Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Pi-hole – A black hole for Internet advertisements

pi-hole.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 320 posts

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

#151

Post by problems »

JoshMnem wrote: post #140
problems wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - Android doesn't provide fine-grained permissions control or root access, so users can't block ads. One caveat here - Google devices are probably some of the most allowing of root access and full device ownership - easily unlocked bootloaders basically allow it to be a one button process. Some manufacturers make you put your device on a shitlist with them before they'll give you a key to unlock the bootloader and…

I've never seen a way to root my phones without some risk of turning them into bricks. How would I quickly and safely get root access to a Galaxy Note III without risking the destruction of the device?

The Note 3 is not a Google-made device, it's made by Samsung. Google's own Nexus and Pixel devices allow it in a single button press, I'm unsure of other manufacturers except OnePlus which does the same as Google. As I said in my post, some devices are a lot better than others when it comes to this.

Also, bricking doesn't just happen, if you understand what you're doing you'll be fine. That "some risk" isn't random, it's in the case that you do something incredibly stupid. Get a custom recovery on there as soon as possible and you can pretty much recover anything.

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

#152

Post by literallycancer »

jcfrei wrote: post #95
hedora wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, you can always make it a pain to block ads.. but then who will use it?

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

#153

Post by no_wizard »

grp wrote: post #39
no_wizard wrote: post #24

PiHole is pretty cool, very 'plug n play' which I like. A sufficiently advanced average user can set it up without too much trouble just following on a guide, even a relatively tech savvy 'lay' person can do this. If you like a more technical solution I prefer something like running a Unbound + NSD server Here's some great tutorials on that: (Kudos to the people who write Calomel, i really liked these tutorials, it w…

Check: https://www.pcengines.ch/ Maybe you can get some alternatives based on those cards.

I'm actually wondering if they simply didn't repackage this hardware with a better then average design for a case, frankly. The specs are very similar. I think even though these are AMD embedded processors they're ARM, not sure though, it didn't say (or i missed it).

Thanks for the link!

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

#154

Post by JustSomeNobody »

Animats wrote: post #132

This is just a DNS filter. Why is it a big deal? DNS filters sort of work, but they're not new or magic. They trigger some ad-blocking detectors when the ads don't load.

Nobody is making a "big deal" about it[0]. What they did was wrap something well known up into a relatively easy to install "package". They're not claiming this is new or magic, just simple.

[0] Except, maybe, you.

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

#155

Post by allendoerfer »

I love how they recommend curl-bash-piping, but then put a disclaimer beneath it, even with a detailed post about it. As if people would not just copy paste it anyway. I think they were just trying to dodge the usual curl-pipe-bash-is-evil comment thread – unsuccessfully, since I started it anyway.

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

#156

Post by foodstances »

problems wrote: post #130
JoshMnem wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> - Android doesn't provide fine-grained permissions control or root access, so users can't block ads. One caveat here - Google devices are probably some of the most allowing of root access and full device ownership - easily unlocked bootloaders basically allow it to be a one button process. Some manufacturers make you put your device on a shitlist with them before they'll give you a key to unlock the bootloader and…

And yet Apple introduced a first-class ad blocking mechanism into iOS that even works in 3rd party apps (using SFSafariViewController). There are dozens of ad blocking apps available on the App Store, which are much more accessible to the average user than having to root your device and install apps that have full root privileges.

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

#157

Post by JustSomeNobody »

allendoerfer wrote: post #155

I love how they recommend curl-bash-piping, but then put a disclaimer beneath it, even with a detailed post about it. As if people would not just copy paste it anyway. I think they were just trying to dodge the usual curl-pipe-bash-is-evil comment thread – unsuccessfully, since I started it anyway.

Yes, this is evil. Installing software off of can be evil too.

Buyer beware.

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

#158

Post by problems »

foodstances wrote: post #156
problems wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - Android doesn't provide fine-grained permissions control or root access, so users can't block ads. One caveat here - Google devices are probably some of the most allowing of root access and full device ownership - easily unlocked bootloaders basically allow it to be a one button process. Some manufacturers make you put your device on a shitlist with them before they'll give you a key to unlock the bootloader and…

And yet Apple introduced a first-class ad blocking mechanism into iOS that even works in 3rd party apps (using SFSafariViewController). There are dozens of ad blocking apps available on the App Store, which are much more accessible to the average user than having to root your device and install apps that have full root privileges.

Yeah, that's definitely a step in the right direction, I certainly wouldn't say that Google does nothing to protect their interests in advertising - especially given their recent actions on the Chrome store with AdNauseum.

However, what I'm trying to get at is that, for example on iOS you still can't block in-app non-Safari ads at all. On Android you can do that if you want to, and a lot more, you can also block specific connections, block device-specific identifiers, APN lists, accelerometers, wake state, etc - it's a better compromise for someone concerned about privacy than other platforms even with this considered right now.

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

#159

Post by olyjohn »

geekamongus wrote: post #141
Animats wrote: post #132

This is just a DNS filter. Why is it a big deal? DNS filters sort of work, but they're not new or magic. They trigger some ad-blocking detectors when the ads don't load.

Easy to run at home with a web-based GUI for whitelisting, blacklisting and such. I like this tool a lot, personally, and it helps me feel better about keeping the family safe(r) online at home.

Agreed, it's been really nice to run at home. Took about an hour to set up from a diskless Pi I had sitting around, to a fully running system. Maintenance has been zero so far, and haven't had any downtime or anything.

The best part was when I first fired up the web interface and saw that it had already blocked 14 requests after hardly being up for more than 5 minutes. Nobody was home at the time, so it was kind of a wake up call to see idle devices reaching out to potential ad servers.

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

#160

Post by JustSomeNobody »

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…

> With all the ad blocking technologies that are coming up, I wonder if Google is devising something to counteract these efforts.

AMP

Post reply on HN