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Comment by andreasvc | Hacker News Reader

The simplest approach is to use a hosts file: https://someonewhocares.org/hosts/

That doesn't work the same as pihole. PiHole blocks ads on ALL devices on your network. Your computer, your laptop, your phone, your kids kindle, etc. As long as they are on your network, they are protected (and browsing web pages on an older phone, things are much faster)

Yup, that's a downside. The advantage is that it's much simpler and will also work when you're not on your home network.

You can also run pi-hole on a tiny VPS and set your DNS statically on all devices.

do you have any links for doing this?

Yeah this is something I've been thinking about lately as well. Pi-Hole seems cool but what about most of the time when I'm somewhere else than my local network?

How do I edit the hosts file on my iPhone?

I use AdBlock https://www.adblockios.com on iOS which runs a local DNS server that can blackhole domains. It doesn't work well on very large host files so I gave up trying to import https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts, but it does work well for smaller lists.

Probably not the answer you are looking for but:

(1) Install "1Blocker X" -- not free but it's cheap. (2) It has a huge number of rules and protects your Safari pretty damn good. (3) You can disable the existing rules if you so choose. (4) You can add new ones based on URL regexes or CSS rules.

I am still using it actively both on my iPhone and iPad, one of the best investment in apps I ever did.

Jailbreak it, install openssh, ssh in and edit /etc/hosts. There's also packages in Cydia that add adblock lists to your hosts for you.

You fire up vi and load /etc/hosts /s

Well, I'm connected to my home network via VPN when I'm not on my home network, so....

There's also Steven Black's host file:

https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts

The issue with that is DNS resolution. I noticed that when I disconnect/reconnect my interface, it took >30 seconds for DNS resolution to properly resolve. Why? Because I was using a 65,000 entry host file on my modern Windows 10 machine.

It seems to only impact during NIC changes, but I VPN and was moving my computer enough that it was causing me issue.

I'd rather have a separate service to run it.

I also had a performance problem with DNS resolution with a big host file, but disbling the DNS client service helped.

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