When I tried pi-hole I often noted some urls were added 'automagically' to the whitelist, they will show up a few days after I removed them. All of them were weird domains.
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Pi-hole – A black hole for Internet advertisements
91–100 of 320 posts
Re: Pi-hole – A black hole for Internet advertisements
#92With 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…
Google makes efforts to prevent ad-blocking: - Google Chrome for mobile doesn't allow add-ons so you can't install ad-blockers. (You can install browser extensions with Firefox for Android.) - Google Chrome uses a dark pattern where the address bar tends to send users to the Google search results page instead of to their final destination (compare the behavior with Firefox's). That means that even if you have an ad-b…
Here's another one I spotted recently:
- Android apps like YouTube and Google News use a built-in browser frame to show navigated-to web pages, rather than opening them in an external browser. The built-in frame uses Chrome tech, without add-ons. They used to allow you to open links by default in an external browser, but not any more.
Re: Pi-hole – A black hole for Internet advertisements
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ad blockers do a lot more than just block domains. They look for and remove divs/DOM elements that contain known ad naming schemes and remove them from the page. And if a site decides to start combating the ad blockers, the adblock list providers will update their rules specifically for the site in question. Adblock users get upset whenever they see ads, and report them pretty quickly. The business I work for tried b…
To me, that would be a sign that you are winning the battle. If enough websites fight ad blockers, especially big sites, and the people behind those ad blockers make clumsy mistakes, then users will reach a point where they uninstall the blocker.
Or they'll stop visiting the site.
Re: Pi-hole – A black hole for Internet advertisements
#94+1 for pfSense port. Also, not sure how I feel about having this device as my primary DNS server for my entire internal network. What if the project gets compromised and injects a number of malicious DNS entries, now my entire network is toast?
You can always review the code for yourself over on our github repo (https://github.com/pi-hole/pi-hole)! As well as the devs, there are so many pairs of eyes on the code that if anything fishy were to happen, everyone would know about it (not to mention it would completely undermine the hard work we've put into it over the past couple of years!)
Updates are manual, too, so unless you intervene, there is no reason that a working system would suddenly become compromised, except if somebody had access to your network. But then you have a different issue...
Re: Pi-hole – A black hole for Internet advertisements
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
The most promising front against ad blockers is forcing users to access your content with an application you control. That's why more and more websites want you to install their apps (Google search is installed by default on lots of android devices). It's very unfortunate that the incentives of users and content creators / advertisers aren't aligned very well and we will probably end up with most content creators dum…
I think pi-hole will at least partially block such things -- it intercepts at the network level. I guess you could have the app break itself if the ads won't load, but you can (mostly) do that in a browser. I guess, for network level ad blockers, I'm not seeing obvious advantages to a program written as an app vs a program written to run in a browser.
As others have mentioned, you could just serve ads and content from domains which you wouldn't want to block, like www.google.com. And if an app receives its content encrypted (eg. SSL) you can't do a lot of filtering at the network level apart from domain names.
Re: Pi-hole – A black hole for Internet advertisements
#96+1 for pfSense port. Also, not sure how I feel about having this device as my primary DNS server for my entire internal network. What if the project gets compromised and injects a number of malicious DNS entries, now my entire network is toast?
Not if you run it on an ARM system sadly.
Re: Pi-hole – A black hole for Internet advertisements
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
yep, the name does explain itself, but "pi" and the logo are hinting at raspberry pi
It might just be it was initially made for Raspberry pi and then expanded over time
Exactly that!
The name has just kind of stuck, even though you can in fact run it on most linux distros (We officially support Ubuntu/Debian based distros, but there is limited support for Centos, and even forks for Arch, and Docker!), on a whole host of different hardware.
Re: Pi-hole – A black hole for Internet advertisements
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ad blockers do a lot more than just block domains. They look for and remove divs/DOM elements that contain known ad naming schemes and remove them from the page. And if a site decides to start combating the ad blockers, the adblock list providers will update their rules specifically for the site in question. Adblock users get upset whenever they see ads, and report them pretty quickly. The business I work for tried b…
To me, that would be a sign that you are winning the battle. If enough websites fight ad blockers, especially big sites, and the people behind those ad blockers make clumsy mistakes, then users will reach a point where they uninstall the blocker.
> people behind those ad blockers make clumsy mistakes
What "mistake?" That the developers couldn't foresee and block the exact elements against ad-blockers before they became real?
Reading the parent comment, it seems users are not opposed to reporting specific instances for the greater good. This is obviously more energy consuming than uninstalling, so where do you get the idea people will all of a sudden stop using an adblock because it failed to get passed one or two sites?
We're already seeing anti-ad-blocker-blockers being developed to remedy this problem. And if they don't come fast enough, users can just turn off their adblock for one page and be done with it.
Direct advertising is a dying legacy tactic. The most successful ads these days are the ones you can't tell are ads. They're also the stronger poison of the two.
Re: Pi-hole – A black hole for Internet advertisements
#99This is really neat! I'm wondering why the name is so Raspberry Pi-specific ;) Is there a docker container for it already, by any chance?
Re: Pi-hole – A black hole for Internet advertisements
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Safari itself is an ad-blocker, with its "reader mode". I could hardly imagine opening a newspaper page without it. Actually, my iPad 2 isn't powerful enough anymore to open a newspaper page, except if I use the reader mode.