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

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

#171

Post by pjc50 » Thu, May 30, 2019, 4:01 PM UTC

nawtacawp wrote: post #166

pjc50 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the dark side of DNS-over-HTTPs: it prevents the network operator from changing what is received by browsers. Sometimes this is legitimate, as in Pi-hole. Paul Vixie got very upset when he discovered that his chromecast bypasses local DNS settings to go directly to Google: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19170671 I wouldn't be surprised if soon Chrome defaults to DNS-over-HTTPs direct to base, except for…

could setup a small firewall (pfSense) that routes all DNS queries from connected devices to your own DNS server.

Not with DNS-over-HTTPs and certificate pinning you can't, because the certificate check would fail.

(That would be a very annoying thing to do in a device or browser, but it's certainly possible)

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

#172

Post by calimac » Thu, May 30, 2019, 4:01 PM UTC

segfaultbuserr wrote: post #62

brianpayne2 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are the advantages of using Cloudflare's DNS as opposed to say Google DNS or your ISP? Tracking?

Due to the architecture of DNS, DNS is not end-to-end encrypted. There is a potential solution (djb's DNSCurve), but it will not be deployed. As a result, let's do an assessment. Using Google DNS, self-hosted resolver, or your ISP's DNS : NSA, your ISP, everyone and every dog at the middle of your link to the Internet can track and see your requests. Using CloudFlare's DNS w/ DNS-over-HTTPS : only NSA (via a NSL or s…

Cloudflare scaled up massively so quickly when they started offering cdns a decade ago.

I judged the company in a negative light when their ceo or cfo wrote an open letter rationalizing their ban silencing some obnoxious website over political belief virtue signaling.

A company that crushes free speech cannot be trusted.

I don’t even remember what the obnoxious or offensive website was but I know that offensive speech is protected speech.

Autocratic technocracy centralized into a few digital monopolies wrap our wrists into digital slave chains labeled “free”.

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

#173

Post by stevesearer » Thu, May 30, 2019, 4:01 PM UTC

elorant wrote: post #160

stevesearer wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Initially I just set a price I thought was fair and have adjusted accordingly as we've grown. I do recall that the amount we received from Adsense was less than what we ended up choosing to charge for the same space.

We also sell the space per month as opposed to based on impressions or clicks so it makes it a little more straightforward.

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

#174

Post by AstroJetson » Thu, May 30, 2019, 4:02 PM UTC

sbarre wrote: post #146

programbreeding wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Over 50% of my DNS queries get blocked by the pihole [0]; and I've seen it much higher. Like you said, it's one of the most prized devices on my network. [0] https://i.imgur.com/dPZzYjL.png

That's fascinating.. I would love to know what the averages are across a wider range of users.. In contrast, For my home network, it's just under 15% of queries that get blocked. I've got 3 Macs, a Windows 10 machine, an Apple TV (all connected 24/7) and a handful of iOS devices that hop on and off the network. My blocklist contains ~114k domains I believe.

28-30% here about ~114k domains also, 5 devices

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

#175

Post by pjc50 » Thu, May 30, 2019, 4:05 PM UTC

zaroth wrote: post #169

I haven’t tried Pi-Hole yet but this was the impetus I needed to decide to set it up tonight. I commented on a different post last night, that I was a bit shocked and saddened to see their Patreon is only pulling in $1,700/mo. Do they have another significant revenue stream? Is it just too much hassle to bother signing up to Patreon to commit to even $1/mo? Do they have something on the Admin panel where users can cl…

> only pulling in $1,700/mo.

This is an astonishingly huge amount of money for an open source project to raise directly from its users. Most open source projects get basically nothing.

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

#176

Post by creeble » Thu, May 30, 2019, 4:05 PM UTC

Can you tell from the command line what version Pi you're running? I think mine's an original B+, but not sure. I typically get sub-millisecond DNS resolution (presumably from cache).

>root@pihole:~# uptime > 17:02:51 up 587 days, 22:34, 1 user, load average: 0.03, 0.03, 0.05

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

#177

Post by asveikau » Thu, May 30, 2019, 4:06 PM UTC

I was looking at their github repo and couldn't immediately see where pihole gets its block lists, just a very large soup of shell scripting that seems to make a lot of assumptions about your Linux distro.

Anybody familiar with this code able to point out where it does the "interesting" work?

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

#178

Post by mpettitt » Thu, May 30, 2019, 4:07 PM UTC

sbarre wrote: post #146

programbreeding wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Over 50% of my DNS queries get blocked by the pihole [0]; and I've seen it much higher. Like you said, it's one of the most prized devices on my network. [0] https://i.imgur.com/dPZzYjL.png

That's fascinating.. I would love to know what the averages are across a wider range of users.. In contrast, For my home network, it's just under 15% of queries that get blocked. I've got 3 Macs, a Windows 10 machine, an Apple TV (all connected 24/7) and a handful of iOS devices that hop on and off the network. My blocklist contains ~114k domains I believe.

I get about 15% of queries blocked with 3 Windows laptops, 2 Android phones, 1 iPhone, and a smart TV. I do run most of the traffic generated for work through work VPN though, and that tends to be the largest source of traffic (about 80% by data volume), which completely ignores local DNS.

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

#179

Post by jrace » Thu, May 30, 2019, 4:07 PM UTC

creeble wrote: post #176

Can you tell from the command line what version Pi you're running? I think mine's an original B+, but not sure. I typically get sub-millisecond DNS resolution (presumably from cache). >root@pihole:~# uptime > 17:02:51 up 587 days, 22:34, 1 user, load average: 0.03, 0.03, 0.05

cat /proc/cpuinfo

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

#180

Post by F00Fbug » Thu, May 30, 2019, 4:07 PM UTC

nawtacawp wrote: post #163

F00Fbug wrote: post #145

If you're running some type of hypervisor (ESXi, Proxmox, etc.), you can create a tiny VM running Debian and load Pi-hole on it. No need for extra hardware and wires.

I use ESXi and one of the VMs is pfSense. pfSense has an additional software package called pfBlocker, which is highly configurable and just plan awesome for blockings ads/trackers/etc for the LAN. pfSense has tons of other options - I setup a vLAN and all of my IoT devices are segregated onto it. That way they can't interact with the rest of the devices on the LAN.

Yep... my pfSense is virtualized, too. I need to get pfBlocker configured, but pi-hole works so well, I'm too lazy to do anything about it! I'm also working on an IoT VLAN - that Ring doorbell is a chatty Kathy!