ADBLK-28: Review blocking of img1.wsimg.com



Issue Information

Issue Type: Bug
 
Priority: Major
Status: Closed

Reported By:
Ben Tasker
Assigned To:
Ben Tasker
Project: Adblock Lists (ADBLK)
Resolution: Done (2021-08-19 09:11:51)

Created: 2021-08-18 18:09:14
Time Spent Working


Description
The domain img1.wsimg.com was added to my blocklists quite a while ago in 423a33d.

It's used to host images for GoDaddy hosted sites, but crucially was also being used to inject unwanted tracking code without the site owner (much less the user) giving consent as part of GoDaddy's Real User Metrics (RUM) program.

At the time it came to my attention, the result was that it had broken a whole load of people's sites, preventing other scripts and images from loading.

More details here: https://www.igorkromin.net/index.php/2019/01/13/godaddy-is-sneakily-injecting-javascript-into-your-website-and-how-to-stop-it/

That was a couple of years ago, and blocking that domain does cause collateral damage - GoDaddy users will find their dashboard doesn't work properly, and blogs hosted with GoDaddy may not be able to serve images (as per https://github.com/bentasker/adblocklists/issues/3).

It'd be worth having a poke about and seeing whether GoDaddy still do this, with an eye to either

- Removing the block completely
- Refining the block so it catches their injected JS without blocking images/desirable content



Issue Links

Github #3
Commit 423a33d
Toggle State Changes

Activity


Based on this comment (https://www.holycowonlinemarketing.com/website-development/godaddy-hacks-wordpress-sites-says-monitoring-performance/#comment-21467) it looks like GoDaddy are still doing this.

They were serving their code from https://img1.wsimg.com/tcc/ so we can adjust to blocking that path. It submits to a domain under secureserver.net but the specific subdomain used seems to change. Best bet then is to just block that path.


Repo: adblocklists
Commit: 77a1ec49719e1207f2978fcc271d7871edc4aa4f
Author: B Tasker <github@<Domain Hidden>>

Date: Thu Aug 19 08:59:44 2021 +0100
Commit Message: Change block of img1.wsimg.com to be for path /tcc rather than domain wide, for ADBLK-28 / #3

The domain was originally blocked in 423a33d467304589c5756e987add60d16d4d6fc7 (details there), but was a bit broad - various GoDaddy hosted blogs serve images from this domain.



Modified (-)(+)
-------
config/manualblocks/00_general.txt
config/manualpages.txt




Webhook User-Agent

GitHub-Hookshot/59a1e9d


View Commit

btasker changed status from 'Open' to 'Resolved'
btasker added 'Done' to resolution
btasker changed status from 'Resolved' to 'Closed'