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Comment by Orangeair | Hacker News Reader

Just a heads-up, you can get 1 CPU and 0.6 gigs of RAM for free with the new entry tier of GCP: https://cloud.google.com/free/

(Disclaimer: Google employee, unrelated product area)

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Notwithstanding the irony of one google service hurting another, the free tier only has 1GB of free egress traffic right?

Dang, you're right, I forgot about that. So not so suitable, unfortunately.

Seems like root + a local hosts adblocker is still the best solution for Android, or a local VPN for iOS (do they have those on Android? never checked).

Ideally you'd want to have L7 filtering so an SSL terminating proxy is the best thing short of running a fully functional copy of uBlock on your mobile device, lest you run into issues where removing ads on youtube also interferes with normal site function.

Or, you know, you could actually pay for a reddit app without ads.

I don't have a full understanding of what's going on here, so this might be a stupid comment: Isn't 1GB of DNS lookups quite a lot?

Geez, color me double-wrong. Yes, that should be plenty. I thought was a VPN-esque solution that required shuffling all traffic through the VPS instance, but yes you're right, it's basically just a custom DNS server. In which case this would be totally fine. I might even try it myself if I ever decide to unroot my phone.

DNS66 (https://github.com/julian-klode/dns66) doesn't require root. It uses the Android VPN system to capture DNS requests and forwards everything else.

Agreed. Works really well on all my Android devices and the performance impact is negligible

It would also have to serve the not found responses, no?

Still, if they're short it seems unlikely that you'd have any issues.

> or a local VPN for iOS (do they have those on Android? never checked).

It seems so; at least my Android phone has something named "VPN", which I sometimes use to capture traffic and look at what my phone is sending/receiving.

(Packet-capturing your phone traffic is a pretty eye-opening experience; I was surprised just how much data about you goes to ad/tracking services.)

for Android (local VPN) I am using the free "NoRootFirewall" on all my android devices [1]

for iOS (for jailbroken) via Cydia and BigBoss I am using "Firewall IP7" which is not yet updated for iOS10, costs $2.99 or near

both act as firewalls in learning mode.. it can be a little tedious in the beginning but as soon as you block most ads/trackers/beacons "globally" then you feel the difference on speed, bandwidth usage, and user experience

[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=app.greyshirts...

AFAIK Block This! Is an example of local VPN - based ad blocker for Android.

I use Firefox on Android with an adblocker installed via its extensions page without root and it makes me a happy browser. It obviously doesn't do anything for other apps, though.

Not for personal use in Europe.

But not in the EU, there you cannot sign up as a individual only as a business :(

Am I the only one who finds the cloud console interface very unintuitive? How do I actually make use of the free tier, and set up something I can SSH into?

So, one gets 1 VPS for free forever..?

Yeah it's pretty cool

It seems like it is $300 for the next 12 months. There is no mention of always free.

from the parent's link:

> Always Free Products

> Use these products for free up to the specified usage limits during and past the free trial. These usage limits do not expire, but are subject to change.

Unfortunate that a credit card has to be provided for a "free" trial

.2 cpu

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