41–50 of 254 posts
It's baffling how much useless telemetry and other crap there is, slowing internet down and wasting cpu cycles.
Pi-hole is very easy to set up, and it works so well you can basically forget about it from that point on. Blocking ads is nice, but it’s also a huge boon for privacy. I run uBlock origin on all my browsers, but Pi-hole still blocks 30-50% of requests on my network. It’s also really nice to be able to glance at the logs and get an idea of what’s going on on your network, or if there’s any unusual activity. I’m especi…
>I’m especially excited to see CNAME inspection. I was tired of trying to figure out what domains like “xuenl4v1szy8g.cloudfront.net” were doing. Is there a good explainer for CNAME inspection? I'm not finding anything good with my Google Fu.
Let's say I have your own blog running on dastx.me, and I wanted some ads from adgiant.com.
As an adblocker you've added `* .adgiant.com` to your blacklist and I'm an asshole and try to circumvent such adblocking measure. Them young millennials and their tech. Stealing me out of my money!
So I go to adgiant.com and ask them if there is something i can do. adgiant.com asks me to add a new DNS record of `CNAME definitely-not-an-ad-subdomain.dastx.me -> terribleads.adgiant.com`. This way, whenever I wanna call terrible-ads.adgiant.com, I instead use `definitely-not-an-ad-subdomain.dastx.me`.
When it comes to adblocking this is an issue because adblocking lists are usually based on a blacklist. They'll have `*.adgiant.com` on the list but not `definitely-not-an-ad-subdomain.dastx.me`, thus my ads will start working. We could of course ad every subdomain we come across to the blacklist, but suddenly our adblock list doubles, triples, quadruples or more.
What adblocking software do now, is they do a dns lookup for every domain, and consider all domains in the result as the same. So if either of previous domains are in the block list, both domains are considered blocked.
This CNAME method is also a huge security issue, but I'm not gonna go into that.
I have never used this but how does it block ads on https pages? Or am I misunderstanding pi-hole?
Pi-Hole has made my home browsing experience so much better since setting it up. Minimal resource overhead, maximum results - and if you care about stats those are available too but I just turned all logging off. Now if it could just filter out YouTube ads...
Alternatively for MAX_lazyness and convenience I've been using https://nextdns.io , does all the same stuff and is the alternative to cloudflare in Firefox for DNS-over-Https (DOH)
Is there an advantage in sending all of your DNS queries to a for-profit company vs. setting up your own Pi-hole? Their privacy policy seems legit[0] but why trust them at all when Pi-hole is an option? [0] https://nextdns.io/privacy
Pi-Hole has made my home browsing experience so much better since setting it up. Minimal resource overhead, maximum results - and if you care about stats those are available too but I just turned all logging off. Now if it could just filter out YouTube ads...
> Now if it could just filter out YouTube ads... Ive heard that the problem is that the native YT apps come with a big list of IP addresses for the ad servers, instead of doing lookups.
Is there a way to quickly disable/re-enable pihole for the network? With AdGuard DNS or uBlock Origin I still get into situations where occasionally they break a site completely and I have to temporarily disable the plugin (or switch to cell tower dns) to get the site working, so I’d want a quick way out of pi-holing traffic as well
Pi-hole is very easy to set up, and it works so well you can basically forget about it from that point on. Blocking ads is nice, but it’s also a huge boon for privacy. I run uBlock origin on all my browsers, but Pi-hole still blocks 30-50% of requests on my network. It’s also really nice to be able to glance at the logs and get an idea of what’s going on on your network, or if there’s any unusual activity. I’m especi…
>I’m especially excited to see CNAME inspection. I was tired of trying to figure out what domains like “xuenl4v1szy8g.cloudfront.net” were doing. Is there a good explainer for CNAME inspection? I'm not finding anything good with my Google Fu.
Here is an example (the domains are fake, it’s for demonstration purpose only): The domain adcompany.com 5 is in my blacklist, so it returns the IP of my Pi-Hole if I do a DNS query:
$ host adcompany.com adcompany.com has address 192.168.1.10
But if I do a DNS query of ad.newspaper.com it doesn’t get blocked by Pi-Hole even though it’s simply an alias (CNAME) for adcompany.com:
$ host ad.newspaper.com ad.newspaper.com is an alias for adcompany.com. adcompany.com has address 6.6.6.6
What I would like that Pi-hole do is to check if the domain is a CNAME (in the example ad.newspaper.com) then comparing the domain that is aliased to (in the example adcompany.com) with my blacklist. If it is in my blacklist block the domain (by returning the IP of my Pi-hole).
Source: https://discourse.pi-hole.net/t/apply-pi-hole-blocking-to-cn...
Is there a way to quickly disable/re-enable pihole for the network? With AdGuard DNS or uBlock Origin I still get into situations where occasionally they break a site completely and I have to temporarily disable the plugin (or switch to cell tower dns) to get the site working, so I’d want a quick way out of pi-holing traffic as well
The Web UI has a Disable button, and also quick options for permanent, 10 seconds, 30 seconds, 5 minutes, custom, etc. I think there's also an API as well. I can toggle it via Alexa and Home-Assistant. It's a feature that's been around for 2 years or more
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd rather recommend this one: https://newpipe.schabi.org/ At least it is opensource and works great.
I used NewPipe for a while and it was very nice, enjoyed how well it works. However I started wanting to see videos on my TV (Chromecast), and that's where the abilities of NewPipe fell short. They have an open issue [0] since a couple years ago, but so far it is not a feature yet. [0]: https://github.com/TeamNewPipe/NewPipe/issues/668
For me on top of that, my wife and I often join chromecast together, and she has an iPhone. Vanced is pretty much fully compatible with the official YouTube app.