Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Pi-hole – A black hole for Internet advertisements

pi-hole.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 320 posts

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

#291

Post by traviscj »

drdaeman wrote: post #254
albertico wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

no one has the right or should spam people with ads. There are lots of ways to support your projects without ads. Privacy matters!

I think, privacy, spam and ads-in-general are related but distinct concepts that don't necessarily involve each other (although more likely to be so than not, when it comes to real-life situations). Ads are about what's being sent from publisher to consumer. It can be solicited, unsolicited or something in-between. And privacy is about what's being sent in the very opposite direction.

I think a lot of publishers seem uninterested in untargeted advertisements though, so the distinction -- while existing in principal -- is not very relevant in practice.

Certainly the untargeted adds I see (or even those I can tell are by virtue of the place I am, instead of my own customer profile, seem much lower quality.

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

#292

Post by johnpowell »

finid wrote: post #232
Kaedon wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you imagine sites that are ad free would appear? What's their business model? I don't think that's a given, especially since most users won't pay (see the rise of freemium style apps vs paid ones in the app store).

Proponents of adblockers are not thinking this thing through. It takes time (that's money) to create quality content that anybody would love reading. Heck, even content that's crappy takes time to create.

I remember back in 1994. There was actually better quality content back them. Think of half the sites being Ian's Shoelace Site. People that are just really into something and make a site about it. Static HTML sites that were fairly cheap to run. I had a site about all the special tricks in Tony Hawks Pro Skater. It was simple HTML and I got a ton of hits (this was later in 1999). No ads, I just loved the game.

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

#293

Post by dang »

promofaux wrote: post #211
dmix wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks like your comments were getting killed with [dead] automatically. Maybe because of a new HN account combined with linking to the same site a couple times cause it to flag some spam detector? I vouched for your comments so they appear. Thanks for the project!

Ah! I did wonder what was going on.. :) I've heard of HN before, but never actively participated, hence only signing up today! Thanks for vouching for me :)

Sorry about that, and welcome to HN! (I'm a moderator here.)

You got hit by a spam filter; they're tuned more aggressively for new accounts. We've marked this account legit so it won't affect you again.

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

#294

Post by malikNF »

foxylad wrote: post #282
malikNF wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So if you are not convinced the advert driven model is not "the only, or even a good, model" what is then an alternative. I think the ad model needs to improve where the major players will start enforcing strict rules on what types of adverts are allowed for example, they could reject any advert that waste CPU cycles, reject ones using too much memory, ban buggy adverts. Plus, the number one concern these days, the p…

Subscriptions. My company only provides services via subscription, which means we can provide great support, continuous development, and no ads. Our customers love this. You could argue that this doesn't solve your problem, because we have to identify you to tell if you have paid or not. But actually paying for a service radically alters the relationship - it's suddenly in our interests to keep your information priva…

Subscriptions are nice, but not for everything, if the entire Internet was a subscription model, that would suck so much you would have to spend atleast 100usd a month to just keep using websites. Even if we have a model where you can subscribe to an array of sites using one service, we will still have the same problem of a few companies being in charge of controlling the information we have access to. Hell it would make tracking even easier.

Honestly I don't think we should even think about getting rid of adverts, but I definitely think that these adverts need to focus on being non intrusive, they have to start respecting people's privacy. I would willingly support a product which helps keep something I love online. But I would definitely think twice if that said company tries to get through to me by tracking and observing what I do online.

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

#295

Post by noja »

Gaelan wrote: post #287
noja wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. With a curl install, you cannot audit the source. You cannot know if you have been served the same content as someone else. You cannot look at version history, check a signed package, etc. etc. If someone wants to root just a few select machines, you would want people to do a curl install.

If you're going to manually audit the source, you can curl into a file then run bash on it. If you're not going to read the code anyway, there's no harm in curl|bash.

Yes there is, there's a lot of harm, see my comment above.

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

#296

Post by AlexAffe »

QuadrupleA wrote: post #186

I definitely hate ads like anyone, but it should be acknowledged that ads serve a purpose too, of creating an economy for free content and giving people an avenue to get some income in exchange for their efforts, and possibly be able to devote their full attention to a free project and not have to support themselves with other income. Ads give creators some incentive to create stuff - although the income generally is…

Then they should start to respect the user in every way. For me, it is not about ads being shown (as long as no pink flashy flashy banner popup hell). It is about privacy and snooping around, creating profiles, without me knowing, selling my data behind my back. I want to control, what my device sends and to whom. That is it.

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

#297

Post by petre »

nigifabio wrote: post #170
laumars wrote: post #135

For those of us - myself included - who run a hosts file list (either using dnsmasq like Pi-hole or directly), here are the sources that Pi-hole use so you can add to your own solution: https://github.com/pi-hole/pi-hole/blob/master/adlists.defau... There's a few on there I don't use and will look to implement. There's also a few they seem to have missed (perhaps intentionally?) so below I have included the lists I u…

Sound like an amazing setup, what about sharing all these scripts? How and why you build your browser?

There is also this perl script for generating a DNS based blocklist for unbound out of Dan Pollock's hosts file.

https://github.com/jodrell/unbound-block-hosts

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

#298

Post by promofaux »

pix64 wrote: post #213

I feel like this is a bit dangerous because it doesn't allow the end user to disable it if it breaks a website which is quite common.

There is a disable button on the web interface[1] which allows you to either disable it permanently, or for a specific amount of time. Of course, client devices need to clear their DNS cache, too, in order for this to work properly, but at the moment there is no way of automating that.

There are also other tools to help with blacklisted domains that cause issues/site breakages, such as a query log to identify them, and the ability to whitelist with ease!

[1] http://imgur.com/a/DlIeq

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

#299

Post by promofaux »

libeclipse wrote: post #173

I used this for a while but I found that it was unbearably slow. Perhaps it's too much to ask from a RaspberryPi3.

When you say unbearably slow, do you mean the actual DNS resolution, or the Admin interface?

An Rpi3, even a Rpi B or zero is plenty good enough for DNS queries! The Admin interface has been a bit of a bugbear for a while, but we are working on some massive improvements for the 3.0 release (coming soon™)

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

#300

Post by snaky »

problems wrote: post #130
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…

> - 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…

> Google devices are probably some of the most allowing of root access and full device ownership

Did you hear about SafetyNet? https://koz.io/inside-safetynet/

Post reply on HN