Unless the founder has changed course from what is described in the 2016 article, as far as I can tell, this startup <i>relies on widespread usage of adblockers</i>. If users do not use adblockers, then this startup has nothing to sell.<p>VC: "What happens if the ad blockers block the servers that serve the ad blocker tracking image?"<p>Founder: "I'll send them DMCA notices."<p>VC: "Excellent. I'm in."<p>?
From Admiral's responding blogpost:<p>> 5. We asked them 24 days ago to remove functionalclam[.]com on the original commit.<p>> Transparent engagement between publishers and visitors is a critical piece of that.<p>Umm, no? Admiral created an account that they hoped would be mistaken as an official github bot or something. And then, instead of asking, they threatened disruption of the repository.<p>So, in summary, they:<p>* Tried to hide their identity
* Tried to trick people into thinking they were Github
* Threatened, not asked, to remove the site from the list<p>Look, I'm okay with them wanting to remove a server that helps inform users that they'd like to show ads on their customers sites. At the very least, though, be honest about it.<p>Also, bless the EFF, man. Heading over there to donate right now.
Personally, this could be a real problem, if Ad services decide to pry open the doors on our ability to deny them our screen real estate. I block Ads, primarily due to the fact that I don't want my web surfing history and behaviors captured by some uncontrollable mob a ad-servers. Further, most advertisements are akin to the dreaded <flash> tag of old! animated, ugly, and obtrusive.<p>We are coming to a point in the Internets genesis, where technology should evolve to allow the "information consumer" to directly reward the "information producer"... without the need of an intermediary like Google Adwords, etc. etc.