Does this mean that I will have to setup an always running server at home?
Pi-hole – A black hole for Internet advertisements
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Re: Pi-hole – A black hole for Internet advertisements
#72Re: Pi-hole – A black hole for Internet advertisements
#73With all the ad blocking technologies that are coming up, I wonder if Google is devising something to counteract these efforts. For instance, since browser-based ad blockers work from what I know by blocking known domain names, couldn't Google create random subdomains and serve the code from a different subdomain every day or even every few hours, as well as change the way their JavaScript and HTML looks? Even someth…
Decreasing ads will hurt sites that aren't providing enough value I guess. Maybe others that could but were fragile. Cynically a natural selection of some sort.
Re: Pi-hole – A black hole for Internet advertisements
#74I went so far as to set up Dnscrypt with a pi-hole setup recently and it was almost as painless as advertised. And it finally gave me something productive to do with my RPi3! https://github.com/pi-hole/pi-hole/wiki/DNSCrypt could use a little wordsmithing, but it wasn't too bad.
Re: Pi-hole – A black hole for Internet advertisements
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ad blockers do a lot more than just block domains. They look for and remove divs/DOM elements that contain known ad naming schemes and remove them from the page. And if a site decides to start combating the ad blockers, the adblock list providers will update their rules specifically for the site in question. Adblock users get upset whenever they see ads, and report them pretty quickly. The business I work for tried b…
Start loading essential content via AJAX?
When over 30% of your userbase is adblocking, it's not worth it. Your users will complain to you, not the adblockers. They don't even understand what's going on. Asking your users to whitelist the site doesn't work, either.
Re: Pi-hole – A black hole for Internet advertisements
#76I just set this up at home yesterday (using an Odroid C2). A very pleasant experience so far. I'm trying to find other services that are worth running in a similar fashion. Any ideas?
Not strictly useful for yourself, but you could run a tor relay https://www.torproject.org/docs/tor-doc-relay.html.en
any stats on the number of relays online ?
Re: Pi-hole – A black hole for Internet advertisements
#77When I tried pi-hole I often noted some urls were added 'automagically' to the whitelist, they will show up a few days after I removed them. All of them were weird domains.
Pi-hole Dev here. The only domains added to the whitelist are the domains on which the source lists are themselves hosted. It's probably complete over-kill, but the reasoning behind it is just in case one list tried to blacklist another.
Compare the "automagical" whitelist entries (http://imgur.com/a/rxgsC) to the Default whitelist here: https://github.com/pi-hole/pi-hole/blob/master/adlists.defau...
Edit: The code that does it: https://github.com/pi-hole/pi-hole/blob/master/gravity.sh#L2...
Re: Pi-hole – A black hole for Internet advertisements
#78With all the ad blocking technologies that are coming up, I wonder if Google is devising something to counteract these efforts. For instance, since browser-based ad blockers work from what I know by blocking known domain names, couldn't Google create random subdomains and serve the code from a different subdomain every day or even every few hours, as well as change the way their JavaScript and HTML looks? Even someth…
Ad blockers do a lot more than just block domains. They look for and remove divs/DOM elements that contain known ad naming schemes and remove them from the page. And if a site decides to start combating the ad blockers, the adblock list providers will update their rules specifically for the site in question. Adblock users get upset whenever they see ads, and report them pretty quickly. The business I work for tried b…
To me, that would be a sign that you are winning the battle. If enough websites fight ad blockers, especially big sites, and the people behind those ad blockers make clumsy mistakes, then users will reach a point where they uninstall the blocker.
Re: Pi-hole – A black hole for Internet advertisements
#79With all the ad blocking technologies that are coming up, I wonder if Google is devising something to counteract these efforts. For instance, since browser-based ad blockers work from what I know by blocking known domain names, couldn't Google create random subdomains and serve the code from a different subdomain every day or even every few hours, as well as change the way their JavaScript and HTML looks? Even someth…
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-blocker, many users are likely to click on Google ads on the way to the destination site, even if they are blocked on the destination site.
- Android doesn't provide fine-grained permissions control or root access, so users can't block ads.
- Some of their content is designed to coerce users to buy restricted Android-based content-consumption devices. For example, you can't buy movies on YouTube and watch them HD in Google Chrome (at least on my computer). You have to buy another computer that doesn't have root access (an Android device) in order to consume the videos in HD. Once you're on the restricted device, it's harder to block ads.
- Google introduces projects like AMP that try to convince webmasters to restrict their monetization options and make it easier to appify the WWW. AMP even serves your content from Google's servers. The more control of the content they have from server-to-eyeball, the more options they have for stopping ad-blockers (and the worse it is for open technology).
Re: Pi-hole – A black hole for Internet advertisements
#80I have to admit to doing as little as possible from web browsers on phones, but on the desktop I rely extensively on uMatrix + NoScript (don't know if adding PrivacyBadger on top would buy me anything). However, NoScript for Android seems to be moribund and I don't think there is a uMatrix for Android either. DNS-based ad-blocking seems very 90s (i.e., designed for an era that's less invasive than today), and there's a ton of javascript content that really needs to be filtered as well if you want to counter all the ads + tracking. Is there any equivalent to NoScript + uMatrix on Android?