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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

An even better approach is to block all ad-serving domains at the DNS layer. If you associate with my home access point and use my DNS cache, you don't get ads period, and you don't have to install an ad blocker or lift a finger.

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Can you explain how you do that?

> Can you explain how you do that?

Probably Pi-Hole running on. Raspberry Pi. https://pi-hole.net

Yea, not exactly Pi-Hole, but the same concept. dnsmasq running on router, with a big list of ad-serving domains and hosts resolving to 0.0.0.0

Wow, nice and simple. Is that list available in some repository? would like to implement that since I run a dnsmasq bearing router at my home border as well.

I do the same - my approach was to take some of the popular /etc/hosts files (like http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/zero) and sed them into dnsmasq format:

    # before:  0.0.0.0  evil.biz
    # after:   address=/evil.biz/0.0.0.0
    sed 's#^0\.0\.0\.0[[:space:]]*\([^:]*\)$#address=/\1/0.0.0.0#'

which goes in a file in /etc/dnsmasq.d/, with this line in /etc/dnsmasq.conf:

    conf-dir=/etc/dnsmasq.d

The results can be trimmed a lot, e.g. if you have rules for a.evil.biz and b.evil.biz, you can usually reduce those to a rule for just evil.biz. I wrote some scripts to help with this, which are now at https://petedeas.co.uk/dnsmasq/. I might write something up about the process later.

Here's a nice repo with a "starting point" for hostnames and domains to block: https://github.com/notracking/hosts-blocklists

I loathe ads and tracking. I run ublock origin/https everywhere/privacy badger (the latter of those 2 are from the EFF).

I run a dedicated pfsense machine (old optiplex 755 with an old ssd) I added a nic to it. All network traffic must physically flow through it (1 nic goes to lan 1 goes directly to the cable modem). It's running pfblockerng and DNSBL with a bunch of sources. It's amazing. I can watch youtube videos on my smart tv in the living room streaming with 0 ads.

Most recently: November Workshop: Running the Pi-hole Network-wide Ad-blocker, and more | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15608052

Related discussions (click the 'comments' links): https://hn.algolia.com/?query=netguard&sort=byDate&type=comm...

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