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Pi-hole: A black hole for Internet advertisements

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

#151

Post by vmurthy »

JustSomeNobody wrote: post #137
someexgamedev wrote: post #130

Why hasn't anyone, or pi-hole themselves, made a public DNS that does this? Pass everything not on the blocklist thru to 1.1.1.1. The fact that this requires special hardware, bash commands, etc is severely limiting the audience. The more people blocking ads the quicker the internet changes. Edit: thanks for the replies!

pi-hole as a service. How much would that cost / month? Or could fund it with some targeted ads. Oh, wait.

I have a Vultr instance that costs me $2.5 per month. Pi-hole doesn’t consume too many resources. While I’ve not done any math, assuming I can handle 10 ppl browsing at the same time, my cost per person is 25 cents a month. Assuming other overheads(my time etc.) and some margin , I’d say a dollar a month ? For better effect , I’ll say 1.49 per month ;-)

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

#152

Post by neuronic »

Theizestooke wrote: post #129

Apparently it blocks some domains necessary for the Washington Post articles to load. Whitelisting washingtonpost.com doesn't remove the adblock notice :(

Can you check which domains don't resolve using dev tools and check if they are on the pi-hole block lists?

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

#154

Post by bgeeek »

ashman5 wrote: post #126
isbjorn16 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haven't you noticed any drastic reductions in speed? My rpi 3b (not 3b+) just couldn't handle it. It had 2 users. Our DNS resolution times increased by about 200ms. It was awful. I stripped it back out and haven't bothered trying to set it up again. (Other details: the RPI was hardwired, wireless disabled, and it was a fresh raspbian install with zero customization outside of adding pihole.)

I would say that you may have a setup issue with your router. My resolution times decreased when the pi-hole is providing DNS responses. I have 30+ devices on a 3b+. I'm using a UniFi setup and both WAN and LAN point to the pi-hole local ip address.

Same here. Absolutely fine.

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

#155

Post by xrd »

loudtieblahblah wrote: post #112
ChikkaChiChi wrote: post #17

Pi-hole is my most prized addition to my connected home. It was simple to set up, easy to manage, and easy to access for whitelisting. Now, all of my devices throughout my network benefit from the service, as opposed to relying on locally installed solutions. If you aren't using it, you should!

I see it as an advantage for all the devices on your network. I mean, to block trackers from Windows computers, or Roku devices or android apps. But as an adblocker - I feel like I'm missing something. It acts as a DNS server for your local network and blocks what's essentially a host file. So how does it handle ads served through websockets? How does it handle ads that come from the same domain as legitimate content…

Your fourth sentence is what strikes me as really important. All this discussion about adblockers will not work if Google develops technologies to embed their ads directly inside content providers. It's going to be a race to see if ad blockers and the reliant technologies are faster than Google.

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

#156

Post by kasey_junk »

craigsmansion wrote: post #143
kasey_junk wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cloudflare makes a pretty specific statement against what you are saying: "1.1.1.1 does not mine any user data. Logs are kept for 24 hours for debugging purposes, then they are purged." Are you claiming they are lying?

I'm all for assuming the people who work there are good eggs with the best intentions, but Cloudflare, Inc. is a U.S. company. As I understand the U.S. legal landscape with regards to data and privacy protection, they could be forced to lie at a moment's notice and not talk about it.

So far as I know there is no legal way for the US to make a company lie about its activities. That is the basis of warrant canaries, which have not been tested in court yet. You can find cloudflares https://www.cloudflare.com/transparency/.

They could be forced to not talk about something via a gag order.

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

#157

Post by jamesog »

jqueryin wrote: post #144
jamesog wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have: nextdns.io There was discussion a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20012687

I'm slightly concerned about routing my traffic through a non-major player in Anycast when I don't control the routing or software. I'd be worried it's quite an easy target for someone to do some DNS hijacking or packet sniffing. There's a certain level of trust when I use 1.1.1.1 or 8.8.8.8. I'm unwilling to take the risk for this solution. I'm not sure what would help in the trust department to legitimize a solutio…

This is why you should use their DNS-over-TLS or DNS-over-HTTPS service instead of standard DNS.

Route hijacks can happen to anyone, even Cloudflare or Google. If anything they're more likely to be targetted than a smaller player like Nextdns.

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

#158

Post by jm4 »

loudtieblahblah wrote: post #112
ChikkaChiChi wrote: post #17

Pi-hole is my most prized addition to my connected home. It was simple to set up, easy to manage, and easy to access for whitelisting. Now, all of my devices throughout my network benefit from the service, as opposed to relying on locally installed solutions. If you aren't using it, you should!

I see it as an advantage for all the devices on your network. I mean, to block trackers from Windows computers, or Roku devices or android apps. But as an adblocker - I feel like I'm missing something. It acts as a DNS server for your local network and blocks what's essentially a host file. So how does it handle ads served through websockets? How does it handle ads that come from the same domain as legitimate content…

It's not much effort. You basically write an image to an SD card, put it into a pi and you're up and running. Although it doesn't block everything that ubo does, it does a darn good job and it's also effective for devices where ubo isn't an option. It updates the list on its own. I occasionally update it when I happen to log in to check something and I notice the software is out of date.

I don't think it's a situation where you can ditch your ad blocker if you are dead set on never seeing an ad. It may be good enough for most people though. Personally, I still run ad blockers on my devices. Other people in the household do not.

I seldom have to whitelist anything. I may not have whitelisted anything at all. I have blacklisted a few extra domains - things like analytics requests for IoT devices. I don't recall a time that something didn't work and I had to fiddle with the pi-hole to fix it. It's been very low maintenance and very effective in my experience.

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

#159

Post by intopieces »

bilal4hmed wrote: post #16

With all the fervor around ad-blocking what I fail to see is how do you propose those sites that you visit, read their content to make money ? Are you willing to pay every site you visit or encourage them to put up pay walls ??

In what other industry is the customer responsible for the company’s business model?

I choose who deserves my attention carefully. Internet ads have not earned it.

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

#160

Post by elorant »

stevesearer wrote: post #57
zelon88 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with the "old" way, where you visit a Mopar automotive related website and saw Mopar car part ads? Or when you visit a computer magazine and saw ads for computer parts? Or when you went to NYT and saw basic shit like paper towels and fall fashion? It became a problem when everyone and their sister started needing to know what kinds of kinks I'm into just to sell me dish detergent.

This is what we do at Office Snapshots ( https://officesnapshots.com ). We post about office design and our ads are primarily for office furniture or other services related to the industry. We also self-host the ads which are non-animated jpgs and sell them without using any ad networks. What you describe works well for us :)

So how do you know how much to charge? Do you relate it to AdSense's cost plus Google's profit or you follow some other practice?
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