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Mmm, Pi-hole

troyhunt.com

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Re: Mmm, Pi-hole

#101

Post by user812 »

ryandrake wrote: post #47
windexh8er wrote: post #26

I'm surprised this is the top slot right now. Troy, generally, puts out interesting info on security related news however this feels a bit minimal. Since the project has been around a number of years now, and it's not relegated to only a RPi I would have expected him to delve into things a bit more. Pi-hole will also break things. I think the common one I always heard from users on my network at home were that Google…

It’s essentially dnsmasq which can be run directly on your wireless router if you are using custom firmware. No separate hw needed, no need to horse around with dockers or containers or any of that stuff. I’d guess a lot of people are already running dnsmasq for other purposes, so adding the blocklist and periodically updating it should be trivial.

And Hacker News is essentially just a bit of HTML, CSS and lots of words.

Re: Mmm, Pi-hole

#102

Post by TheSmiddy »

Tomte wrote: post #64
windexh8er wrote: post #26

I'm surprised this is the top slot right now. Troy, generally, puts out interesting info on security related news however this feels a bit minimal. Since the project has been around a number of years now, and it's not relegated to only a RPi I would have expected him to delve into things a bit more. Pi-hole will also break things. I think the common one I always heard from users on my network at home were that Google…

Of course I have deployed it on a Raspberry. I don't have another always-on computer, and while it's not the only supported target, it is the one most Pi-Hole users have, so I get maximum community support. I'm doubting whether electricity cost might be too high (it's getting mighty warm), but I haven't measured it, yet. So far, I love my Pi-Hole. Absolutely no problems with it.

At 100% power draw the charger I use to power my pi uses 5 watts so you're pretty safe on the power.

Re: Mmm, Pi-hole

#103

Post by SketchySeaBeast »

krageon wrote: post #87
SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what's the impetus for the news business to be available online? If the world wide web should be a free love utopia of data slurping why would these agencies, who have been built on the assumption that the creation and presentation of their data has an inherent worth? How do they get remunerated for their efforts? Or do they just never try to take advantage of this new epoch and die off, leaving us with a billion…

I would pay for a source of journalism that had any actual effort put in it and wasn't blatantly and hilariously wrong almost all of the time. Sadly news agencies don't fit that bill at all.

So do you/would you pay for something like the New York times?

Re: Mmm, Pi-hole

#104

Post by lvh »

sciurus wrote: post #89

I don't use a browser extension, I use Firefox's built-in tracking protection. It is only enabled by default in private browsing mode, but it's easy to enable it for all your browsing. See https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/tracking-protection I get 126 requests and 2.3 MB transferred on Daily Mail Australia, which seems comparable or better than what Troy saw with Pi-hole. See https://postimg.cc/3WYwZf3b (Disclosu…

This is great: it has most of the benefits of an extension without the concern the extension gets compromised (you already have to trust your browser). The only downside is it doesn't address ads in things that aren't browsers, like mobile apps and the like.

I wonder how long it's going to take for ads to be implemented server-side entirely.

Re: Mmm, Pi-hole

#105

Post by slantyyz »

WorkLifeBalance wrote: post #16

Someone on here recently recommended uMatrix for this purpose and I find that a nice trade-off between usability and request blocking. It's an extension but given it's less opaque than a generic ad-blocker I feel more in control and that it's less likely to go 'rogue' like adblockers do.

uMatrix, while having a bit of a dense UI, is what I prefer as well.

I installed a pi-hole in my home network about a week ago, and it survived less than a week.

My wife likes using sites like eBates when she shops online, and it redirects her through a random sequence of tracking sites before landing on a site like the Gap. It caused all sorts of problems for her, as those sites were being blocked.

If I was going to keep the pi-hole running, I would have had to constantly be adding white list entries. Or, I could have manually created a black list from scratch. I was not interested in doing either.

I found that dropping a handful of domains in uMatrix got rid of most ads (but not tracking), and that was good enough for my uses.

Re: Mmm, Pi-hole

#106

Post by jwilk »

windexh8er wrote: post #26

I'm surprised this is the top slot right now. Troy, generally, puts out interesting info on security related news however this feels a bit minimal. Since the project has been around a number of years now, and it's not relegated to only a RPi I would have expected him to delve into things a bit more. Pi-hole will also break things. I think the common one I always heard from users on my network at home were that Google…

> DoH or DoT

I wasn't familiar with these terms and they are a bit ungooglable. :-/

DoH = DNS-over-HTTPS

DoT = DNS-over-TLS

Re: Mmm, Pi-hole

#107

Post by drb91 »

ricketycricket wrote: post #86
chupasaurus wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can wind up a Linux VDS with dnsmasq and blacklist of domains, then use it on any device everywhere.

If you trust your ability to secure a publicly-accessible DNS server. Pretty attractive target. Also, you can't usually specify DNS servers on cellular connections. The VPN setup would address that.

> Also, you can't usually specify DNS servers on cellular connections.

From what I understand this is only iOS.

Re: Mmm, Pi-hole

#108

Post by drb91 »

lbriner wrote: post #95
theandrewbailey wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, ads are the reason websites are bloated. I don't mind websites loading 50 MB if I'm in awe of the amazing multimedia presentation it's giving me. 50 MB of ads just... isn't.

That's not always true. Check out the new GMail, my new corporate account has no ads but it still weighs in at 25MB (well 28MB now - still asyncing stuff!) for the inbox. In this case, the largest resources are Javascript and CSS (yes 1.2MB CSS files!). The weird thing is that it appears to be making requests with different cache-busting strings and getting resources that are the same size. (32MB now, I haven't done…

> Check out the new GMail, my new corporate account has no ads but it still weighs in at 25MB (well 28MB now - still asyncing stuff!) for the inbox.

The new gmail is the slowest web app I have ever used. It's gotten so bad I've started managing my email on my relatively snappy inbox iOS client.

It wouldn't be so bad if they didn't load so much crap, like the gchat functionality nobody has used since 2008.

Re: Mmm, Pi-hole

#109

Post by FroshKiller »

andreasvc wrote: post #83
briffle wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't work the same as pihole. PiHole blocks ads on ALL devices on your network. Your computer, your laptop, your phone, your kids kindle, etc. As long as they are on your network, they are protected (and browsing web pages on an older phone, things are much faster)

Yup, that's a downside. The advantage is that it's much simpler and will also work when you're not on your home network.

Well, I'm connected to my home network via VPN when I'm not on my home network, so....

Re: Mmm, Pi-hole

#110

Post by SippinLean »

paulcole wrote: post #66
gnufied wrote: post #49

So I have tried using pi-hole in past and I think one of the problems is - some websites refusing to function if ads are blocked. IIRC - British Airways website uses some javascript that requires ad to be disabled for finishing checking in. It may have changed now but there are other websites too which may or may not work as expected. With browser extensions it is typically easy to disable the ad blocker one time and…

> some websites refusing to function if ads are blocked Don't visit those sites! They want your eyes and/or your money (if a subscription is an option) and you don't want to give it to them. Just stop going there! Edit: I don’t understand the downvotes. Sites aren’t obligated to give you something for nothing. Why does it feel like that’s the default view here?

but there are other people that live in or visit my home. Maybe they want to visit those sites.

I'd love a pi-hole like solution that was as easy to temporarily disable as a browser extension.

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