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Setting up a Pi Hole made my home network faster

brianchristner.io

191–200 of 249 posts

Re: Setting up a Pi Hole made my home network faster

#191

Advertising powers the free and open web. Never sure how to feel about Pi Hole…

A lot of shady advertising brokers also push malware. And many sites are only able to be used with some type of ad blocker because of how intrusive the ads are. Also the bandwidth savings can be huge in bandwidth constrained environments.

Re: Setting up a Pi Hole made my home network faster

#192
post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Krebs had inaccurate info at the time. The breach was faked by an employee who was part of the investigation team. https://krebsonsecurity.com/2021/12/ubiquiti-developer-charg...

Yeah, Krebs published this updated take: "On Wednesday, a former Ubiquiti developer was arrested and charged with stealing data and trying to extort his employer while pretending to be a whistleblower. "Federal prosecutors say Nickolas Sharp, a senior developer at Ubiquiti, actually caused the “breach” that forced Ubiquiti to disclose a cybersecurity incident in January."

No matter how good your security is, a rogue employee with high-level access will always be a threat. Since they now have experience with this situation, I trust that Ubiquiti has dedicated more resources to preventing both employee sabotage and external breaches.

This also shows that not every breach is what it seems, and investigating fully before publicly disclosing can sometimes help prevent disinformation. The “whistleblower” in this case was intentionally lying, and every customer that dedicated time to mitigation had to pay part of the cost.

Re: Setting up a Pi Hole made my home network faster

#194
post #37

I know some folks are anti Ubiquiti Unifi on here, but you can run pihole (along with a bunch of other stuff) right on a UDM/UDM-Pro. IMO it makes the most sense to run this on the router, and you can run it in a docker container. If you're looking for a fun hour or two project, check out: https://github.com/boostchicken-dev/udm-utilities/tree/maste...

I run a PiHole and a Tailscale exit node on my Unifi routers (previous generation). The Tailscale exit node lets me do both site-to-site VPNs and site-specific egress. The one thing keeping me from site network nirvana is that I haven't quite figured out how to set up a wifi network on the Ubiquiti device that routes all traffic through a given other exit node, however. Someday!

What router do you have? I've got a USG and was wondering if it was possible to run PiHole on the USG.

Re: Setting up a Pi Hole made my home network faster

#195

Won't be long now until IoT and other crap-ware devices catch on to this trend and start hard-coding DNS servers in code, or worse, using DNS encryption to avoid this sort of routine blocking by end-users. I wonder how people are thinking about solving this problem.

> Smart devices manufacturers often “hard-code” in a public DNS server, like Google’s 8.8.8.8, and their devices ignore whatever DNS server is assigned by your router - such as your PiHole.

> Nearly 70% of smart TVs and 46% of game consoles were found to contain hardcoded DNS settings - allowing them to simply ignore your local network’s DNS server entirely. On average, Smart TVs generate an average of 60 megabytes of outgoing Internet traffic per day, all the while bypassing tools like PiHole.

https://labzilla.io/blog/force-dns-pihole

For those devices which ignore DHCP/NDP provided DNS addresses, you could create a firewall to redirect outgoing port 53 traffic to your own server.

Re: Setting up a Pi Hole made my home network faster

#196
Note that pi-hole can also be used by only installing the DNS resolver, without the web server and UI, which allows it to be installed on any tiny Linux system as well.

Additionally I can recommend the "Privacy" web browser on Android combined with the "Rethink DNS" firewall.

Both are amazing tools that help speed up your phone, and allow you to even filter ads out of specific apps that use e.g. an embedded cloudflare DoH resolving mechanism.

If you want to dig deeper, there's always the Aurora App Warden and Permission Manager X which allows you to modify other Apps and remove their Activities and Services that are coming from ad frameworks.

[1] https://www.stoutner.com/privacy-browser-android/

[2] https://github.com/celzero/rethink-app

Re: Setting up a Pi Hole made my home network faster

#197

Advertising powers the free and open web. Never sure how to feel about Pi Hole…

My favourite channels on Youtube, once they become large enough they start to include sponsoring/ads. Production quality goes up, but my enjoyment and trust goes down. I prefer the old hobbyist internet over this manipulative and shallow ad-driven one. So I install adblockers on every system and I don't understand people that look at ads to support content creators. If you want to support, then why don't you use Patreon or subscriptions? (I wish micropayments had worked out)

Re: Setting up a Pi Hole made my home network faster

#198

Advertising powers the free and open web. Never sure how to feel about Pi Hole…

My favourite channels on Youtube, once they become large enough they start to include sponsoring/ads. Production quality goes up, but my enjoyment and trust goes down. I prefer the old hobbyist internet over this manipulative and shallow ad-driven one. So I install adblockers on every system and I don't understand people that look at ads to support content creators. If you want to support, then why don't you use Patr…

I do support a number of creators on Patreon and I myself make a tinyyyyy bit of money from Patreon.

Your question is better asked to the creators in question I think. They prefer to provide you content through an ad-supported model.

Re: Setting up a Pi Hole made my home network faster

#199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You solve that by not buying such crap-ware. You buy open hardware systems.

I would love if there was an open 4K HDR TV but I think only a very niche audience actually cares about this so most manufacturers will not see a market opportunity

I see your point. Real question: In today's world, what is the difference between a TV and a computer monitor + RasPi? I guess the biggest issue will be streaming on services with very strict operating system / browser requirements.

For example, can you stream Netflix @ 4K via RasPi? I assume no, due to super strict DRM.

It is a little bit surprising to me that the big streaming companies have not creating an open source operating system (similar to Android) that can be used by manuf to create TVs. Then, smaller manuf can find ways to offer bloatware- / adware-free options. Maybe this already exists, and this comment makes no sense!

Re: Setting up a Pi Hole made my home network faster

#200

Pi-Hole is brilliant. I set up[1] one few years back and used for over a year. Here are the issues; - When I'm away from home and traveling, if something goes wrong, the Pi-Hole is usually the single source of that error, and is hard to solve by talking to my wife to walkthrough the settings. - A few websites (India in my case), mostly government ones, do not work when Ads are blocked. Try paying LIC Premium or even…

>

Cripes! That is amazing data. Thank you to share.

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