Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Brotherhood of the Ad Blockers

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 299 posts

Re: The Brotherhood of the Ad Blockers

#11

Post by FreeKill »

gruez wrote: post #3

Is it me, or is pi hole way more popular than it should be? Compared to the alternatives, it's worse in almost every way. It only works on your local network, so good luck blocking ads while you're at work, using mobile data, or at a cafe. Browser based adblockers (which is available on most desktop browsers, mobile safari, and firefox for android) can block elements and url patterns, pi hole can't. Even if you're on…

Pi Hole is free, unless you're counting the system you have to run it off of (like a raspberry pi) but you can run it off any device you want like a virtual machine at home for instance, so you only need to buy a Raspberry Pi if that's how you intend to operate it. The benefit of it, is it blocks a lot more than just ads. For instance, it blocks any attempts to "phone home" by my smart TV or by applications I use such as Nvidia Geforce Experience. It's more extensive than browser based ad blockers because it works for your entire network, not just web browsing (for example, blocks all youtube ads on my un-rooted mobile device). It also has a huge set of customizable community maintained block lists that block everything from simple ads all the way to pornography (if that's what you want).

Re: The Brotherhood of the Ad Blockers

#12

Post by TheCapn »

gruez wrote: post #3

Is it me, or is pi hole way more popular than it should be? Compared to the alternatives, it's worse in almost every way. It only works on your local network, so good luck blocking ads while you're at work, using mobile data, or at a cafe. Browser based adblockers (which is available on most desktop browsers, mobile safari, and firefox for android) can block elements and url patterns, pi hole can't. Even if you're on…

I run pi-hole in conjunction with browser blockers and still find it a net benefit overall. Anyone who uses my wifi gets an adblocker, any device, for any browser, and any configuration gets the benefit of having it. It's not just myself, a technically literate person, but my mother, sister, girlfriend and friends... Ideally if it stops just one malicious ad from landing itself upon my home's network then I say the benefit is there.

If you have an excuse to run a Raspberry Pi at home for any other purpose then use Pi-hole to piggy back off it and the cost you cite becomes a writeoff. I had a Rpi running OpenVPN for myself, throwing PiHole on it was a no brainer.

Re: The Brotherhood of the Ad Blockers

#13

Post by parasanti »

gruez wrote: post #3

Is it me, or is pi hole way more popular than it should be? Compared to the alternatives, it's worse in almost every way. It only works on your local network, so good luck blocking ads while you're at work, using mobile data, or at a cafe. Browser based adblockers (which is available on most desktop browsers, mobile safari, and firefox for android) can block elements and url patterns, pi hole can't. Even if you're on…

With always connected VPN on my mobile to my home, blocking ads on mobile works well. Also when connected to hotspots on my portable devices. Great point about work though.

Re: The Brotherhood of the Ad Blockers

#14

Post by FreeKill »

FreeKill wrote: post #11
gruez wrote: post #3

Is it me, or is pi hole way more popular than it should be? Compared to the alternatives, it's worse in almost every way. It only works on your local network, so good luck blocking ads while you're at work, using mobile data, or at a cafe. Browser based adblockers (which is available on most desktop browsers, mobile safari, and firefox for android) can block elements and url patterns, pi hole can't. Even if you're on…

Pi Hole is free, unless you're counting the system you have to run it off of (like a raspberry pi) but you can run it off any device you want like a virtual machine at home for instance, so you only need to buy a Raspberry Pi if that's how you intend to operate it. The benefit of it, is it blocks a lot more than just ads. For instance, it blocks any attempts to "phone home" by my smart TV or by applications I use suc…

Here's an example of some of the community maintained lists you can use to block more things easily. https://wally3k.github.io/ Many of these are updated quite frequently as well.

Re: The Brotherhood of the Ad Blockers

#15

Post by sli »

johnvanommen wrote: post #9
gruez wrote: post #3

Is it me, or is pi hole way more popular than it should be? Compared to the alternatives, it's worse in almost every way. It only works on your local network, so good luck blocking ads while you're at work, using mobile data, or at a cafe. Browser based adblockers (which is available on most desktop browsers, mobile safari, and firefox for android) can block elements and url patterns, pi hole can't. Even if you're on…

I thought you had to root your Android to block ads? In my household we have four people with smartphones and another four laptops. That's a lot of ads to block. Blocking ads on my laptop made a more noticeable improvement to web browsing than increasing my network bandwidth.

DNS66[0] can block ads without root.

[0]: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.jak_linux.dns66/

Re: The Brotherhood of the Ad Blockers

#16

Post by vanadium »

djhworld wrote: post #2

I've been running a Pi-Hole instance for about a year now, it's excellent. I could never get it to work with my router, but manually configuring the DNS on my devices to point to it works just as well. One thing that became immediately apparent was how much faster browsing the web got after I turned it on.

Been running it myself for 5-6 months, and other than the occasional (actually, very rare) complaint from the Mrs. that a link she clicked won't go through due to a blocked tracker/analytics intermediary, it's been a peachy time VPNing into our home network so it works just as well on the go.

Our install Pi-Hole points its upstream DNS to 1.1.1.1, with uBlock Origin where possible installed on our devices. Can't imagine going back.

Re: The Brotherhood of the Ad Blockers

#17

Post by ageitgey »

gruez wrote: post #3

Is it me, or is pi hole way more popular than it should be? Compared to the alternatives, it's worse in almost every way. It only works on your local network, so good luck blocking ads while you're at work, using mobile data, or at a cafe. Browser based adblockers (which is available on most desktop browsers, mobile safari, and firefox for android) can block elements and url patterns, pi hole can't. Even if you're on…

If you are on Android, you can install the Brave browser for Android. It's essentially just a recompiled Chrome with built-in ad-blocking.

Re: The Brotherhood of the Ad Blockers

#18

Post by vanadium »

ch4s3 wrote: post #4

Does anyone know if there are performance penalties associated with using a Raspberry PI as your DNS server? Also, a link[1] to the Pi-Hole page. [1] https://pi-hole.net/

None. None at all that anyone's noticed in our home, and I imagine the speed associated with the fewer server requests and their payload offsets any negligible performance degradation that would have been there.

Re: The Brotherhood of the Ad Blockers

#19

Post by trip1 »

gruez wrote: post #3

Is it me, or is pi hole way more popular than it should be? Compared to the alternatives, it's worse in almost every way. It only works on your local network, so good luck blocking ads while you're at work, using mobile data, or at a cafe. Browser based adblockers (which is available on most desktop browsers, mobile safari, and firefox for android) can block elements and url patterns, pi hole can't. Even if you're on…

The difference with pi-hole is that since it blocks it at the DNS level the network traffic doesn't even reach you, saving on bandwidth.

It will also be faster than most browser based ad blockers since the browser has to analyze every webpage whereas pi-hole blocks by simply not making a request.

Also if you want a DNS that works outside your local network it would be trivial to get a cloud server for $5 a month put pi hole on it and route DNS through that. Then you could get free https certs and have a pretty sweet private DNS just for you!

And if you're someone trying to setup their own local DNS it's likely you have a spare pi or computer laying around somewhere to use.

And finally it offers pretty great convience. Instead of having to setup blockers on every device it just needs to be set on the pi.

Re: The Brotherhood of the Ad Blockers

#20

Post by njharman »

gruez wrote: post #3

Is it me, or is pi hole way more popular than it should be? Compared to the alternatives, it's worse in almost every way. It only works on your local network, so good luck blocking ads while you're at work, using mobile data, or at a cafe. Browser based adblockers (which is available on most desktop browsers, mobile safari, and firefox for android) can block elements and url patterns, pi hole can't. Even if you're on…

> Browser based adblockers (which is available on most desktop browsers, mobile safari, and firefox for androd

Answered your own question. That list does not include chrome, smart TVs, fire TV, Roku, Kindle, game consiles, iot devices of all types. Nor all guests.

You need both. Security / defence needs to be deep and layared and mukti-vendor to be effective.

Post reply on HN