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Comment by ObsoleteNerd | Hacker News Reader

I vehemently disagree with advertising in general, and go to efforts to make sure myself and my wife/kids see ads as little as possible (Pi-Hole, adblock plugins, no TV other than as a NAS screen, etc). I very much believe it is a form of malicious brainwashing.

But, I very much want to reward the people who create the things I use.

So I'll never whitelist any site or service, but I'll absolutely donate or make sure they get paid in other ways (and usually willingly donate more than they'd get from showing me ads).

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I agree with your position. I'm trying to figure out how to limit my kid from seeing any ads at all. Where can I get more information for this beyond adblock and host file manipulation?

I'm not sure this is realistic in our modern society. Online, there is some flexibility: you can pay to remove ads for some things, and use ad-block on the ones that don't provide such an option. But in the offline world, I'm not sure what you're going to do. Physical ads are hard to block, you just have to avoid them when you can.

Economically, I'm not sure we're ever going to get away from ads. As I've said before in some of my comments, it's not just about paying for things you use. It's about paying more than the people who are willing to put up with ads, because otherwise companies will just do both: charge, and use ads. That's what we see in TV, in addition to many other places, and there's no reason to expect that not to continue unless there were widespread backlash, and I just don't see that happening. I don't like ads, but most of my friends don't seem to see things the way I do.

> Economically, I'm not sure we're ever going to get away from ads.

Why? Was there no human economic activity before they were ads?

If spaceships appeared in the sky, and shot lasers at all ads, and anyone making new ones, would we find no way to make and sell and buy things regardless? That seems less likely to me than said spaceships.

> I just don't see that happening.

True, and saying "it should be possible" is not the same as knowing how to get from here to there. But I wouldn't say "never ever" in this context.

https://www.troyhunt.com/mmm-pi-hole/

A link posted on HN a while ago. Long story short it uses a raspberry pi as a DNS server which blocks all requests for ads.

Just make sure your kids are media savvy. If you train critical thought into them, then ads can be much less harmful. I tend to agree in general but I think the way ads infect non ad content is the danger and you can’t block that.

Let’s be honest, the kids of hacker news commenters are probably going to be fine. It’s the way ads influence the unwashed masses that becomes problematic.

Indeed. There’s little precedence for the children of the wealthy and privileged to cause future social problems.

I have Pi-Hole on the network that every device in the house runs through, with extra blocklists and a year or so of manual tweaking, that covers most stuff. I also run ad block plugins just in case, don't allow commercial TV (they only watch Netflix or ABC Kids app), and that pretty much covers everything for our family.

It's also just a thing we keep in mind and work around in life. We won't use any service that has ads, or any site that finds ways around the Pi Hole, or watch shows/movies with heavy product placement, etc etc. It's just part of mine and my wife's core beliefs (privacy in general) so we just guide our kids towards "good" content and taught them from the minute they could understand, that "ads are bad, we don't like ads".

  don't allow commercial TV (they only watch Netflix or ABC Kids app

How are Netflix and ABC Kids not "commercial"?

Even PBS is "commercial", given the growing practice of underwriter ads.

They probably meant TV shows with commercial break. Not sure about ABC but Netflix you can watch uninterrupted without ads.

I'm guessing they mean the other ABC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Broadcasting_Corpor...

Can a pi-hole run without a raspberry-pi? I have a machine kept on all the time at home. Tried setting up pi-hole on docker with no veil.

It sure can. I have piHole running inside a virtual machine (Ubuntu 18.04).

What does the virtual/physical network configuration look like? Are you routing all traffic into a physical server, then through a vnet/VM, and back out some other physical interface on the server?

To be clear: not all traffic has to be routed through it, just DNS.

All that I had to do was assign a static IP address to the MAC address of the VM network interface, and configure my router's DHCP to hand out that static IP for DNS.

It's all done over a singular ethernet connection between my router and the server; the amount of traffic is very minimal.

Did you try rolling your own or did you use https://hub.docker.com/r/pihole/pihole/ ?

> limit my kid from seeing any ads

I'm not sure if complete abstinence is good. I see my parents struggle with ads sometimes. They grew up as farmers in a rural enviroment with only a black and white TV (with 2 state channels). They seem unable to distinguish ads from proper content (unless it's obviously an ad), or they see ads as a kind of honest product documentation.

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