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The Brotherhood of the Ad Blockers

bloomberg.com

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Re: The Brotherhood of the Ad Blockers

#2

Post by djhworld »

I've been running a Pi-Hole instance for about a year now, it's excellent. I could never get it to work with my router, but manually configuring the DNS on my devices to point to it works just as well.

One thing that became immediately apparent was how much faster browsing the web got after I turned it on.

Re: The Brotherhood of the Ad Blockers

#3

Post by gruez »

Is it me, or is pi hole way more popular than it should be? Compared to the alternatives, it's worse in almost every way. It only works on your local network, so good luck blocking ads while you're at work, using mobile data, or at a cafe. Browser based adblockers (which is available on most desktop browsers, mobile safari, and firefox for android) can block elements and url patterns, pi hole can't. Even if you're on a browser that can't use adblock (mostly android), you can still use VPN based adblockers (the ones that reroute your traffic through a local VPN), which work regardless of what network you're on. And worst of all, all of the alternatives are free, which can't be said for pi hole[1].

[1] I know you can run pi hole on your desktop OS, which is technically free, but you need to leave your computer on 24/7 which undoubtedly raises your electricity bill.

Re: The Brotherhood of the Ad Blockers

#5

Post by FreeKill »

djhworld wrote: post #2

I've been running a Pi-Hole instance for about a year now, it's excellent. I could never get it to work with my router, but manually configuring the DNS on my devices to point to it works just as well. One thing that became immediately apparent was how much faster browsing the web got after I turned it on.

Agreed, same for me. I did get it to work with my router as well, and it works amazingly well. When you supplement it with the community ban lists as well, it's incredibly powerful and updated quite frequently. Highly recommend it. Works great off a Raspberry-Pi.

Re: The Brotherhood of the Ad Blockers

#7

Post by vsviridov »

djhworld wrote: post #2

I've been running a Pi-Hole instance for about a year now, it's excellent. I could never get it to work with my router, but manually configuring the DNS on my devices to point to it works just as well. One thing that became immediately apparent was how much faster browsing the web got after I turned it on.

I resorted to having that PiHole to be my DHCP server and I turned off DHCP service on the router. It's a bit more fragile, but more flexible as well...

Re: The Brotherhood of the Ad Blockers

#9

Post by johnvanommen »

gruez wrote: post #3

Is it me, or is pi hole way more popular than it should be? Compared to the alternatives, it's worse in almost every way. It only works on your local network, so good luck blocking ads while you're at work, using mobile data, or at a cafe. Browser based adblockers (which is available on most desktop browsers, mobile safari, and firefox for android) can block elements and url patterns, pi hole can't. Even if you're on…

I thought you had to root your Android to block ads?

In my household we have four people with smartphones and another four laptops. That's a lot of ads to block.

Blocking ads on my laptop made a more noticeable improvement to web browsing than increasing my network bandwidth.

Re: The Brotherhood of the Ad Blockers

#10

Post by nasredin »

ch4s3 wrote: post #4

Does anyone know if there are performance penalties associated with using a Raspberry PI as your DNS server? Also, a link[1] to the Pi-Hole page. [1] https://pi-hole.net/

Using DNS blocking with Pixelserv on DD-WRT, 300 MHz single-core IIRC, there is no noticable performance hit.
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