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Ad blocking with Raspberry Pi and Pi-hole

cri.dev

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Re: Ad blocking with Raspberry Pi and Pi-hole

#81

Post by Smoosh »

mulmen wrote: post #68
Blackadderz wrote: post #55

Pi-hole has been excellent. I was able to discover that my Samsung TV was reporting minute by minute updates on what I was watching to a local Australian company. Unplugged it faster than I could swear.

How does the Pi-hole achieve this? Does it have a blacklist (I assume) or can it use a whitelist? The services my TV needs to reach are easily enumerable, I pay all of them subscriptions. There is no other valid connection for it to make. Maybe firmware/app updates but I'd kinda prefer to do that myself at this point.

Yes, both blacklist and whitelist.

Re: Ad blocking with Raspberry Pi and Pi-hole

#82

Post by x3blah »

strenholme wrote: post #11

I actually have been doing some work with MaraDNS to have the ability to have a pi-hole sized blacklist. The main source of pi-hole’s blacklist is this Git repo: https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts That is about 60,000 hosts, so I added MaraDNS support to have up to 500,000 blacklisted names. Since it’s a speed-optimized (not size-optimized) cache, each element takes about a kilobyte of memory, so a blacklist this s…

Will you test the efficiency of the block list.

For example, given a block list of 60,000 how many hosts on the list did your computer actually try to access. Have you ever read through one of those massive blocklists.

I use a whitelist rather than a blocklist. Similar to a firewall, I block everything by default. Then carefully choose what I allow.

This way I can see exactly what hosts I actually need to access. Makes it easy to see attempts to access ad servers, trackers, phone home, etc.

Re: Ad blocking with Raspberry Pi and Pi-hole

#83

Post by kube-system »

brachi wrote: post #65
Blackadderz wrote: post #55

Pi-hole has been excellent. I was able to discover that my Samsung TV was reporting minute by minute updates on what I was watching to a local Australian company. Unplugged it faster than I could swear.

Reading these kind of anecdotes makes me wonder why is this legal or at least opt-in.

My TV made me accept a terms of service agreement on first boot.

Re: Ad blocking with Raspberry Pi and Pi-hole

#84

Post by kube-system »

KungFuJohnny wrote: post #40
kd913 wrote: post #25

Please do note that Android appears to be quite weird in regards to accepting network set DNS. My observations so far have been that Android tends to ignore any DNS set by either the network via DHCP or statically set. Android instead probes the gateway for 8.8.8.8, and happily uses that instead. The only way I have been able to solve this has been to setup a VPN (I prefer wireguard) on the pihole. Android seems to a…

If you have a decent router, then you can just forcibly redirect any DNS requests from 8.8.8.8 to your PiHole.

I have had good luck simply blocking any outbound port 53 traffic that doesn't come from pihole.

Although with DoH these days, I'm not confident my firewall rule is still doing a good job :(

Re: Ad blocking with Raspberry Pi and Pi-hole

#85

Post by x3blah »

greencar wrote: post #4

> Use it for ad-blocking in your home network and to finally browse the web, watch videos etc. without annoying ads. It doesn't really do this as well as a browser adblocker, YouTube ads for example can't effectively be blocked with pihole

Watching videos with Javascript turned off, there are no ads.

Google tries to force users to turn on JavaScript by needlessly making the YouTube website "require" JS to be turned on to play videos.

However it is easy to play the videos without using JavaScript using just basic HTML.

Example

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23076239

Re: Ad blocking with Raspberry Pi and Pi-hole

#88

Post by gpsz »

css wrote: post #26
jedberg wrote: post #20

Is anyone successfully using PiHole with non-technical users? My main concern with putting PiHole on my home network is that for example my mother in law might not understand that she can't get to some web page because it's being ad-blocked, nor would she be able to go to the web admin page and temporarily unblock it. Even as a technical person sometimes it takes a while to figure out that a page isn't working becaus…

I have an iOS shortcut that hits the disable endpoint, so they have a button on their phone they tap that will disable it for 30 minutes at a time.

Yeah, I found and tweaked this for my needs: https://routinehub.co/shortcut/5005

Works great, even if I dont invoke Siri to trigger it.

Re: Ad blocking with Raspberry Pi and Pi-hole

#89

Post by mulmen »

LeoPanthera wrote: post #86

The move of applications such as Firefox to start using DNS-over-https to hardcoded DNS servers will render such user-modified DNS services useless. Firefox can have this feature disabled, but more malicious applications will simply not give you the choice.

It's a tragic move. The DHCP/DNS ecosystem made managing devices dead simple. OTOH I suppose we were foolish to ever think our devices were playing nice. Is there a fix to DNS-over-HTTPS as a network operator? Can you MITM your "own" proprietary devices? What dragons live there?

Re: Ad blocking with Raspberry Pi and Pi-hole

#90

Post by mulmen »

kube-system wrote: post #84
KungFuJohnny wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have a decent router, then you can just forcibly redirect any DNS requests from 8.8.8.8 to your PiHole.

I have had good luck simply blocking any outbound port 53 traffic that doesn't come from pihole. Although with DoH these days, I'm not confident my firewall rule is still doing a good job :(

If someone was rude enough to bypass DHCP's suggested DNS is it reasonable to assume they were polite enough to use the standard port?

At this point every device on my network is hostile, default deny outbound is starting to feel like the reasonable starting point.

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