Getting rid of ads in exchange for letting an additional third party know all my Web-surfing respective DNS-lookups?
Not sure which one is worse ..?
Optimal DNS Ad Blocker
11–20 of 98 posts
Re: Optimal DNS Ad Blocker
#12One can achieve this locally, on a laptop/desktop, using https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts Or you can combine that with https://github.com/jlund/streisand to have a VPN service that happens to adblock (great for mobile). That said... I like that Optimal have made this too, because neither of the above can work for all devices in a household and more things in the house are tracking you and serving adverts (TV!). T…
I use this with Gas Mask on OS X.
Re: Optimal DNS Ad Blocker
#13I'd like to believe that Optimal is being altruistic with their DNS servers and just trying to help rid the world of annoying ads...but I'm also realistic.
My VPN provider (Torguard) provides one of these as well. I'm a little more willing to trust them not to do anything malicious with my DNS requests, if only because I'm paying them.
Re: Optimal DNS Ad Blocker
#14One can achieve this locally, on a laptop/desktop, using https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts Or you can combine that with https://github.com/jlund/streisand to have a VPN service that happens to adblock (great for mobile). That said... I like that Optimal have made this too, because neither of the above can work for all devices in a household and more things in the house are tracking you and serving adverts (TV!). T…
If you want StevenBlack's hosts list to be network-wide I integrated it with an open source, self-hosted DNS server called https://pi-hole.net/ last week which adds a slick admin interface and browser extensions too, then I put it all in a Vagrantfile and set my router to use the VM as a DNS server. Screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/ELL9CDu.png Vagrantfile: https://github.com/benlowry/pihole-extended-hosts
Alternately, if your router is capable of doing so, have it be the DNS server, seeded with the hosts file. That's what I do with my EdgeRouter Lite.
Re: Optimal DNS Ad Blocker
#15I've been using https://github.com/jakeogh/dnsgate for about 6 months now. Much better than just throwing stuff into /etc/hosts
Re: Optimal DNS Ad Blocker
#16Well this makes me feel a little better... from http://optimal.com/privacy-policy/
WHAT WE COLLECT
We get information about you in a range of ways.
snip
DNS service. If you utilize our DNS-based service, we may receive information about your IP address and URLs requested by that address. DNS requests utilize the UDP protocol which means we do not typically get information on the full URL you are attempting to visit (We receive far less information than a company providing a VPN service to you, for example, and that is one of the reasons we prefer this approach as it gives us far less information about user browsing). We do, however, have an IP address associated with each request and so could produce a list of sites visited by each IP address using our DNS servers. We do not know who you are when you use our DNS service, however. IP addresses may also be shared between users, and are not universally regarded as personally identifiable. We only use the IP addresses as follows: (a) the count of unique IPs we use as a benchmark for the adoption of our DNS service, and (b) we may check IP addresses against a free database of countries or cities provided by MaxMind and hosted on our servers, to limit the ability for users outside of certain areas to use our DNS service. We will not use the IP addresses we gather for any other purpose, and we will not correlate or combine them with any other personal information provided by you or other DNS service users, and we will never sell or share any of this information with any outside companies in any way. We may use aggregate request counts to help compensate publishers based on overall site traffic, across all users of our DNS service.
Re: Optimal DNS Ad Blocker
#17Very interesting. I'd be curious to know what Optimal plans to do with all the DNS traffic they'll be collecting
I'm definitely weary of handing over my DNS data to a company I don't know. Besides, Safari ad blocking plugins already take care of this while surfing. This may have unintended (both good or bad) affects on normal app experience since it's configured on the network.
For a few bucks more a month, I'll sell you a proxy service through which you can proxy your DNS requests to optimal!
Re: Optimal DNS Ad Blocker
#18I'd like to believe that Optimal is being altruistic with their DNS servers and just trying to help rid the world of annoying ads...but I'm also realistic. My VPN provider (Torguard) provides one of these as well. I'm a little more willing to trust them not to do anything malicious with my DNS requests, if only because I'm paying them.
I don't find the "I can trust them because I'm paying them" idea very useful. Nor the "If you're not the customer you're the product."
The bottom line is, if your information is valuable, then it will be in the advantage of those who possess it to exploit it whether you pay them or not. The only real non-moralistic consideration is whether you will stop paying if they start selling.
Either way, "I have a moral obligation to not sell your info, even if you don't pay me not to" sounds a lot better to me than "I don't sell your info because you think you're paying me not to." It's a horse apiece if you're dealing with strangers and you have to take them at their word.
Re: Optimal DNS Ad Blocker
#19What are the security concerns with a service such as this?
Re: Optimal DNS Ad Blocker
#20I will just leave this here http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/
i put this hosts file on every device/router that i touch.
It works fully local. So infinitely (and this is not even a hyperbole) faster and you won't have to exchange one privacy hole for another on the "cloud".