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Comment by prometheus1909 | Hacker News Reader

prometheus1909

I keep seeing posts about Pi Holes and it looks good, but I have previously dealt with ads by appending their delivering sites to my /etc/hosts, i.e.

0.0.0.0 trashsite1.com

0.0.0.0 trashsite2.com

The only downside I see is that my approach is not network-wide. Any other reasons I should reconsider?

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A big limitation with /etc/hosts is no support for wildcards.

Previous subthread about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22535387

(But it doesn't look like wildcard pattern matching doesn't work for the substring middle part of the string like your example.)

Probably the biggest two selling points are the crowdsourced deny list and the fact that all types of devices will benefit, including "smart" TVs etc.

I don’t know how you maintain your hosts list, but with a solution like pi-hole, you can easily subscribe to multiple blocking filters and have them update periodically without any intervention. Of course, you could automate your hosts update too, but pi-hole comes with this built-in.

There’s an app for macOS called Gas Mask that helps you manage these lists easily

This is essentially what pihole does, but automatically, using shared lists of ad networks (you can add your own easily). And it’s available to things on your network where you can’t or don’t want to edit etc/hosts (My smart tv used to love to shove ads in my home screen)

It’s an elegant and efficient way of taking back control of your network and the content It shows you.

I run it in a pi zero w with a little wooden case and a low power phone charger (500ma) I Velcroed it to my router.

I highly recommend that everyone do it.

Not sure about now, but before I'm using pihole, I was using hosts file to block ads and found a significant increase in network latency. Turns out the huge hosts file significantly increased DNS lookup time in my system (>1 seconds).

"I was using hosts file to block ads and found a significant increase in network latency"

I ran in to a similar issue on Windows, which is described here: [1]

After following that article's suggestion to disable the Windows "DNS Client" service name resolution returned to normal.

[1] - https://tinyapps.org/blog/201809300700_large_hosts_file.html

It was on mac. I guess it didn't go as bad as windows, but still pretty bad.

Like you said, convenience of propagating the blockage to all devices, a central place for configuration, stats/diagnostics built into PiHole dashboard. I do like your DIY approach, though!

Similarly, why is PiHole better than using a browser ad-blocker?

My understanding is that PiHole stops the ads from being downloaded in the first place, hence the increased network performance.

uBlock prevents then from being downloaded too

ublock only works inside Firefox on mobile, this blocks most ads in every app, smart tvs, iot devices

You should have both. One is for network wide effects, so anything on your network will have ads blocked (smart TV, projector, phones etc.), another is for youtube and friends.

If you’re willing to add and maintain an ad-blocker in every single of your browsers (and potentially your family’s) and don’t care about non browser apps it’s virtually the same.

Ad blocker extensions only block ads on the browser they're installed. Pi hole would block ads on all devices they're connected in, in all apps (not just web browser) as long as the ad domains they requested are in the blocklist.

Also, ublock origin can only protect you from CNAME cloaking (a commonly used to evade ad blockers) on firefox. It can't protect against CNAME cloaking in chrome or other browser. But pihole can.

You should still install an adblocker in your browser though as some ads are loaded from the same domain they're serving site contents from, such as youtube ads. Ad blockers can remove ads based on full urls, not just domains.

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