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Mmm, Pi-hole

troyhunt.com

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Re: Mmm, Pi-hole

#181

Post by rufugee »

ObsoleteNerd wrote: post #81

My Pi-hole with updated block lists (blocking trackers as well as ads) sits at around 87.7% requests blocked, which is absolutely mind-blowingly ridiculous. I see absolutely no negative effects browsing like this. Everything I've come across still works fine. Even sites that detect uBlock Origin and tell me to disable it, will work with that disabled and Pi-hole still blocking the ads instead. I heavily believe we sh…

I use a /etc/hosts-based (https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts) approach to add blocking across my machines, but I have found some sites (fansided.com) comes to mind, which detect that I'm blocking and won't let me read them. How easy is it to get around this with the pi-hole?

Re: Mmm, Pi-hole

#182

Post by lightswitch05 »

badbug wrote: post #161
move-on-by wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of these list maintainers put a lot of work into not breaking things, but their are just too many websites out their to know if a block breaks one of them or not. Send the list maintainer an email - or if they are on Github/Gitlab open a ticket and have a discussion. I think you'll find many of them are happy to remove breaking domains. Of course whitelist is always an option too if the list maintainer disagree…

I spoke directly with the pihole maintainers. They took a Hardline position that them blocking email from my city was the right thing to do because it used click tracking or some other metric gathering and was deemed a privacy risk. I understand the devotion to a cause but it was too myopic for me.

As far as I know, the pi-hole maintainers do not maintain any of the default block lists. I maintain a list [1] that is then feed into the popular host list by Steven Black [2] - which is a default list.

I definitely do not want to break things for people and I'm happy to remove any reasonable domains from the list. I wouldn't consider google analytics a reasonable one to remove - but you get the idea. I hate to hear you had a bad experience of it. If my list had the breaking domains for you, I would of loved to have a ticket opened where we could discuss it. Sometimes it isn't clear cut between ads & tracking and useful services.

[1] https://github.com/lightswitch05/hosts

[2] https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts

Re: Mmm, Pi-hole

#183

Post by greymeister »

ObsoleteNerd wrote: post #81

My Pi-hole with updated block lists (blocking trackers as well as ads) sits at around 87.7% requests blocked, which is absolutely mind-blowingly ridiculous. I see absolutely no negative effects browsing like this. Everything I've come across still works fine. Even sites that detect uBlock Origin and tell me to disable it, will work with that disabled and Pi-hole still blocking the ads instead. I heavily believe we sh…

> Modern online advertising companies are malicious entities that actively harm users, and I absolutely classify them as malware.

This is exactly the response for anyone that is frustrated by blocking ads impacting revenue for web publishers. Had the ad tech not become so invasive and pernicious, users wouldn't be going out of the way for solutions like this. The advertisers have essentially forced our hand.

Re: Mmm, Pi-hole

#184

Post by ethagnawl »

greymeister wrote: post #183
ObsoleteNerd wrote: post #81

My Pi-hole with updated block lists (blocking trackers as well as ads) sits at around 87.7% requests blocked, which is absolutely mind-blowingly ridiculous. I see absolutely no negative effects browsing like this. Everything I've come across still works fine. Even sites that detect uBlock Origin and tell me to disable it, will work with that disabled and Pi-hole still blocking the ads instead. I heavily believe we sh…

> Modern online advertising companies are malicious entities that actively harm users, and I absolutely classify them as malware. This is exactly the response for anyone that is frustrated by blocking ads impacting revenue for web publishers. Had the ad tech not become so invasive and pernicious, users wouldn't be going out of the way for solutions like this. The advertisers have essentially forced our hand.

Exactly. I believe Troy has another post about this topic where he discusses why he's able to justify selling the single, static banner ad at the top of his site.

Re: Mmm, Pi-hole

#185

Post by jasonmp85 »

tpush wrote: post #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…

+1 for this. Reading his whole argument I was like "I don't think this applies to Safari Content Blockers"…

There's no reason to have an ad blocker be anything other than local. Sure, it should be able to pull more rules, but during operation it should just match those rules. There's no need to have it be written in a language with e.g. XHR or whatnot.

Re: Mmm, Pi-hole

#186

Post by gruez »

ryandrake wrote: post #72
gruez wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you could do the same with ublock

Not on a network-wide basis, and not on non-browsers. I don’t think anyone here is saying don’t use a browser-based blocker too. I use both a browser plugin on the client and dnsmasq on my network.

when i said

>you could do the same with ublock

that was in response to

>This should just be dnsmasq, for which source code is readily available and inspectable. You can (and should) compile it yourself if you don’t trust someone else’s binary.

Re: Mmm, Pi-hole

#187

Post by ethagnawl »

admax88q wrote: post #167

Why are our devices so far outside our own control that we need to run an additional device on our networks to help prevent them from making unwanted network requests? The whole approach of Pi-hole feels misguided. Blacklisting domains and hosts should be something easily done on my device locally. Then it comes with me when I visit friends or coffee shops, and it's easy to temporarily disable when it breaks somethin…

Surprisingly, I've yet to see a service which fronts Pi-Hole or similar and allows you to point your DNS resolver(?) at it, so you can use it on the go -- without having to use a VPN.

I tried to set this up on my own using a VPS and Pi-Hole and it did work for a while. However, bad actors eventually found the server and started using it to perform DNS amplification attacks against, of all things, cricket news websites. I don't know too much about networking, so this may be a limitation of the DNS protocol. However, it seems like Quad9, Cloudflare and the like have figured out a way to prevent this sort of abuse... So, if any provider out there is reading this, please add this capability and I will gladly pay to use your DNS service.

Re: Mmm, Pi-hole

#188

Post by txcwpalpha »

TheBeardKing wrote: post #175

Don't buy a raspberry pi just for this, chances are you have some old windows machine you can slap Ubuntu server on and set it up easily. That's what I did and I have very little Linux experience. My favorite thing about it is ad-blocking in mobile apps. I tried to use it with OpenVPN on my android phone for ad-blocking when I'm on cellular data, but the speed it was unbearable. I'm not sure if it was my crappy route…

>Don't buy a raspberry pi just for this, chances are you have some old windows machine you can slap Ubuntu server on and set it up easily. That's what I did and I have very little Linux experience.

But this would require having a full-blown PC running 24/7 and increasing your electricity costs by at least a few bucks a month. It would be much wiser to buy a $10 Pi Zero W and put Pi-Hole on it.

Re: Mmm, Pi-hole

#189

Post by c54 »

The aria.microsoft.com domain is for analytics and client metrics for probably some microsoft produced app you’ve got

Re: Mmm, Pi-hole

#190

Post by biktor_gj »

upofadown wrote: post #177
admax88q wrote: post #167

Why are our devices so far outside our own control that we need to run an additional device on our networks to help prevent them from making unwanted network requests? The whole approach of Pi-hole feels misguided. Blacklisting domains and hosts should be something easily done on my device locally. Then it comes with me when I visit friends or coffee shops, and it's easy to temporarily disable when it breaks somethin…

You can edit the hosts file on Android apparently and the Pi-hole is just a shared hosts file.

It's a self-updating hosts file. If you only do it once in a month you'll start seeing ads again. Also you can edit the hosts file if you're rooted, but you definitely can't if you're running a stock unmodified ROM. If you're rooted and you only care about your Android phone, you can also install Adaway, which does pretty much the same thing without the whitelist capability (Get it on F-Droid), but if you have a number of devices to protect, and some of them are iOS devices, TVs or whatever that can't be rooted, jailbroken, or you don't have administrative privileges to, Pi-hole is a good choice (if you run pfSense at home you can also use pfBlockerNG, which is essentially the same thing too).
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