False positives on lightswitch05's hosts lists

All AMP pages stopped loading on my phone and laptop. It seems that lightswitch05’s hosts list now blocks some ampproject.org URLs even though they’re not all are used for tracking or ad delivering (eg: status.ampproject.org):

0.0.0.0 ampproject.org 0.0.0.0 cdn.ampproject.org 0.0.0.0 status.ampproject.org 0.0.0.0 www.ampproject.org

Just a few hours ago some podtrac.com URLs were added. This service is used by many podcasts and it’s impossible to download new episodes if www.podtrac.com is blocked:

0.0.0.0 podtrac.com 0.0.0.0 analytics.podtrac.com 0.0.0.0 dev.podtrac.com 0.0.0.0 east.dev.podtrac.com 0.0.0.0 west.dev.podtrac.com 0.0.0.0 dts.podtrac.com 0.0.0.0 www.podtrac.com

There are other examples - intercom.io, for example, used for things like customer support - and again even their own website is blocked. It’s like blocking www.google.com because Google runs Google Analytics.

I’m not trying to criticise lightswitch05’s work, I can see this being useful for some users, but I think there are too many false positives on both of his lists.

[lightswitch05]

I removed AMP: lightswitch05@6e62515eb4d8484d8a018200b1e1e466f6d0e263 I also removed the podtrac root domain (left dts.podtrac.com and analytics.podtrac.com): lightswitch05@365185639e9ce0550d611097ba765dc57c86fe7e

As for the domain expansion, hosts lists do not support wildcards. I programmatically expand domains as a effort to make up for the loss of wildcard blocking. This method definitely ends up including innocuous subdomains like the examples you gave. But that wouldn’t be any different then wildcard blocking.

I’ll continue programmatically expanding domains that I believe deserve entire wildcard blocking, but I’m happy to remove ones that cause issues. If there are cases you disagree with me on, there is always the whitelist feature.

[lightswitch05]

@celsoazevedo I would be happy for you to open tickets like this on my repo. I definitely don’t want to break legitimate services. I also don’t want to add to the maintenance workload of this repo.

ampproject

The project enables the creation of websites and ads that are consistently fast, beautiful and high-performing across devices and distribution platforms

The rest of the home page goes on to talk more about ads, higher engagement, etc. Can either @celsoazevedo or @Skaronator provide me with a concrete example of how blocking this domain breaks legitimate services? I’ve actually had this one blocked for a little while and haven’t notice any ill effects.

podtrac

The standard for podcast analytics

Same thing goes for this site. If its breaking a bunch of stuff, I’ll remove it. My podcasts are working fine - but that not an all inclusive test 😃 - concrete examples would be appreciated. Worst case I can limit the blocking to analytics.podtrac.com.