Hacker News Reader

Comment by gruez | Hacker News Reader

Is it me, or is pi hole way more popular than it should be? Compared to the alternatives, it's worse in almost every way. It only works on your local network, so good luck blocking ads while you're at work, using mobile data, or at a cafe. Browser based adblockers (which is available on most desktop browsers, mobile safari, and firefox for android) can block elements and url patterns, pi hole can't. Even if you're on a browser that can't use adblock (mostly android), you can still use VPN based adblockers (the ones that reroute your traffic through a local VPN), which work regardless of what network you're on. And worst of all, all of the alternatives are free, which can't be said for pi hole[1].

[1] I know you can run pi hole on your desktop OS, which is technically free, but you need to leave your computer on 24/7 which undoubtedly raises your electricity bill.

View on HN

I run pi-hole in conjunction with browser blockers and still find it a net benefit overall. Anyone who uses my wifi gets an adblocker, any device, for any browser, and any configuration gets the benefit of having it. It's not just myself, a technically literate person, but my mother, sister, girlfriend and friends... Ideally if it stops just one malicious ad from landing itself upon my home's network then I say the benefit is there.

If you have an excuse to run a Raspberry Pi at home for any other purpose then use Pi-hole to piggy back off it and the cost you cite becomes a writeoff. I had a Rpi running OpenVPN for myself, throwing PiHole on it was a no brainer.

Not just that but it also can block all sorts of telemetry for devices on your network beyond PCs.

For example, mine blocks Samsung telemetry from my TV, so I can still use the TV apps without having my info sent to Samsung.

Interesting. I assume that it could do generate IoT telemetry blocking. That's reason enough to investigate moving forward. With smart appliances and IoT there is no opportunity to install stuff on the device.

The big hole in this model is for devices that have their own cellular radios.

> Browser based adblockers (which is available on most desktop browsers, mobile safari, and firefox for androd

Answered your own question. That list does not include chrome, smart TVs, fire TV, Roku, Kindle, game consiles, iot devices of all types. Nor all guests.

You need both. Security / defence needs to be deep and layared and mukti-vendor to be effective.

Pi Hole is free, unless you're counting the system you have to run it off of (like a raspberry pi) but you can run it off any device you want like a virtual machine at home for instance, so you only need to buy a Raspberry Pi if that's how you intend to operate it. The benefit of it, is it blocks a lot more than just ads. For instance, it blocks any attempts to "phone home" by my smart TV or by applications I use such as Nvidia Geforce Experience. It's more extensive than browser based ad blockers because it works for your entire network, not just web browsing (for example, blocks all youtube ads on my un-rooted mobile device). It also has a huge set of customizable community maintained block lists that block everything from simple ads all the way to pornography (if that's what you want).

Here's an example of some of the community maintained lists you can use to block more things easily. https://wally3k.github.io/ Many of these are updated quite frequently as well.

>Pi Hole is free, unless you're counting the system you have to run it off of (like a raspberry pi) but you can run it off any device you want like a virtual machine at home for instance, so you only need to buy a Raspberry Pi if that's how you intend to operate it.

That was addressed in the parent comment under footnote [1].

You got it to block YouTube ads? Thats the reason I bought an rpi, but it didnt block the ads in the native YouTube app. Still works great against other inapp ads though.

All you need is a VPN (such as OpenVPN) or SNT (such as ZeroTier) to your home router with your Pi-Hole. Which is conceivable on mobile, though it does cost some power (but you also don't see/load the ads saving bandwidth and CPU cycles). A Pi-Hole on a Raspberry Pi doesn't cost much electricity-wise; it does cost something for the hardware but you can use the RPi for more that just Pi-Hole. An alternative is Ublock Origin which works in Firefox and Chrome (even Firefox Mobile) but it isn't OS-wide.

With always connected VPN on my mobile to my home, blocking ads on mobile works well. Also when connected to hotspots on my portable devices. Great point about work though.

The difference with pi-hole is that since it blocks it at the DNS level the network traffic doesn't even reach you, saving on bandwidth.

It will also be faster than most browser based ad blockers since the browser has to analyze every webpage whereas pi-hole blocks by simply not making a request.

Also if you want a DNS that works outside your local network it would be trivial to get a cloud server for $5 a month put pi hole on it and route DNS through that. Then you could get free https certs and have a pretty sweet private DNS just for you!

And if you're someone trying to setup their own local DNS it's likely you have a spare pi or computer laying around somewhere to use.

And finally it offers pretty great convience. Instead of having to setup blockers on every device it just needs to be set on the pi.

Every major ad-blocking browser extension blocks based on URL patterns and CSS selectors. Requests that match URL patterns on the blacklist are dropped, which is at least as fast and saves at least as much bandwidth as blocking at the DNS level. More, really, since URL patterns can block individual paths under a domain, blocking ad scripts hosted on the same domain as content you want to load.

I thought you had to root your Android to block ads?

In my household we have four people with smartphones and another four laptops. That's a lot of ads to block.

Blocking ads on my laptop made a more noticeable improvement to web browsing than increasing my network bandwidth.

DNS66[0] can block ads without root.

[0]: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.jak_linux.dns66/

> I thought you had to root your Android to block ads?

Maybe with Chrome, but there's an Android version of Firefox that lets you install uBlock Origin:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.mozilla.fi...

I do what pi-hole does using pfBlockerNG, a package available for pfSense, which my home router runs.

But I still combine it with a browser-based ad blocker. It's worth doing both, because the network-based blocker will also block other LAN devices connecting to tracking servers, increasingly important in this IoT age.

According to my router's stats, the most blocked sites are:

device-metrics-us.amazon.com e.crashlytics.com ssl.google-analytics.com www.googletagservices.com www.google-analytics.com nexus.officeapps.live.com api.stathat.com www.googleadservices.com

It can block ads on devices where I _can't_ use an adblocker (Xbox One dashboard, Windows Phones), and blocks telemetry data from those devices and Windows 10[1]. It's also set and forget - I set it up once, then get "good enough" blocking on _any_ device on that network. I'm also on my home network 95%+ of the time, so I don't really care about mobile usage (for my use case).

[1] Such as the 1450 requests in the last 24 hours to watson.telemetry.microsoft.com

If you are on Android, you can install the Brave browser for Android. It's essentially just a recompiled Chrome with built-in ad-blocking.

> ... using mobile data, or at a cafe.

I run a VPN on my Edgerouter X and use that while out and about to keep things ad free and reasonably safe.

I run Pi hole on my home network, and then connect to my home network VPN on my phone and get mobile ad blocking.

Just get a raspberry pi, the power usage is negligble.

$35 for the device + ??? for accessories, compared to $0 for downloading an adblocker.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com