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Pi-hole – A black hole for Internet advertisements

pi-hole.net

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Re: Pi-hole – A black hole for Internet advertisements

#51

Post by [deleted] »

SamBam wrote: post #49
Bedon292 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's another good point. The people who are actively blocking ads are probably not the ones going to click them, even if they are not blocked. So not worth the money to invest in unblocking the ads going to people who aren't going to click them.

People greatly overestimate their ability to completely ignore ads, and to make purchasing decisions free from influence. Sure, I believe that I am pretty much completely unaffected ads, but then so does almost everybody else .

[deleted]

Re: Pi-hole – A black hole for Internet advertisements

#52

Post by nikon »

Using this at home. Really interesting to see the blocked domains on the dashboard. Realised my two Samsung Smart TV's were constantly calling home for example. You'll eventually whitelist some things that break like Spotify/Sonos IIRC.

I may switch to an Odroid C2 if I go with a permanent VPN connection as the throughput of the RPi3 network port is not the best.

Re: Pi-hole – A black hole for Internet advertisements

#53

Post by dbg31415 »

nkkollaw wrote: post #30

With all the ad blocking technologies that are coming up, I wonder if Google is devising something to counteract these efforts. For instance, since browser-based ad blockers work from what I know by blocking known domain names, couldn't Google create random subdomains and serve the code from a different subdomain every day or even every few hours, as well as change the way their JavaScript and HTML looks? Even someth…

Not that enough people use them at the moment, but loading from random sources would mess up Content Security Policies.

* Security/Guidelines/Web Security - MozillaWiki || https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Guidelines/Web_Security#Co...

Mozilla makes a good tool to let you scan and report on this sort of thing for any site.

* Observatory by Mozilla :: Scan Results for news.ycombinator.com || https://observatory.mozilla.org/analyze.html?host=news.ycomb...

Re: Pi-hole – A black hole for Internet advertisements

#54

Post by Operyl »

toad_tyrrant wrote: post #31
wtfishackernews wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not strictly useful for yourself, but you could run a tor relay https://www.torproject.org/docs/tor-doc-relay.html.en

That is a decent idea. I have never used Tor though, and I can't say I know the consequences of running a relay. So I'd probably skip that.

You don't have to run an exit node. Just relaying to other nodes helps a ton!

Re: Pi-hole – A black hole for Internet advertisements

#55

Post by Bedon292 »

SamBam wrote: post #49
Bedon292 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's another good point. The people who are actively blocking ads are probably not the ones going to click them, even if they are not blocked. So not worth the money to invest in unblocking the ads going to people who aren't going to click them.

People greatly overestimate their ability to completely ignore ads, and to make purchasing decisions free from influence. Sure, I believe that I am pretty much completely unaffected ads, but then so does almost everybody else .

True. I am not meaning to say I am perfect (or that anyone can be), the hunch is just the expected click through rate of someone such as myself is likely much lower than someone who doesn't even know what an ad blocker is.

Re: Pi-hole – A black hole for Internet advertisements

#56

Post by M_Grey »

SamBam wrote: post #44
Bedon292 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You would just block *.addomain.com at that point. Which is already what is being done on many of the blockers. There will always be domains to block, even if they add new domains, the blockers will probably be able to block them just as fast.

How about if they load them through *.google.com? Sure, you could whitelist www.google.com, mail.google.com, etc, but couldn't they keep ahead of you if they were ok with using their main domain? They could even start using www.google.com/ad-id

Would Google really want to do that? It might be the impetus some people need to say "fuck it" to Google.

Re: Pi-hole – A black hole for Internet advertisements

#57

Post by j_s »

SamBam wrote: post #44
Bedon292 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You would just block *.addomain.com at that point. Which is already what is being done on many of the blockers. There will always be domains to block, even if they add new domains, the blockers will probably be able to block them just as fast.

How about if they load them through *.google.com? Sure, you could whitelist www.google.com, mail.google.com, etc, but couldn't they keep ahead of you if they were ok with using their main domain? They could even start using www.google.com/ad-id

Yes, domain fronting through Google App Engine is already helping Signal bypass censorship: https://whispersystems.org/blog/doodles-stickers-censorship/

Currently domain-based filtering is probably too small a proportion of traffic to even care about, but as ease-of-use comes to the masses there may come a point where the pro-ad side will implement this.

Re: Pi-hole – A black hole for Internet advertisements

#58

Post by ckastner »

Gaelan wrote: post #20
ckastner wrote: post #12

The installation shortcut given is curl -sSL https://install.pi-hole.net | bash and one is expected to execute this as root. Yes, I know this is supposed to be a convenience thing, but I wish people wouldn't actively encourage this pattern.

Unless you've audited the source, a manual install isn't any better.

Hence why I merely opposed actively encouraging this pattern.

I can't stop people from doing potentially dangerous things, but I don't have to promote those things, either.

Re: Pi-hole – A black hole for Internet advertisements

#59

Post by ce4 »

j_s wrote: post #18

You may have missed the precursor discussion this past weekend, a walkthrough of setting up pihole on VPS: Set up a cheap cloud hosted adblocker in an hour for $2.50 a month https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13852109 Of particular added value there was mention of Android apps that can be setup to self-host an ad-blocking VPN / hosts filtering without rooting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13853408 https://g…

Alas the plugin that does host-based blocking is not available in the play store version, it's/was a paid feature for the version on GH only. (edit: Don't know the current state though. remember from some time ago when I last checked it).

Re: Pi-hole – A black hole for Internet advertisements

#60

Post by taejo »

ggcdn wrote: post #46
nkkollaw wrote: post #30

With all the ad blocking technologies that are coming up, I wonder if Google is devising something to counteract these efforts. For instance, since browser-based ad blockers work from what I know by blocking known domain names, couldn't Google create random subdomains and serve the code from a different subdomain every day or even every few hours, as well as change the way their JavaScript and HTML looks? Even someth…

Could the website server make the requests to the ad networks, then serve the responses as if it were native content? Current browser-based blocking tech would be rendered useless, right?

No, adblockers also use things like div ids, and potentially even heuristics like image shape.
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