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Mmm, Pi-hole

troyhunt.com

291–300 of 421 posts

Re: Mmm, Pi-hole

#291
post #108
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not always true. Check out the new GMail, my new corporate account has no ads but it still weighs in at 25MB (well 28MB now - still asyncing stuff!) for the inbox. In this case, the largest resources are Javascript and CSS (yes 1.2MB CSS files!). The weird thing is that it appears to be making requests with different cache-busting strings and getting resources that are the same size. (32MB now, I haven't done…

> Check out the new GMail, my new corporate account has no ads but it still weighs in at 25MB (well 28MB now - still asyncing stuff!) for the inbox. The new gmail is the slowest web app I have ever used. It's gotten so bad I've started managing my email on my relatively snappy inbox iOS client. It wouldn't be so bad if they didn't load so much crap, like the gchat functionality nobody has used since 2008.

The old HTML only version still works. I just refreshed mine and got 19.11 KB transfered with cache disabled. (about half that with cache)

Re: Mmm, Pi-hole

#292
post #129

I tried pi-hole but my family couldn't make it work. Pihole blocks a lot of content they want to see, for example, email newsletters from our city gov. I understand why (privacy/tracking concerns) but it was just blocking too much and frustrating non-technical users in my house.

That's interesting. There's another comment further down saying it broke stuff too, but I've honestly never had that happen. The most I've ever seen it "break" anything was formatting issues when people didn't declare the ad div size. To be fair, we're very light/casual web users as most of my hobbies/entertainment are physical electronics and my wife/kids mostly watch Netflix/Stan or just browse reddit/news sites. I…

> The most I've ever seen it "break" anything was formatting issues when people didn't declare the ad div size.

Haha, I remember some years back a popular C++ programming site would break if you didn't have an adblocker because someone had put wide header banner ads in both of the side banner areas, shrinking the text to a single word column in the middle. I guess they only tested their website with adblockers on...

Re: Mmm, Pi-hole

#293

My Pi-hole with updated block lists (blocking trackers as well as ads) sits at around 87.7% requests blocked, which is absolutely mind-blowingly ridiculous. I see absolutely no negative effects browsing like this. Everything I've come across still works fine. Even sites that detect uBlock Origin and tell me to disable it, will work with that disabled and Pi-hole still blocking the ads instead. I heavily believe we sh…

> I heavily believe we should be supporting creators As do I. There's two significant issues I have supporting most sites: 1. They provide only a subscription that is comparable cost to an old-media full subscription. Like most people in the Internet age I have a small number of main sources that I visit daily, and a much larger secondary tier where I may average one or two stories a week. Or they're the sites linked…

I completely agree with your assessment of the problem.

I'm using https://blendle.com, which offers a wide variety of publications with payment per article (usually something around 0.70 EUR, with the odd 1.99 EUR for articles from DER SPIEGEL). They also have a daily mix of manually curated content and content based on the articles I purchased in the past, which works really well. I'm afraid it's only available in the Netherlands and Germany so far.

I didn't know the Brave browser had a payment model built in, will give this a try as well.

Re: Mmm, Pi-hole

#294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I heavily believe we should be supporting creators As do I. There's two significant issues I have supporting most sites: 1. They provide only a subscription that is comparable cost to an old-media full subscription. Like most people in the Internet age I have a small number of main sources that I visit daily, and a much larger secondary tier where I may average one or two stories a week. Or they're the sites linked…

I just want to pay a monthly "digital content fee" to some service and have that money be fairly distributed to all the digital services I use: websites, music, video, tools, etc. Is anyone working on a system like that?

Check out coil: https://coil.com

Re: Mmm, Pi-hole

#295
For a hardware-free option let me plug my little weekend project called DNS Whisperer:

https://github.com/apankrat/dnswhisperer

It's been quietly spinning on our mail server for a couple of years and it works just as you'd expect it to. Block ratio is around 50%, with no notable effects on browsing experience. It also blocks various in-game ads on the iOS devices. I update the blacklist now and then, may be once every 4-5 months if that, but it's largely maintenance-free.

Re: Mmm, Pi-hole

#296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read an article once that argued the big problem with microtransactions was the transaction cost imposed on users . For the sites, sure, everything can be automated. But even in the best case of good browser ui/ux support the burden shifted to users would be massive. The cognitive cost of trying to decide whether to spend 10c on an article I haven’t read yet costs me way more than 10c. Man that article sucked. Did…

Would it change if there was a button at the bottom of the article, that you could click for an instant refund, no questions asked? Honestly it almost seems to be worth trying, the potential upshot is _huge_.

blendle.com, which I mentioned earlier in this thread, has this instant-refund feature. I've used it a few times when an article was disappointing, or when there were technical problems (digitized article cut off the second half of the print version).

Seems to work for them, though I don't know their revenue/profit numbers.

Re: Mmm, Pi-hole

#297
Troy's perspective seems to be lacking in several levels. The first thing is the nature of advertising. Advertising is an attack on the client to convince him to believe and ultimately to act in ways that could not be contrived through honest communication. It is an attempt to manipulate.

Even his very benign banner represents an attempt to manipulate. A company buying such a banner wants an author to speak as he wouldn't naturally to give a degree of attention to the sponsors content that he wouldn't naturally inspiring us to give an unnatural degree of regard to the sponsor by implying that he does by plastering it on the top of his website.

He expresses that blocking this attempt at manipulation is "unjust". Hi Troy as soon as your content leaves your website and runs on my computer there is no moral dimension to how I choose to display or not display elements.

In the larger context he believes that the larger struggle is to find a way to fund creators through acceptable manipulation that merely tries to hack your brain but doesn't hack your computer or take up your whole screen.

Maybe when there are a billion people out there blogging and the infrastructure to reach hundreds of thousands costs $20 per month nobody is going to pay you to blog.

Most of the intellectual property out there isn't scarce and you are going to have to convince at least some of your readers that they ought to take the affirmative step of paying you to create because they value your work. If you can't you'll have to pay the $20 a month yourself and create in your spare time.

Acceptable manipulation isn't an avenue I'm interested in supporting.

Incidentally the pi-hole is an interesting but pretty bad solution. It is just technical enough to discourage 90% of people from ever trying it, worthless outside your home network, and requires even those interested to actually pull out their credit card and wait for shipping. This is enough to convince another 99% not to do it. If the website doesn't work with this dns based blocking OR you want to show ads to support that site this is in theory possible but only if you log in to another machine and edit its list over ssh?

Whereas ublock origin can be installed by anyone in seconds for free, works everywhere, and can be selectively disabled on a particular site in 2 clicks. This is why almost nobody uses a home dns server but adblock extensions are becoming prevalent.

Troy also tries to throw shade at extensions by suggesting that any particular extension could be bought by malware authors. This is a legit threat model we should all think more about but it applies to all software including the developers of pi-hole.

"The last temptation is the greatest treason. To do the right deed for the wrong reason." -- T S Eliot

Troy doesn't want us to avoid extensions so we don't get compromised he wants us not to run adblock extensions because they block his source of revenue.

Re: Mmm, Pi-hole

#298

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…

Firefox for android can run extensions so its trivial to just install ublock origin. You can even use choose to sync extensions across devices and as soon as you login to your Firefox account all your extensions will be installed automatically.

Re: Mmm, Pi-hole

#299
post #131

My Pi-hole with updated block lists (blocking trackers as well as ads) sits at around 87.7% requests blocked, which is absolutely mind-blowingly ridiculous. I see absolutely no negative effects browsing like this. Everything I've come across still works fine. Even sites that detect uBlock Origin and tell me to disable it, will work with that disabled and Pi-hole still blocking the ads instead. I heavily believe we sh…

> I heavily believe we should be supporting creators Agreed. Do you disable your pi-hole on sites like Reddit? They vet their ads so not have any of the malicious attributes that you described. All the larger newspagers like WaPo and NYT are also good about this too. I'm all for blocking intrusive or malicious ads. But quality content depends on ad revenue. The author dedicated an entire paragraph on donating to the…

Do you keep your car doors unlocked when you park in safe neighborhoods? Do you give nice strangers a spare key to your house? Do you sleep in an expensive hotel with the door propped open? Do you keep your password on a sticky note at your desk inside your secure office?

Of course not. So why would I disable my security software just because a site I visit hasn't been hacked yet? That's just basic security hygiene.

Re: Mmm, Pi-hole

#300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s essentially dnsmasq which can be run directly on your wireless router if you are using custom firmware. No separate hw needed, no need to horse around with dockers or containers or any of that stuff. I’d guess a lot of people are already running dnsmasq for other purposes, so adding the blocklist and periodically updating it should be trivial.

Yeah, on openwrt you just install the adblock package https://github.com/openwrt/packages/tree/master/net/adblock/...

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