Ad blocking with Raspberry Pi and Pi-hole • Hacker News Board

Re: Ad blocking with Raspberry Pi and Pi-hole

#91

Post by mulmen » Tue, May 05, 2020, 4:38 AM UTC

daveslash wrote: post #39

brenden2 wrote: post #8

I use pi-hole, and it's great, but for browsers you still need something like uBlock Origin installed to properly block ads. The thing I like about pi-hole is it also blocks a long list of trackers that are bundled by various mobile SDKs. There's no way to block those with iOS or Android, except at the network level.

I've been using Pi-Hole for quite a while now too. I also have several in-browser ad blockers. In browser, I'm running Ghostery, uBlock Origin, and Privacy Badger, DuckDuck Go's privacy essentials, and whatever Firefox's does when you turn on all of the privacy respecting stuff. Honestly, I don't really know what does what any more. I recently turned off pi-hole and started to browse the web using Internet Explorer,…

This is great and I'm glad it is working for you. I think you are about 6 months ahead of me as I now have two Firefox privacy addons and I'm shopping for hardware to build a firewall box.

As I read your comment all I could visualize was an IE6 browser with 8 toolbars. The network stack of the future.

Re: Ad blocking with Raspberry Pi and Pi-hole

#92

Post by alfalfasprout » Tue, May 05, 2020, 4:51 AM UTC

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.

Agreed-- it's particularly egregious since intranet resources will just fail to resolve entirely in many cases (it has no graceful fallback to system DNS as far as I can tell).

Re: Ad blocking with Raspberry Pi and Pi-hole

#93

Post by BLKNSLVR » Tue, May 05, 2020, 4:56 AM UTC

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.

This is a concern of mine as well. I like having some semblance of control of what connections my personally owned devices are making to the outside world. As soon as that becomes opaque, and normalized, who knows what data leaks there will be? Given what advertising companies and malicious app developers already try to get away with when it's visible (to motivated technical folks), the opportunities / possibilities are scary.

I avoid phone banking as it is...

Re: Ad blocking with Raspberry Pi and Pi-hole

#94

Post by BLKNSLVR » Tue, May 05, 2020, 4:59 AM UTC

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.

My smart TV remains disconnected from any network. But I use an Android TV box, so I may only be substituting one company's surveillance for another's.

Android TV is a massive improvement upon any Smart TV's UX though, so I'm winning on that count.

Re: Ad blocking with Raspberry Pi and Pi-hole

#95

Post by gumby » Tue, May 05, 2020, 5:02 AM UTC

strenholme wrote: post #33

CoolGuySteve wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the optimization gained by having 1KB cache slots when the cacheline size on Intel and ARM is typically 64 bytes?

Each cache entry needs a hash bucket so we can look up the entry in O(1), and we need more hash buckets than entries to minimize cache look up time. The hash bucket needs a copy of the element for each hit (to verify we hit the correct hash bucket), and a possible link to the next hash bucket, just in case we got a hash collision (we still need to store that link in memory as a null pointer regardless). [1] The strin…

Since you have the complete set of blacklist entries each time distribute it, you could compute a perfect hash (zero collisions, no buckets needed) each time you updated the list.

Re: Ad blocking with Raspberry Pi and Pi-hole

#96

Post by ljhsiung » Tue, May 05, 2020, 5:21 AM UTC

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.

Ever thought about just buying a TV that has no network connectivity capability at all i.e. "dumb" TVs?

Though rare to find a 4k/OLED TV that's "dumb", I managed to grab one.

If I do want certain smart features e.g. chromecast I can always just buy it individually for like $30.

Re: Ad blocking with Raspberry Pi and Pi-hole

#97

Post by delcaran » Tue, May 05, 2020, 5:49 AM UTC

I currently use a 3-layered solution: browser blockers -> custom host file on each machine (StevenBlack hosts for linux and windows, nebulo for android) -> nextdns

I'm actually satisfied, but I'm trying to setup pi-hole+unbound on a cloudatcost host I own to reduce the load on nextdns, so far without success.

Re: Ad blocking with Raspberry Pi and Pi-hole

#98

Post by rasz » Tue, May 05, 2020, 6:09 AM UTC

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…

You say it like its a bad thing. Same person wont understand why putting your password into random website is bad, or why all of those windows and notifications keep popping up, or why you shouldn't click download followed by clicking run on random websites.

Re: Ad blocking with Raspberry Pi and Pi-hole

#99

Post by IRegretNothing » Tue, May 05, 2020, 6:15 AM UTC

I've tested pihole for months now, it's working really well.

Set up a VPN to an EC2 with pihole on it, no more ads on Spotify. Even family members wanted the VPN config, they really appreciate it.

Re: Ad blocking with Raspberry Pi and Pi-hole

#100

Post by strenholme » Tue, May 05, 2020, 6:22 AM UTC

gumby wrote: post #95

strenholme wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Each cache entry needs a hash bucket so we can look up the entry in O(1), and we need more hash buckets than entries to minimize cache look up time. The hash bucket needs a copy of the element for each hit (to verify we hit the correct hash bucket), and a possible link to the next hash bucket, just in case we got a hash collision (we still need to store that link in memory as a null pointer regardless). [1] The strin…

Since you have the complete set of blacklist entries each time distribute it, you could compute a perfect hash (zero collisions, no buckets needed) each time you updated the list.

Yes, we could also store the blacklist as a perfect hash, which would probably give us roughly the same memory usage with O(1) performance. But it would have to be a separate hash than the LRU dynamic hash used for storing DNS entries.

Yes, there are dynamic perfect hashes, but they are too slow when we update the hash with each lookup, a common use case with DNS.