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Mmm, Pi-hole

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Re: Mmm, Pi-hole

#171

Post by malnourish »

krageon wrote: post #87
SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what's the impetus for the news business to be available online? If the world wide web should be a free love utopia of data slurping why would these agencies, who have been built on the assumption that the creation and presentation of their data has an inherent worth? How do they get remunerated for their efforts? Or do they just never try to take advantage of this new epoch and die off, leaving us with a billion…

I would pay for a source of journalism that had any actual effort put in it and wasn't blatantly and hilariously wrong almost all of the time. Sadly news agencies don't fit that bill at all.

Read reuters, you don't have to pay for it.

Re: Mmm, Pi-hole

#172

Post by Mister_Snuggles »

mirceal wrote: post #136
Mister_Snuggles wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I found the same thing with emails sent from an airline. It was frustrating because I did actually want to follow the links in the emails as they were to do with a flight I was taking.

You can whitelist domains, you can add to the blacklist or you can temporarily disable pihole (5-10min whatever) while you do something.

Yup, I temporarily disabled it and life was good.

But I can understand how this would frustrate people, especially when they don't know how to disable it or aren't given the password.

Re: Mmm, Pi-hole

#173

Post by mitko »

This might be dumb question and me missing something: Is it technically possible for someone to set up a PiHole DNS service similar to how Google has 8.8.8.8 ? It would be much better user experience in my opinion to just set a different DNS than to have to setup a new machine on your network.

Monetizing such service sounds tough as you have very minimal leverage over the users (by design!) but perhaps a Patreon/Foundation would be sustainable, similar to how Wikipedia is? Perhaps it could be bundled to a VPN service?

Re: Mmm, Pi-hole

#174

Post by 0xCMP »

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #19
WorkLifeBalance wrote: post #16

Someone on here recently recommended uMatrix for this purpose and I find that a nice trade-off between usability and request blocking. It's an extension but given it's less opaque than a generic ad-blocker I feel more in control and that it's less likely to go 'rogue' like adblockers do.

Longtime uMatrix user here. The most frustrating thing about UM (which is the same problem I had with NoScript back in the day) is that some scripts call other scripts. So, particularly when I'm trying to play an embedded video served by another site served through a CDN, the process for getting the damn video to play is something like: Click video -> Open uMatrix -> whitelist some scripts -> reload -> whitelist more…

For popular stuff switching to "global" and marking them as enabled helps reduce the song-and-dance for things like YouTube videos or common CDNs (e.g. Bootstrap)

Re: Mmm, Pi-hole

#175

Post by TheBeardKing »

Don't buy a raspberry pi just for this, chances are you have some old windows machine you can slap Ubuntu server on and set it up easily. That's what I did and I have very little Linux experience.

My favorite thing about it is ad-blocking in mobile apps. I tried to use it with OpenVPN on my android phone for ad-blocking when I'm on cellular data, but the speed it was unbearable. I'm not sure if it was my crappy router or what, everything I read says that DNS routing should be neglibible to speed.

The downside of pi-hole as opposed to a broswer extension is it's more difficult to allow things when needed, and whitelisting specific URLs can be difficult and slow to take effect.

Re: Mmm, Pi-hole

#176

Post by eb00 »

Pi-hole is so important to me that I am unwilling to use the web without it. I also will not use Microsoft Windows without it. The Mozilla DNS over HTTP project concerns me because of this. If DNS over HTTP becomes the default for most software then I will have a serious problem.

Don't bother trying to tell me this will be optional. Absolutely nothing will make me trust you after the MR. Robot incident. I would cut off two fingers to use Safari on Linux and Windows.

Re: Mmm, Pi-hole

#177

Post by upofadown »

admax88q wrote: post #167

Why are our devices so far outside our own control that we need to run an additional device on our networks to help prevent them from making unwanted network requests? The whole approach of Pi-hole feels misguided. Blacklisting domains and hosts should be something easily done on my device locally. Then it comes with me when I visit friends or coffee shops, and it's easy to temporarily disable when it breaks somethin…

You can edit the hosts file on Android apparently and the Pi-hole is just a shared hosts file.

Re: Mmm, Pi-hole

#178

Post by 713233eb »

admax88q wrote: post #167

Why are our devices so far outside our own control that we need to run an additional device on our networks to help prevent them from making unwanted network requests? The whole approach of Pi-hole feels misguided. Blacklisting domains and hosts should be something easily done on my device locally. Then it comes with me when I visit friends or coffee shops, and it's easy to temporarily disable when it breaks somethin…

There are devices that are not easy to free up from ads, eg. unmodified WP mobiles. This way they are protected from ads as well when tehy are conmected to the same network with wifi.

Re: Mmm, Pi-hole

#179

Post by robertely »

mitko wrote: post #173

This might be dumb question and me missing something: Is it technically possible for someone to set up a PiHole DNS service similar to how Google has 8.8.8.8 ? It would be much better user experience in my opinion to just set a different DNS than to have to setup a new machine on your network. Monetizing such service sounds tough as you have very minimal leverage over the users (by design!) but perhaps a Patreon/Foun…

You really want someone you trust as a dns provider.

It would be easy to exploit people and as you say it's basically impossible to monetize. There would be motivation to do so.

Re: Mmm, Pi-hole

#180

Post by jack12 »

ryandrake wrote: post #72
gruez wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you could do the same with ublock

Not on a network-wide basis, and not on non-browsers. I don’t think anyone here is saying don’t use a browser-based blocker too. I use both a browser plugin on the client and dnsmasq on my network.

I think the blog post is saying that, especially in the quote that started this thread. The post portrays ad-blocking browser extensions as not worth the risk, discussing both the questionable value of blocking all ads and also the possible risk of the extension being sold to a malware creator. It then presents Pi-hole as a safe alternative to browser-based blockers.
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