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Comment by bediger4000 | Hacker News Reader

You know what? I don't care. I'm going to continue to use ad blockers like uBlock and Privacy Badger that are non-corporate. I will set up any network I'm in charge of with a DNS that has doubleclick.com as 127.0.0.1, and also many others.

The web was better in the early days, when it wasn't full of corporate dreck. If all the ad-supported BS websites fail, then so be it. I'd rather have just a few websites run by people for their own motives, than have a plethora of websites run by marketeers, propagandists and corporate executives.

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"I will set up any network I'm in charge of with a DNS that has doubleclick.com as 127.0.0.1, and also many others."

You mean doubleclick.net? Alas, that's a typo that would let the ads in.

Like you I redirect doubleclick and "many others". But not to localhost. I like to log all the requests either via pflog or a socket logger. Useful for examining what apps are trying to do from my device over the network. Sometimes I redirect certain domains to my own httpd and serve my own "fake" resources (placeholders for in-app ads, etc.).

You say "any network I'm in charge of".

What if there were a DNS caching server reachable from anywhere that blocked these ad servers for you? That is, what if there was a "public DNS" like 8.8.8.8 or 208.67.222.222 except not run by a company that sells ads or "security services"?

What if there was a turnkey ad-blocking DNS caching server solution that one could run on any suitable hosting provider virtual machine instance?

Would anyone be interested in such a thing? I have had this personal DNS idea for many years, ad blocking is becoming much more popular only recently.

I think users controlling their own DNS is a key step toward taking back the www from the "corporate dreck". Maybe blocking ads is the stimulus for such a change.

I've been pondering this myself recently, and decided to explore setting up my DNS-level adblocking in Bind using RPZ instead of my hosts file.

It was quite easy, and I now even use nsupdate to block new ad domains that show up so that I don't have to restart my DNS server to add new names to block.

I pondered making my server publicly available but had concerns about bandwidth, and other potential legal shenanigans. That said I couldn't put my finger on what exactly I'd get in trouble for if I made it public, so perhaps it's just FUD?

Awesome idea. Please please please if you are going to do it first look for a business model. I guess the people coming to you to avoid ads won't be too eager to pay. Myself included :) Maybe have a data mining or statistics service to pair with it. A curious search brings up an interesting QA about OpenDNS https://www.quora.com/How-does-OpenDNS-make-money.

Wait, what? It's my responsibility to invent a new business model for someone else? Or is it my duty to watch (possibly malware-infected) ads? I'm not sure what you're saying here.

If you're advocating for imposition of a legal duty to watch ads, then I demand the legal imposition of a duty for advertisers to frequently acknowledge that there is no "free" market any more.

> The web was better in the early days, when it wasn't full of corporate dreck.

You mean it was better when it was full of corporations which weren't trying to sell things to you.

The Web, and the Internet as a whole, were founded on a cooperation between governments, non-profit or not-for-profit or not-explicitly-profit-maximizing corporations (universities and research institutions, mainly), and, yes, profit-seeking corporations (BBN being an early one, as was Symbolics) from day one.

It was more genteel, perhaps, and there were AUPs in the early days which cut down on some of the more blatant advertising, but it was also narrow, niche, and nonthreatening. Nobody feared that their misdeeds would be exposed by something posted on the Internet. It was a pet project to allow researchers to share mainframes with a minimum of friction.

You're idealizing precisely the kind of Internet the propagandists want, one that's too small to challenge any of the established groups.

You're idealizing precisely the kind of Internet the propagandists want, one that's too small to challenge any of the established groups.

That's arguably a valid point. Now I'm going to have to think about it, while dnsmasq, uBlock and Privacy badger block a bunch of ads for me.

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