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Ask HN: What ist your AdBlock strategy?
161–170 of 189 posts
Re: Ask HN: What ist your AdBlock strategy?
#162Firefox and uBO, plus pi-hole on an old Celeron NUC alongside some other stuff (Samba, HA, etc). Pi-Hole is worth it, I highly recommend it. You don't need a Pi, just grab a cheap used mini PC off eBay. It's been a total set-and-forget thing.
>You don't need a Pi, just grab a cheap used mini PC off eBay I run pihole in a VM myself. And it works nicely. It doesn't use very much in the way of resources either. In fact, I've been thinking about moving to a docker/podman container. I don't use "upstream" resolvers either. Rather, I use my own recursive resolver. Those plus uBlockOrigin do the job quite nicely for me.
You certainly put in more effort than I did! I just grabbed the boilerplate Docker and systemd stuff off the web, told it "go" and added a few extra adlists. I also stuck nginx in front of it, but that was really just so that I could route different subdomains to HA, IPFS, and Pi-Hole.
Re: Ask HN: What ist your AdBlock strategy?
#163My strategy is based around a single premise: zero tolerance on advertising other than self-promotion or mentions of products directly related to subject of the page I am on. With that last bit I mean the products actually have to be part of the thing I'm reading, e.g. when I'm reading something about how to solder some specific type of component I'm fine with the solder being mentioned together with a link where the…
I think your process is quite reasonable, and should be adopted as SOP by most. Advertising (any sponsored messaging) is a bane, it plays on conflicts of interest in trusting others' to induce you to hand resources over.
Re: Ask HN: What ist your AdBlock strategy?
#164I haven't looked at pihole once after I discovered adguard home. https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/services/dns/adguard-hom...
How do you reduce the latency of the upstream DNS resolvers? The closest Cloudflare servers give me 20-25ms DNS resolution times, but with Cloudflare as the upstream DNS in Adguard Home, I'm getting more around 80-110ms.
Maybe not what you’re looking for, but I put adguard home on a VPS (although later switched to a “real” dns software prior to benchmarking) and is
faster^1 than connecting directly to cloudflare from home.
[1] https://stonegray.ca/dns/#performance
Edit: for the curious, I use technetium as the server, nginx to proxy it (security stuff, prioritize traffic from my zerotier network, do DNS/DoT translation, etc) and docker/letsencrypt/watchtower/netdata for auto updating and status reporting, packaged as a single docker compose I can deploy easily.
Re: Ask HN: What ist your AdBlock strategy?
#165Noscript temporary whitelist only combined with uBlock origin and sponsorblock. A CSS toggle button is important too to be able to read text when the page doesn't display correctly. As well as a "superstop" button to (near) completely end all JS execution in a tab after loading. After 15 years of using NoScript this way I have developed a sixth sense for the minimal set of individual hostnames/ips need to be JS allow…
I use Firefox + uMatrix to achieve a similar setup.
One advantage of using only a script blocker in favor of a proper ad blocker is that I don't shut off reasonable ads but only the ones that do shady stuff with a lot of computation and tracking on the client PC.
uMatrix has the advantage that it additionally blocks cookies by default, making the tracking even harder.
Re: Ask HN: What ist your AdBlock strategy?
#166Ublock origin on desktop browsers.
Pihole with the default ad list and additional ones to block some social media sites.
Then Pihole is configured to use Cloudflare 1.1.1.1 for families, and I use the adult+malware filter.
I’ve got WireGuard running on the pihole server to make this all available for mobile devices when out and about.
Re: Ask HN: What ist your AdBlock strategy?
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bit of an unrealistic comment, this might be a choice you can make for yourself, but most people don't live alone and share their internet connection with others – I doubt telling your partner or housemates to get a new bank because of the DNS ad blocker you set up on the network will go down well. Ad blockers pretty much all rely on community-maintained block-lists, there are always going to be mistakes in those tha…
> Bit of an unrealistic comment For other sites agreed, but a bank that can’t coexist with an adblocker you really have to ask yourself wtf said bank is doing. Everything on that site should come from ad free reputable domains. Also wouldn’t hurt if said bank tested their site with common browser configurations like ublock
Aren't banks sort of the poster children for legacy practices though? Only works with this or that browser, here are some weird password rules, yes I have an SVGA monitor, no I can't search older than 90 days, etc. I'm used to turning off my modern expectations and just getting into the 20 years-old flow for the time I'm logged into the average bank. No, I don't want to switch banks (where my mortgage and dozens of ACH linkages are set up) to have better ad blocker compatibility.
Re: Ask HN: What ist your AdBlock strategy?
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
What’s a CPE?
It's an networking term to distinguish between ISP-owned and customer-owned equipment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Customer-premises_equipment
minor nitpick, but it's not ownership so much as location. Sometimes the ISP will own the equipment, but it will be located on the customer premises rather than the ISP premises. It's an important distinction as you can't just rock up and do stuff to it.
Re: Ask HN: What ist your AdBlock strategy?
#169I use Firefox forks with uBlock. Librewolf on desktop and Fennec on android. My husband uses an iPhone, so I run DNS level ad blocking on my OpenWRT router. Works pretty well most of the time
How do you deal with sites you try accessing but have apps installed. I have hard time opening things in apps. And I end up going back to chrome just for ease.
Re: Ask HN: What ist your AdBlock strategy?
#170I literally JUST set this up for myself on Openwrt (Running on my Pi4) this past week. I tried two popular solutions that both didn't work well and/or I felt were not very intuitive to setup if I needed to re implement them in the future. I started with fresh factory images after each attempt.
The third one I found a very easy method and now am currently using Control-D DNS with free ad/tracker/malware blocking over the modern DoQ protocol. Got it running in less than 30 minutes. ControlD latency appears as fast as any free DNS I've tried (Quad9, OpenDNS for years, etc), including my own ISP, so I am lucky location-wise.
I'll send you all my notes and guidance if want. Email me at my throwaway xyzx
@
duck.com