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Comment by lawnchair_larry | Hacker News Reader

I really wish there was a reliable way to just shitlist all of these affiliate/analytics/tracking/ad SDKs device-wide. Third party SDKs sending who-knows-what to who-knows-where is such a plague in the app ecosystem, and even the developers including them seem to have no idea what the implications are.

I don’t want any of them, ever.

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A reasonable compromise would be to have some way of determining which apps don't do this prior to installing them, such as a paid app that does not need to rely on ads and proactively declares this in the app description. Google Play clearly labels adware and I am genuinely surprised that Apple's App Store does not.

I am happy to pay for apps that do not contain adverts or unnecessary tracking, but I have no way of obtaining this information on iOS. For Android, I can look at the store listing, try F-Droid, or scan with Exodus[0]. For iOS, I'm not aware of any user tools at all. Is this information available anywhere?

[0]https://exodus-privacy.eu.org/

For iOS, there will be: https://guardianapp.com

Also, we will either provide a searchable app index, or freely share findings/info with parties such as Exodus (This has not been fully decided as of yet).

pihole is really easy to setup and the default block list gets a large chunk.

I've found that my pihole seems to slow down a non-trivial number of websites. It's as if the sites are waiting for a response to something before sending the next chunk of info, and so it has to wait 20-30 seconds for a timeout before the next chunk is sent.

Any suggestions on how to fix this? I do love how pihole blocks so many trackers on all my networked devices!

I’d look at your browsers network tab to see what’s pending and check the domain using the pihole blocklist search. I’ve had some blocklists be a little too aggressive and block thinks that are not really trackers or anything bad.

But you’re probably right about the sites waiting for some lib to finish. I’ve only seen it happen on news sites where their video player stalls waiting for the ad to load.

Its probably because the site is trying to make a https connection and your pihole server must not have explicitly closed that port. You can resolve this by either closing that port so that a RST sent back to the client straight away when the https attempt is made OR install a HTTPS cert and open up that port so that pihole can serve you its page.

See here https://pi-hole.net/2018/02/02/why-some-pages-load-slow-when...

Pi-hole is great and all, but people use their phones on mobile data too and on various other WLANs away from home.

Yeah I wish Apple let us put custom dns for mobile data. Can always just vpn to your own network.

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