Pi-hole – A black hole for Internet advertisements • Hacker News Board

Re: Pi-hole – A black hole for Internet advertisements

#121

Post by devonkim » Mon, Mar 13, 2017, 5:07 PM UTC

stagbeetle wrote: post #104

bitJericho wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're more likely to look at an ad if you have an ad blocker. That makes you a prime target.

How do you suppose that is? Is it because you believe people use ad-blockers because they're impulsive and can't hold their gaze?

I think it's based upon the idea that people with ad blockers see less ads and so are still sensitive to ad impressions. In contrast, advertisements in really crowded situations (most people that walk about in urban areas, for example) require more effort to stand out as advertising saturation point hits.

I mostly combat any ad influence on me by making a point to _not_ buy anything that is advertised. Works out pretty well for helping me keep my sanity and conscience a little.

Re: Pi-hole – A black hole for Internet advertisements

#122

Post by wlll » Mon, Mar 13, 2017, 5:10 PM UTC

vanekjar wrote: post #112

Cool project! Great idea and nice UI. I have tried recently and it works fine with HTTP. The problem is with ads served via HTTPS and since today most of the pages are using HTTPS protocol pi-hole is kinda useless. For reference on this topic https://discourse.pi-hole.net/t/websites-hanging-timing-out-...

DNS happens before HTTP and HTTPS. If you block at the DNS level it will work for both HTTP and HTTPS URLs.

That page you linked seems to confirm this, and that Pi-Hole works just fine blocking HTTPS.

Re: Pi-hole – A black hole for Internet advertisements

#123

Post by a3n » Mon, Mar 13, 2017, 5:15 PM UTC

This could be in response to any number of comments on this page:

I use uBO and a few other blockers. I almost never see an ad.

A few days ago I saw an ad, and I was surprised. It was for Cadillac cars. I hovered over the ad, and it seemed to go directly to cadillac.com. And I was sort of OK with that.

The page, and the ad, seemed to be designed like any other legitimate link to another page or site. I don't know how the image made its way on to the page and in to my browser, but it appeared much less intrusive than a totally ad network-served ad.

Certainly the 1st party site could collect data about my visit and send it somewhere, but at least they appear to be more in the loop than just opening their site to all comers.

And if I clicked through to cadillac.com, they could do the same.

Anyway, that's more along the lines of what I've been wishing for as a consumer in web ads.

Re: Pi-hole – A black hole for Internet advertisements

#124

Post by problems » Mon, Mar 13, 2017, 5:18 PM UTC

ggoss wrote: post #109

JoshMnem wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google makes efforts to prevent ad-blocking: - Google Chrome for mobile doesn't allow add-ons so you can't install ad-blockers. (You can install browser extensions with Firefox for Android.) - Google Chrome uses a dark pattern where the address bar tends to send users to the Google search results page instead of to their final destination (compare the behavior with Firefox's). That means that even if you have an ad-b…

Ad-Away (installable via F-Droid if you are rooted) allows you to block ads at the hosts-file level, which will work in Chrome and in other apps that display ads. Before anyone chews me out, as this effectively renders many free apps equivalent to their premium (ad-free) counterparts, I usually pay for said premium versions to compensate their developers.

The catch here is that it isn't as good - using uBlock in FF for Android for example will properly block all ad frames.

Using adaway or a pi-hole for that matter will not - they will only cause ad loading to fail (in some cases) - which sometimes results in frames showing errors on the page instead of a clean rendering of nothing with ad divs removed.

Personally I wind up using several methods - AdAway to kill most app ads, uBlock for web and Xposed to kill YouTube ads since the hosts-based methods seem to work rather poorly for them as their subdomains change all the time.

Re: Pi-hole – A black hole for Internet advertisements

#125

Post by scottmf » Mon, Mar 13, 2017, 5:19 PM UTC

SamBam wrote: post #44

Bedon292 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You would just block *.addomain.com at that point. Which is already what is being done on many of the blockers. There will always be domains to block, even if they add new domains, the blockers will probably be able to block them just as fast.

How about if they load them through *.google.com? Sure, you could whitelist www.google.com, mail.google.com, etc, but couldn't they keep ahead of you if they were ok with using their main domain? They could even start using www.google.com/ad-id

Then you whitelist individual pages and assets.

Re: Pi-hole – A black hole for Internet advertisements

#126

Post by Drumlin » Mon, Mar 13, 2017, 5:19 PM UTC

pavel_lishin wrote: post #93

Drumlin wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me, that would be a sign that you are winning the battle. If enough websites fight ad blockers, especially big sites, and the people behind those ad blockers make clumsy mistakes, then users will reach a point where they uninstall the blocker.

Or they'll stop visiting the site.

Does it matter if they stop visiting the site? Considering that they are using resources without giving something back in return? I guess it could be argued that they might be promoting the site to other users.

Other than that, they are essentially freeloaders and if a website has too many freeloaders it has to either get rid of them or convert them to something else. Or, I guess, the website could shut down completely.

Re: Pi-hole – A black hole for Internet advertisements

#127

Post by nattaylor » Mon, Mar 13, 2017, 5:22 PM UTC

a3n wrote: post #123

This could be in response to any number of comments on this page: I use uBO and a few other blockers. I almost never see an ad. A few days ago I saw an ad, and I was surprised. It was for Cadillac cars. I hovered over the ad, and it seemed to go directly to cadillac.com. And I was sort of OK with that. The page, and the ad, seemed to be designed like any other legitimate link to another page or site. I don't know how…

Are you in-market for a car?

Re: Pi-hole – A black hole for Internet advertisements

#128

Post by ch » Mon, Mar 13, 2017, 5:23 PM UTC

a3n wrote: post #123

This could be in response to any number of comments on this page: I use uBO and a few other blockers. I almost never see an ad. A few days ago I saw an ad, and I was surprised. It was for Cadillac cars. I hovered over the ad, and it seemed to go directly to cadillac.com. And I was sort of OK with that. The page, and the ad, seemed to be designed like any other legitimate link to another page or site. I don't know how…

Would have been interesting to know who the domain was homed to. Might have just been an ad network with a CDN and cadillac.com CNAME'd to their servers. Looks like an origin served ad, but still flows through the tracker.

Re: Pi-hole – A black hole for Internet advertisements

#129

Post by df5t0rw » Mon, Mar 13, 2017, 5:24 PM UTC

Drumlin wrote: post #78

legohead wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ad blockers do a lot more than just block domains. They look for and remove divs/DOM elements that contain known ad naming schemes and remove them from the page. And if a site decides to start combating the ad blockers, the adblock list providers will update their rules specifically for the site in question. Adblock users get upset whenever they see ads, and report them pretty quickly. The business I work for tried b…

To me, that would be a sign that you are winning the battle. If enough websites fight ad blockers, especially big sites, and the people behind those ad blockers make clumsy mistakes, then users will reach a point where they uninstall the blocker.

Something relevant : https://www.geeksaresexy.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/bloc...

Re: Pi-hole – A black hole for Internet advertisements

#130

Post by problems » Mon, Mar 13, 2017, 5:26 PM UTC

JoshMnem wrote: post #79

nkkollaw wrote: post #30

With all the ad blocking technologies that are coming up, I wonder if Google is devising something to counteract these efforts. For instance, since browser-based ad blockers work from what I know by blocking known domain names, couldn't Google create random subdomains and serve the code from a different subdomain every day or even every few hours, as well as change the way their JavaScript and HTML looks? Even someth…

Google makes efforts to prevent ad-blocking: - Google Chrome for mobile doesn't allow add-ons so you can't install ad-blockers. (You can install browser extensions with Firefox for Android.) - Google Chrome uses a dark pattern where the address bar tends to send users to the Google search results page instead of to their final destination (compare the behavior with Firefox's). That means that even if you have an ad-b…

> - Android doesn't provide fine-grained permissions control or root access, so users can't block ads.

One caveat here - Google devices are probably some of the most allowing of root access and full device ownership - easily unlocked bootloaders basically allow it to be a one button process.

Some manufacturers make you put your device on a shitlist with them before they'll give you a key to unlock the bootloader and root it - others, like Apple, won't allow you to at all.

Once you are rooted, you do have full ability to block everything and get fine-grained permission control via XPrivacy for example. Android devices are actually some of the best here mostly due to strong community support. You can't even get this control if you want it on many mobile devices these days.