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hedora

Has anyone set up an always on phone VPN + host-based blocking? That would help a lot with this.

Also, has anyone carefully looked into the recent changes apple made to mobile ad identifiers/etc in ios 11?

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It's surprisingly easy to set up an always-on phone VPN.

Get a VPS, install OpenVPN on it, install "OpenVPN for Android" on your phone, and click through the settings.

DigitalOcean have a good writeup of the VPS side of things: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-set-...

I'm curious what the battery life impact of running this 24/7 is.

On Android with openvpn app it's bad... Maybe the native VPN support has better battery life, or I need to fiddle more with openvpn app settings.

https://github.com/trailofbits/algo

It says it doesn’t try to help with anonymity. Is there some unadvertised ad blocker hiding in there?

Yes, algo ships with an option to setup Privoxy and dnsmasq for just this: https://github.com/trailofbits/algo/issues/14

If you look at the commits, it regularly downloads and concats a large number of host files that track ad/analytics/malware hosts.

The reason it does not help with anonymity is that you own the server that it is running on. It is moving who you trust with your traffic. Do you trust your ISP or do you trust Digital Ocean / Amazon / other hosting service it supports? Any VPN isn't going to provide you anonymity, as you are connecting to it from your IP (if someone is monitoring on the VPN side, they know who you are) and logging into services associated with your identity.

However, from the readme:

>Blocks ads with a local DNS resolver (optional)

Easy enough to set up a VPN on a cloud VM (I actually ran one for a long time via my home internet connection with a raspberry pi). Paired with something like Pi Hole (http://pi-hole.net/) would give you DNS level ad blocking wherever you go. They have a guide for configuring it together with OpenVPN on the Pi Hole github: https://github.com/pi-hole/pi-hole/wiki/Pi-hole---OpenVPN-se...

Use, a non-US based VPN, this is a good one: https://airvpn.org/?referred_by=287899 *yeah, that's a referral link, I'm a happy user

Well, this isn't a VPN service, but this app (combined with a hosts file) does ad-blocking.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.github.xfa...

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