There is clearly a mass market for preconfigured plug-&-play versions of this. Reminds me of the little bits they used to (probably still do) sell to go between landline phones & the jack to screen telemarketers.
Mmm, Pi-hole
111–120 of 421 posts
Re: Mmm, Pi-hole
#112I 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.
True. For mobile browsing it works well as long as you use Firefox on your phone too, but it doesn't help for tracking and ads within apps. Pi-hole can help there, but only when you're connected to your home network.
Re: Mmm, Pi-hole
#113I managed to get it running on a few Intel Edison's (no longer supported by Intel) that were lying around. It makes browsing a stress free experience. For anyone looking to get it running on an Edison, check this out https://hello-w0r1d.github.io/Installing-Pi-hole-on-Intel-Ed...
Re: Mmm, Pi-hole
#114I'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…
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Re: Mmm, Pi-hole
#115Earlier 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.
You can also run pi-hole on a tiny VPS and set your DNS statically on all devices.
Re: Mmm, Pi-hole
#116Works for most basic ads. Unfortunately basic ads are a thing of the 90's. Does not work for most common ads nowadays, as youtube et. al. run them from the same domain as other important parts for the app/site to run. For these you have to use a different approach, like running an extension in the browser to block them.
I'm amazed that something that (to me) as simple as an ad and analytics proxy running on the website domain isn't more of a thing yet. That will already circumvent a lot of ad blockers. Well initially anyway, the ones based on blocklists / patterns will probably be updated quickly.
You really think anyone wants to maintain something like that, let alone subsidize the advertisers' bandwidth costs?
Re: Mmm, Pi-hole
#117> [...] it's also the fact that running an ad blocker means giving a third party an enormous amount of power over your browser.
That's why Safari's content blocker API is so great[0]. Creators of these extension have no access to my data and it's faster than normal extensions to boot.
I'm using Wipr, which seems to work just as well as pi-hole on the example pages. Blocked his advert too, or at least I can't find it cough.
[0] https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Ge...
Re: Mmm, Pi-hole
#118> Do you use a popular browser extension? How confident are you that the creator wouldn’t accept a $10k offer to hand it over only to have it then go rogue on you? What makes the Pi-Hole organization any more trustworthy? (and the software stack it all depends on) Personally, I'm inclined to trust them both and hope that the long arm of the GDPR will be effective. Optimistic, I know.
Since Pi-Hole is a DNS server running on a separate machine, it just doesn’t have the same level of access as browser extension would. Even if it was rogue, the worst it could do is share the list of domains that you visit, and possibly hijack your HTTP (but not HTTPS) sessions.
They could easily do a diagnostics / analytics feature where user stats are posted back to developers
Re: Mmm, Pi-hole
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
In this case it just acts as a DNS resolver. That's potentially risky when resources don't use SSL, but far less than a browser extension that can change a page in place, inject JavaScript, and record keystrokes on all pages.
> resources don't use SSL Huh? DNS is hit even if the site is SSL. Unless the site has HSTS, and you've got to the site before; DNS poisoning is very much doable.
How would the attacker do anything useful with a SSL connection attempt? They can either send the real certificate, and then not be able to decrypt the data, or send a self-signed cert which the OS/browser wouldn't trust?
Are you thinking of some downgrade attack vector?
Re: Mmm, Pi-hole
#120Someone 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.
Longtime uMatrix user here. The most frustrating thing about UM (which is the same problem I had with NoScript back in the day) is that some scripts call other scripts. So, particularly when I'm trying to play an embedded video served by another site served through a CDN, the process for getting the damn video to play is something like: Click video -> Open uMatrix -> whitelist some scripts -> reload -> whitelist more…
I dumped that routine and just started pointing those video URLs at youtube-dl
vlc is a better video viewing experience (and better on battery) than a browser and you can usually start playing a partially downloaded file