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Pi-hole – A black hole for Internet advertisements

pi-hole.net

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

#81

Post by hedora »

jcfrei wrote: post #65
nkkollaw wrote: post #30

With 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…

The most promising front against ad blockers is forcing users to access your content with an application you control. That's why more and more websites want you to install their apps (Google search is installed by default on lots of android devices). It's very unfortunate that the incentives of users and content creators / advertisers aren't aligned very well and we will probably end up with most content creators dum…

I think pi-hole will at least partially block such things -- it intercepts at the network level. I guess you could have the app break itself if the ads won't load, but you can (mostly) do that in a browser.

I guess, for network level ad blockers, I'm not seeing obvious advantages to a program written as an app vs a program written to run in a browser.

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

#82

Post by dingaling »

kuon wrote: post #35

I've been running a DNS based ad blocking for ages, but I realized that recently, youtube has been serving ads from the same domain as regular videos. I wonder if anybody has seen this.

The primary difference seems to be that the real videos have '/watch?' in the URL versus the ad videos.

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

#85

Post by geuis »

I haven't had time to look at the code yet. I have some questions though.

As an experiment a while back I wrote a simple dns server that blocked ad-related domains. https://github.com/geuis/lead-dns. While it technically worked, it made using the web almost non functional. Nearly every site was broken in some way. So blocking purely by domain isn't going to work. I wonder how pi-hole is dealing with it.

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

#86

Post by [deleted] »

SamBam wrote: post #44
Bedon292 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You would just block *.addomain.com at that point. Which is already what is being done on many of the blockers. There will always be domains to block, even if they add new domains, the blockers will probably be able to block them just as fast.

How about if they load them through *.google.com? Sure, you could whitelist www.google.com, mail.google.com, etc, but couldn't they keep ahead of you if they were ok with using their main domain? They could even start using www.google.com/ad-id

[deleted]

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

#87

Post by slau »

strictnein wrote: post #66
dmbass wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

from the article: > Our code is completely open, but piping to bash can be dangerous. For a safer install, review the code and then run the installer locally.

The compounds in this medicine are public knowledge, but taking them could be dangerous. For a safer experience, review all medical literature pertaining to these compounds before consuming.

Not really the same. One of the main issues with curl pipes is that the server (or MITM) can detect that the request goes into a pipe.

This allows an attacker to display one (safe) source when you view it in your browser on your workstation, or wget it, and serve a different (nefarious) source when you curl/pipe it.

So, a more complete analogy would be: a bottle that gives you a safe chemical compound when you extract it for analysis, but throws in some VX when you go to administer it.

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

#88

Post by promofaux »

geuis wrote: post #85

I haven't had time to look at the code yet. I have some questions though. As an experiment a while back I wrote a simple dns server that blocked ad-related domains. https://github.com/geuis/lead-dns . While it technically worked, it made using the web almost non functional. Nearly every site was broken in some way. So blocking purely by domain isn't going to work. I wonder how pi-hole is dealing with it.

We have a web interface with a whole host of tools to easily identify and whitelist the domains that may or may not be causing issues with sites you browse.

Everyone's mileage varies, but I have only had to whitelist 5 or 6 sites using the default blocklists.

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