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Comment by oscilloscope | Hacker News Reader

Since this was about devices and ad-blocking, I expected the Pi-hole to make an appearance. But alas, the author used Brave browser.

https://github.com/pi-hole/pi-hole/blob/master/README.md

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Not only did he not mention PiHole (or the similar, but better, Adguard Home), he didn't seem to be aware that network adblocking is a thing—but who can blame him? It's not exactly trivial unless you're comfortable with a terminal. Is there any sort of commercialized solution for this? I'd love to see Adguard/Pihole devices available off the shelf; with a little marketing I think they could really appeal to a lot of people.

(I looked around and the only 'built in' solution I could find for adblocking is in Eero WiFi's paid subscription, which blocks ads on their wifi router)

Adguard can be used with any router: https://adguard.com/en/adguard-dns/overview.html#instruction

Its not built in per se, but its arguably less complicated than replacing a router (or worse, putting one router behind another, as would be required for the many people who's cable/fiber/etc modem is all in one with their router).

I think what GP means is that someone needs to set up the PiHole/Adguard software on their own hardware (like a RPi). After it's up and running it's pretty trivial to set it up in your router.

Reading through Adguard's GitHub page I can't help not noticing some disingenuous feature comparison there. Like how PiHole doesn't support "Blocking phishing and malware domains" or "Parental control (blocking adult domains)". Although they both do it in the exact same way: blacklists [0]. Does it block YouTube ads?

I'd like better reports and stats on PiHole, not just top sites, top clients, etc. Adguard seems to do better here from the screenshots. But I'll take it with a grain of salt.

[0] https://imgur.com/Um7o4fU

You don't need to setup adguard software or hardware at all to use it - you just change your existing router's DHCP setup to point to their DNS servers.

Its pretty handy on Android (I think requires 9 or later), you can set dns.adguard.com as your "Private DNS" server and it will work system wide, with no Apps or VPNs to install, and on every network you connect to. I beleive it uses DNS over TLS as well.

When I commented the link in GP's comment was pointing to Adguard Home [0], the PiHole like solution. See screenshot where you set up the blocklists.

[0] https://adguard.com/en/adguard-home/overview.html which takes you to: https://github.com/AdguardTeam/AdGuardHome

Brave works. Lots of propaganda on here against Brave for some reason. It's open source based on chromium with all the Google bits taken out, and it has built in ad blocking. So there's an opt-in crypto coin, so what.

If I could have one thing in Brave, aside from bug fixes, it’s this: rather than give me popup ads on my desktop, replace some of the static ads it blocks with Brave ones. They’re way less intrusive.

Then I would have to look for a solution for the sites I run that completely block Brave. I don't care if people block ads. But I give a massive fuck if someone/thing swapped out my ads for theirs.

Wait, what? I've never seen popup ads on my desktop from Brave. I'm on Mac and linux. Is this a Windows thing? Are you on Windows?

I frequently recommend Brave to non-technical people who would have problems installing browser extensions. Everything works out of the box without configuration.

> Lots of propaganda on here against Brave for some reason.

I think the same reason some people find Google's advertising-based business model problematic, they find Brave's advertising-based business model problematic.

I'd say these people are out of touch. If sites aren't funded by advertising, that means people need to pay to access. See all the efforts to workaround paywalls because nobody wants to pay every single site that they visit $5 a month, and plenty of people simply couldn't afford paying to access the internet in that way. That's enabled by advertising. But somehow nobody here wants to hear it. Advertising is incredibly important to enable open access to, well, the entire internet. We see with the Linux Journal how well subscription-only services work out - they live by the skin of their teeth for a while until they go under. But somehow we're better off because they didn't use advertising for funding? Now we don't have any LJ at all. I don't see how that's better.

Not that I'm advocating for ads that track and profile you and everything that you do. We should be making an effort to create an infrastructure for ads where they can't track and profile us. That's what Brave is trying to do, and I don't understand why people are against it. Like, how do they expect sites to be financed?

What is braves advertising based business model? I've been using it since it came out and haven't seen a single brave ad.

> Lots of propaganda on here against Brave for some reason.

Lots of people on HN make money with ad networks or are otherwise invested in the concept of harvesting user data.

Same thing happens with GDPR.

After a brief skim of that README, I'm not 100% certain how Pi-hole works. Basically, it is a DNS server whose job is to lose requests to trackers, sort of like modifying the hosts file to fail to connect to facebook owned domains? And you use it by telling your router to use it as its DNS server, controlling it via a webpage it hosts on your private network?

It’s on a raspberry pi that is connected to your LAN. It is dns for the LAN and blocks any requests to hosts that are blacklisted

I presume it doesn’t need to be a Raspberry Pi, it could be any host in your LAN?

Yes, it can run on any host in your lan.

How does this differ from the traditional hosts file that blocks requests to blacklisted hosts?

Works for devices with hard to access hosts files (IoT garbage, smart TVs)

My understanding is that it accomplishes the same thing but for every device on your network rather than having to manage host files on each device. It also works for those where editing the host file isn't possible.

It's also good for systems with hard coded domains that ignore hosts files.

Windows will still connect to quite a few even if they are in the hosts file.

A DNS server can't help with that. You'd need a firewall.

Not much, except it's on another machine and is a central point of config. Can even be used to hand out DHCP

Privacy and ad blocking for whole network instead of just one device and you can also add your own custom dns servers for extra privacy.

For ex: Pihole + Unbound

Mobile phones. You can't modify the hosts file on an Android phone without rooting the phone. I'm not even sure how you would do it on an iPhone.

Both of them, however, allow you to manually specify the IP of a DNS server in advanced network settings.

It looks like pihole supports wildcards better maybe

What if ads are hosted on the same origin as the content? I'd still need application adblocking then I guess

True, but in terms of privacy those kinds of ads are mostly a non-issue (and speaking for myself, I'd probably be happy to see them).

DNS based ad-blocking has limitations. YouTube does exactly this, with ads served from the same URL as the videos. It's a better than nothing solution that will cover 95% of the needs of the whole network. For the rest you can add a browser based adblocker, where possible. Or even firewall rules.

If a site is serving ads from their own domain, that's OK. As a pi-hole user I'm trying to block automated ad networks as those are the worst culprits when it comes to tracking and serving malware.

I visit some sites that sell their ad spaces directly to advertisers and create and host all creative themselves. I have no issue with those ads.

I'm guessing a dns lookup of annoying.adserver.com returns the pihole ip address (or a dedicated alternate address)

Then when your browser tries to load content from annoying.adserver.com it connects to the pihole, which returns dummy content (a blank image or html page)

I would imagine hardcoded ip addresses in trackers/ads might bypass pihole.

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