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oscilloscope | 6 years ago

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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owenwil|6 years ago

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)

ac29|6 years ago

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).

colordrops|6 years ago

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.

ac29|6 years ago

> 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.

daybreak|6 years ago

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

t-writescode|6 years ago

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.

fit2rule|6 years ago

> 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.

jammygit|6 years ago

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?

duncan-donuts|6 years ago

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

m463|6 years ago

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.