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Set up a cheap cloud hosted adblocker in an hour for $2.50 a month

gomez.wtf

51–60 of 128 posts

Re: Set up a cheap cloud hosted adblocker in an hour for $2.50 a month

#51
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Notwithstanding the irony of one google service hurting another, the free tier only has 1GB of free egress traffic right?

Dang, you're right, I forgot about that. So not so suitable, unfortunately. Seems like root + a local hosts adblocker is still the best solution for Android, or a local VPN for iOS (do they have those on Android? never checked).

Ideally you'd want to have L7 filtering so an SSL terminating proxy is the best thing short of running a fully functional copy of uBlock on your mobile device, lest you run into issues where removing ads on youtube also interferes with normal site function.

Re: Set up a cheap cloud hosted adblocker in an hour for $2.50 a month

#52
post #4

My number one reason for rooting my phone is blocking ads on a hosts-file level. It also stopped me from being able to play pokemon go, which I assume is for the best.

Why not just use Firefox with uBlock? Or do you use a lot of free apps with ads that don't offer a pay for no ads option?

not-op here, but your question made me wonder: If you've paid for a freemium upgrade in an app that relies on Google's ad network, does that default to completely disabling the ads integration?

In other words, is the app still feeding data points into the ad network even though it may not be displaying ads? I had assumed it was, but your question makes me think otherwise.

Re: Set up a cheap cloud hosted adblocker in an hour for $2.50 a month

#53
post #4

My number one reason for rooting my phone is blocking ads on a hosts-file level. It also stopped me from being able to play pokemon go, which I assume is for the best.

Why not just use Firefox with uBlock? Or do you use a lot of free apps with ads that don't offer a pay for no ads option?

not-op here, but your question made me wonder: If you've paid for a freemium upgrade in an app that relies on Google's ad network, does that default to completely disabling the ads integration?

In other words, is the app still feeding data points into the ad network even though it may not be displaying ads? I had assumed it was, but your question makes me think otherwise.

Re: Set up a cheap cloud hosted adblocker in an hour for $2.50 a month

#54

Just a heads-up, you can get 1 CPU and 0.6 gigs of RAM for free with the new entry tier of GCP: https://cloud.google.com/free/ (Disclaimer: Google employee, unrelated product area)

So, one gets 1 VPS for free forever..?

Yeah. Forever. That's how cloud works.

Re: Set up a cheap cloud hosted adblocker in an hour for $2.50 a month

#55
post #44

Note that this is just a DNS-level adblocker, which is already quite useful (I use a HOSTS file myself) but isn't quite as powerful as an actual MITM/filtering proxy like Proxomitron which can more precisely remove the content you don't want without having to block entire domains. If you use DNS-only blocking, you will often see error messages in place of banners and other oddities, because of sites which partly host…

Woah, Proxomitron, that's a blast from the distant past! Has anyone picked up development of anything similar these days?

There's Privoxy and Proximodo, but they both lack HTTPS filtering support. There's also https://github.com/amate/Proxydomo which appears to be based on Proximodo and seems to use wolfSSL so it may be able to do TLS MITM, but the documentation is unfortunately all in Japanese.

...and of course at the high end there's the enterprise filtering middleboxes which are probably too expensive and difficult to configure for personal use.

Re: Set up a cheap cloud hosted adblocker in an hour for $2.50 a month

#56
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Notwithstanding the irony of one google service hurting another, the free tier only has 1GB of free egress traffic right?

Dang, you're right, I forgot about that. So not so suitable, unfortunately. Seems like root + a local hosts adblocker is still the best solution for Android, or a local VPN for iOS (do they have those on Android? never checked).

Or, you know, you could actually pay for a reddit app without ads.

Re: Set up a cheap cloud hosted adblocker in an hour for $2.50 a month

#57
post #29

I did the same thing but using an old netbook I had lying around. It lives under the house running Pi-Hole and a few other things. I wrote about it here http://www.boyter.org/2015/12/pi-hole-ubuntu-14-04/ No idea what power draw it has (probably $5 a month?) but I have a large solar array so I doubt it costs me anything to actually run. I also get to recycle some old hardware. EDIT - Seems that post was linked to by…

You must be blessed enough to have a fast upload speed. I'm still trapped at ~10Mbps. Thanks, Spectrum/TWC!

Re: Set up a cheap cloud hosted adblocker in an hour for $2.50 a month

#58
post #13

This is really neat and I had thought about doing this when I acquired a new Android device that I don't have root on. Alternatively, a program was made to host a DNS process on the phone in userland that downloads blacklists as well as uses external well known nameservers. Then use build in VPN client to redirect all DNS queries through to the daemon. DNS66 has been doing a fine job since I started using it last wee…

I use Netguard (https://github.com/M66B/NetGuard) and found it to be better polished than DNS66, check it out if you're interested, I'm a happy user.
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