2014-07-26 - It's gone.
UPDATE: Well it's been more than a week and the place is still up, so who knows. In the meantime, AdBlock Plus maintains a list of subscriptions.
was digg.com/tech_news/pierceive_com_out_of_funds
While researching the Tor onion-router anonymizer, I ended up checking out Polipo, a surfing speedup proxy. So far the proxy is wonderful!
I've been investigating some tweaks like ad-blocking, because I want to lighten the burden on my system by stripping away some of the reliance on Firefox add-ons. So Adblock Plus could be replaced by Polipo "forbidden URLs". I may also figure out how to use some other mechanism ([http://www.squid-cache.org/ Squid]?) to rewrite content before it's delivered to my browser. This might eliminate Greasemonkey, but I suspect I would have to get a whole lot smarter before I could properly edit other people's pages. Still, I'd love to be able to correct certain issues I have with my commonly-visited websites.
So I was investigating ad-blocking with Polipo, and the forbidden URLs looks like the one from Adblock Plus. I figured I'd go to the source and visit http://www.pierceive.com/ to get their famed advertising blacklist.
But ran out of money!
I'd bet a lot of people have been silently using this service, especially since it's an automatically-updating subscription with Adblock Plus. It's so crucial I lack the words. I also lack the funds to donate. =(
I certainly hope some angel comes along and donates enough to keep them running, and that the community rallies to support this essential service.