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

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

#221

Post by LeoPanthera » Thu, May 30, 2019, 4:33 PM UTC

ronjouch wrote: post #42

Also, owners or routers able to run OpenWRT (which is actively maintained and in great shape since the merge with LEDE), you have access to several packages providing the same technical solution (DNS-based blocking). As far as I know, the most common and maintained is https://github.com/openwrt/packages/tree/master/net/adblock/... . Super easy to install, full-featured, lots of lists to pick from, auto-updates lists,…

pfSense based routers can use pfBlockerNG which can be installed from the Package Manager.

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

#222

Post by matoro » Thu, May 30, 2019, 4:33 PM UTC

mikepasek wrote: post #190

Ad blocking via DNS is relatively easy right now because a content provider like CNN.com will use a domain like “ads.evil-surveillance-media.com” to load their ads into your browser. But what happens if all these companies switch to just using their own domain to load ads? If the ads as well as the content BOTH come from CNN.com then there will be no easy way to filter the ads out. This will be the next stage in this…

This has been warned about for a while now and it's not actually terribly difficult for sites to implement. Why don't they? Simple - click fraud. The ad networks don't trust the sites to accurately report click numbers, so they insist on running their own code. For this reason, the number of truly first-party ads will be limited for a long while.

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

#223

Post by [deleted] » Thu, May 30, 2019, 4:36 PM UTC

creeble wrote: post #147

ronjouch wrote: post #42

Also, owners or routers able to run OpenWRT (which is actively maintained and in great shape since the merge with LEDE), you have access to several packages providing the same technical solution (DNS-based blocking). As far as I know, the most common and maintained is https://github.com/openwrt/packages/tree/master/net/adblock/... . Super easy to install, full-featured, lots of lists to pick from, auto-updates lists,…

Curious about anyone's experience with adblock for OpenWRT. I use Pi-hole now, and it works great. The one feature that I use quite a lot is the ability to disable it for a short period of time -- when I'm shopping for something, Google ads are sometimes actually useful! I'd say I use that feature about once a month. That's the sum value of advertising for me.

[deleted]

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

#224

Post by ben509 » Thu, May 30, 2019, 4:37 PM UTC

mikepasek wrote: post #190

Ad blocking via DNS is relatively easy right now because a content provider like CNN.com will use a domain like “ads.evil-surveillance-media.com” to load their ads into your browser. But what happens if all these companies switch to just using their own domain to load ads? If the ads as well as the content BOTH come from CNN.com then there will be no easy way to filter the ads out. This will be the next stage in this…

Adblocker plugins already do content-level filtering because of this, not just for ads but various tracking and other annoyances.

I do that for the sites that have the banner that hides if you scroll down, but pops out the moment you scroll one pixel back, or sites that put up "please don't leave me" modals the moment your cursor strays out of the window.

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

#225

Post by ampsonic » Thu, May 30, 2019, 4:37 PM UTC

I have set up a Siri Shortcut on my phone so that I can disable the blocking for 5 minutes very easily. Highly recommended if you have family members that occasionally need something unblocked.

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

#226

Post by SmirkingRevenge » Thu, May 30, 2019, 4:37 PM UTC

Abishek_Muthian wrote: post #204

creeble wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious about anyone's experience with adblock for OpenWRT. I use Pi-hole now, and it works great. The one feature that I use quite a lot is the ability to disable it for a short period of time -- when I'm shopping for something, Google ads are sometimes actually useful! I'd say I use that feature about once a month. That's the sum value of advertising for me.

That's interesting, Where do you see relevant Google Ads while shopping; is it on some product review blogs? Did you check the 'Shopping' tab of Google search?

One example I've run into...

When you google search for something (like say a product or service that you want to purchase), you'll see a couple ads at the top of the results.

Pi-hole usually prevents most ads from even displaying, but those always show up. If the ad was useful and you want to click through, it will generally block the request. I think the click through sends you to doubleclick or something.

I've never disabled pi-hole in that situation, but there have been times when it was an annoyance because the ad was actually relevant.

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

#227

Post by bmedwar » Thu, May 30, 2019, 4:38 PM UTC

content is blocked in non-browser locations, such as ad-laden mobile apps and smart TVs

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

#228

Post by ekblom » Thu, May 30, 2019, 4:39 PM UTC

ampsonic wrote: post #225

I have set up a Siri Shortcut on my phone so that I can disable the blocking for 5 minutes very easily. Highly recommended if you have family members that occasionally need something unblocked.

How does one acquire this kind of magic?

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

#229

Post by jerf » Thu, May 30, 2019, 4:40 PM UTC

Piskvorrr wrote: post #214

jerf wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Conceivably we could take a harder line on this, if we get a little deeper into the routing. We could make it so we only whitelist IP addresses outbound if we saw them come back through our DNS server, and network block everything else. Then if you bypass my DNS server, you don't get to talk to the Internet, unless you directly pick an address that something else has whitelisted that way. I'm thinking about this, and…

Interesting, interesting. Note that long DNS TTLs will break this: your DNS server needs to hand out artificially short TTLs so that clients will keep re-querying (within the local network).

I was also considering going the opposite direction and given extremely long permissions to the IP in question, i.e., longer than any practical DNS TTL. In general, I'm not too worried about a good IP becoming bad, and if an IP can be both "good" and "bad" this way I'm not going to block it with this technique anyhow. It'd be a potential hole, but if this non-existent project got to the point that it was being that directly targeted, that'd only mean we got pretty successful to even get to that point. :)

I should probably make an explicit point that I left implicit; I'm interested in anyone popping up and telling me "Hey, this thing exists already and it's http://...".

(I find myself wondering if I finally found my Rust project...)

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

#230

Post by llamataboot » Thu, May 30, 2019, 4:43 PM UTC

I love the pi-hole, but I can't seem to figure out how to get resolving of .local hostnames back when I use it. Like, I can no longer ping my media server at media.local, I have to use the exact IP address. Not a deal breaker, but annoying.