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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

#91

Post by cptskippy »

otachack wrote: post #40

I love pi-hole. It's very passive and easy to use. My only issue was when the pi hosting it went down for whatever reason and I didn't know immediately, so I thought my ISP connection went down. I just had to restart the pi to get it going again. It's only happened once in around 6 months. And it's running on one of my older pi!

Specify a secondary DNS server to avoid your network going down due to a DNS failure. The downside to this will be that you won't know if the Pi-Hole instance goes down other than possibly seeing Ads.

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

#92

Post by pjc50 »

bilal4hmed wrote: post #32
scohesc wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't have to care about if they make money or not. That's not my business. If they want to make money, they'll shift to other profit models that don't involve intrusive tracking and annoying advertisements.

would you support paywalls ?

Patreon-paywalls are becoming increasingly popular, with bits of free content as advertising. It seems like a reasonable way to do business.

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

#94

Post by stevesearer »

ChikkaChiChi wrote: post #65
stevesearer wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what we do at Office Snapshots ( https://officesnapshots.com ). We post about office design and our ads are primarily for office furniture or other services related to the industry. We also self-host the ads which are non-animated jpgs and sell them without using any ad networks. What you describe works well for us :)

What type of overhead is associated with this? Are you experiencing an increase in server costs? What about the resources it takes to build those relationships, maintain the content, or manage the infrastructure? I'm very interested in learning more...

We use WordPress and plugins which offer these features so hosting and server costs are pretty minimal.

It definitely takes time and work to develop and maintain relationships, but we also get to keep 100% of the revenue. In some ways we've just decided that ownership of the relationship and process is more important than being able to quickly slap some Adsense code up on the site.

That said, we also used Adsense early on, but have been doing this for ~5 years.

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

#95

Post by kasey_junk »

Nux wrote: post #82
ktm5j wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The argument you are making is a huge stretch.. Cloudflare is one of the bigger driving forces for DoH and they have nothing to do with ad revenue. Claiming that DoH is some sneaky way to get rid of things like pi-hole is just ridiculous.

DoH in itself is not sneaky, no more than ping is. The push to centralise DNS resolution in the hands of a few questionable actors is and this is what is happening. Cloudflare for example would absolutely love to know what you're up to all day; and because they can now correlate data from their "omnipresent" WAF with the data from 1.1.1.1 they could get some interesting information... And believe you me, they're not…

Cloudflare makes a pretty specific statement against what you are saying:

"1.1.1.1 does not mine any user data. Logs are kept for 24 hours for debugging purposes, then they are purged."

Are you claiming they are lying?

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

#96

Post by dTal »

pjc50 wrote: post #83
Piskvorrr wrote: post #2

[tinfoilhat] Given that Chrome now became Google's weapon against adblocking, how long until it starts refusing to use Pi-hole specifically? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20044430 [/tinfoilhat]

This is the dark side of DNS-over-HTTPs: it prevents the network operator from changing what is received by browsers. Sometimes this is legitimate, as in Pi-hole. Paul Vixie got very upset when he discovered that his chromecast bypasses local DNS settings to go directly to Google: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19170671 I wouldn't be surprised if soon Chrome defaults to DNS-over-HTTPs direct to base, except for…

The problem is two mutually incompatible use cases:

1) trusted endpoint / untrusted network (laptop in a coffee shop)

2) untrusted endpoint / trusted network (chromecast/alexa/other corporate zombie on your home network)

Which category a given scenario falls under depends on who you ask - to Google, Chromecast is in the first category. I don't know if it's possible to design a system that somehow always favors the rights of the individual.

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

#98

Post by the8472 »

derefr wrote: post #60
zelon88 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with the "old" way, where you visit a Mopar automotive related website and saw Mopar car part ads? Or when you visit a computer magazine and saw ads for computer parts? Or when you went to NYT and saw basic shit like paper towels and fall fashion? It became a problem when everyone and their sister started needing to know what kinds of kinks I'm into just to sell me dish detergent.

One big problem with entirely static ads is that websites are global but the ads running on them are for brands that are likely local (at least to a specific country.) If I visit the NYT website in e.g. Norway, should I still see ads for an American brand of paper towel that doesn’t exist here; or should I see ads for Norway paper towel brands? The flip-side of this is that I’ve noticed that YouTube shows me PSAs fro…

Geotargeting can be done on the server-side without involving any trackers, 3rd-party javascript and what-not.

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

#99

Post by Nux »

kasey_junk wrote: post #95
Nux wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DoH in itself is not sneaky, no more than ping is. The push to centralise DNS resolution in the hands of a few questionable actors is and this is what is happening. Cloudflare for example would absolutely love to know what you're up to all day; and because they can now correlate data from their "omnipresent" WAF with the data from 1.1.1.1 they could get some interesting information... And believe you me, they're not…

Cloudflare makes a pretty specific statement against what you are saying: "1.1.1.1 does not mine any user data. Logs are kept for 24 hours for debugging purposes, then they are purged." Are you claiming they are lying?

I'm claiming I don't believe them. They could write on their page whatever they see fit and do a completely different thing internally.

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

#100

Post by KirinDave »

segfaultbuserr wrote: post #62
brianpayne2 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are the advantages of using Cloudflare's DNS as opposed to say Google DNS or your ISP? Tracking?

Due to the architecture of DNS, DNS is not end-to-end encrypted. There is a potential solution (djb's DNSCurve), but it will not be deployed. As a result, let's do an assessment. Using Google DNS, self-hosted resolver, or your ISP's DNS : NSA, your ISP, everyone and every dog at the middle of your link to the Internet can track and see your requests. Using CloudFlare's DNS w/ DNS-over-HTTPS : only NSA (via a NSL or s…

What threat model does concealing DNS but not indirecting traffic via Tor address, given that Tor can also tunnel DNS? Cloudflare's not wrong that the DNS requests are hidden, but many classes of observer who could read your DNS request could also see you connect to the resting host?

Follow up question, do you trust CloudFlare not to manipulate the results of DNS more or less than Google?

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