What finally got me to setup pi-hole on an old Raspberry Pi was getting an LG OLED TV. The webOS apps for YouTube and Plex are pretty convenient, but the TV was absolutely packed with ads via the home screen and pop-up toasts. To add insult to injury, the home screen would lag for several seconds at boot while it pulled down all those ads. And then I discovered that even after opting out of all the telemetry options, it was making DNS queries for _several_ data mining services that analyze what's being shown on the TV. I didn't Wireshark it to see what API calls it was making, but clearly opting out in the menu wasn't enough. After some passes of scanning the pi-hole logs and adding to the blacklist, my TV is snappier and ad-free. :) Definitely will not be going with LG for my next TV, though. It's mind blowing to me that this is the user experience on a TV that costs over $1k.
As for the pi-hole setup itself, it's working great. It's a great backup to locally installed adblockers, and I have my EdgeRouter as the primary DHCP DNS server, which makes requests to pi-hole. Both the router and pi-hole have caching, and my DNS query latencies are good. Pi-hole also has a nice interface for pointing `.local` domains to local IP addresses, which is much easier than messing with dnsmasq settings on the EdgeRouter.
Wait, you want a telescreen that doesn’t watch you back? Citizen, this is ungood crimethink. Plusungood crimethink!
Thankfully, it’s almost unpossible to buy a telescreen without telemetry (and always has been), so Big Brother will know what you are doing. But you should still stop by the local MiniLuv for reeducation, just in case.
I emailed the LG CEO and some of the executive board and said (in colorful language) that the only reason I bought this TV was because the quality was unmatched. For the moment LG is the only vendor where I can get an OLED TV like this. But as soon as there are competitors I will remember never to buy LG again for the terrible ad and tv menu experience. I also said how annoying it was that you commit to a particular smart assistant (google or alexa), and the TV will nag you to set up Alexa. I made my choice leave me alone.
The analogy is Tesla is the only one making good electric cars. When there's competition, I will never buy Tesla because of the shitty experience.
Also for >$1k it should let you use the TV as an HDMI multiviewer. It has 4 HDMI ports on the back, let me view plug in my personal laptop on the port 1, work laptop on port 2, and divide the screen to give each laptop a "2nd monitor". Or even 2 monitors each.
What got me was when my LG tv updated itself. In doing so it broke the Ethernet connection which I was using because the wifi has an issue where it just stops all of a sudden for no reason.
I was able to resolve the wifi issue by resetting the region to another and back and turning off the auto setting for it, but frankly it’s appalling an update can go out that breaks something as basic as Ethernet.
I was really questioning the size of big monitors (40+) as a convergence to tv, but unusable as desktop monitor, but now it appears they are a good replacement for a tv, sans the ads tracking, spam, and crappy interface.
LG TVs constantly try to get you to install Alexa. To the point that it'll pop up and you'll accidentally install it when you were pressing buttons for something else. I've had to uninstall multiple times between me and visiting friends accidentally installing Alexa.
You could get a Sony TV, they’ve been making OLED tvs since 2017. A lot of them (all? I had a hard time finding sources on some) use the exact same panels as LG.
Just be aware that some apps will bypass the local net DNS settings and hard code Google DNS or a third party DNS. I have a firewall rule in my router that redirects those queries to my pi-hole.
If your router can do it, have it route all of your DNS queries to your (pi-hole|adguard|nextdns). Doesn't matter if they are hardcoded to 8.8.8.8, anything to port 53 goes through the blocker.
(#inlcude my typical rant about why in the US the consumers are not better protected against such ads, this is completely illegal in Europe)
I used to have an EdgeRouter which was a huge improvement to the ISP-provided crappy box but ultimately the configuration was so complicated and inconsistent that I switched to a small fanless debian box. I put Pi-Hole there, which also covered DHCP and DNS services (synchronized together).
It has been a blast and I have more confidence that I will understand what is happening (vs the ER magic)
I have a PiHole, but I also disable networking on any TV in the house and use an AppleTV instead of the native TV apps. LG and Samsung will eventually route around ad blockers by bypassing DNS altogether.
Eventually they’ll just route around this by connecting to your neighbor’s Ring doorbell or your Nest thermostat or whatever random internet connected thing that it can reach out and pass packets through.
> Pi-hole also has a nice interface for pointing `.local` domains to local IP addresses, which is much easier than messing with dnsmasq settings on the EdgeRouter.
This is why I have Pi-hole set up as well. I wanted to have custom DNS records so I can resolve multiple named services to the single IP they're hosted on. With my Ubiquiti Security Gateway you have to do this by SSHing in and modifying the dnsmasq settings. It's much easier for me to manage this on Pi-hole. The DNS request metrics and blocking are just a bonus for me.
I bought an LG OLED TV couple of months ago during the Cyber Monday sale.
> but the TV was absolutely packed with ads via the home screen and pop-up toasts. To add insult to injury, the home screen would lag for several seconds at boot while it pulled down all those ads.
I was shocked to read this. I've been running AdGuard Home for awhile now and had no idea that my TV was capable of showing me so many ads. Even my spouse breathed a sigh of relief (and possibly admired my setup just a little!) when I read her these lines.
I got an LG C2 and immediately plugged a Roku into it. I've spent less than 5 minutes total looking at WebOS. I also have OpenWRT's ad block setup enabled on my router. If there are ads on its home screen, I am blind to them.
I've heard that the high end Sony Bravia TVs are better in this regard, but haven't confirmed it myself. They are quite a bit more expensive than the other OLED TVs on the market, however.
One thing I've been feeling lately with internet-connected home devices is that I'm being pushed towards products from big tech companies like Google. Google might mine my data still, but at least they'll ostensibly do it competently and securely. Not a great feeling. Despite not really being in the Google ecosystem, maybe my next TV will be one with Android TV support. On the smart home side, I did get into self-hosting Home Assistant recently. I didn't expect much from it at first, but it's remarkable how liberating and useful it feels compared to the one-size-fits-all approach of Google Home or HomeKit. I'm actually excited to try and get some more smart home devices now, beyond just a few lightbulbs.
I'm watching TV right now while having lunch. I'm watching it on a tablet, with VLC, started by TVH Client, which is a client for TVHeadend, running on a Raspberry with a TV hat. I'm also using that tablet to type this message because VLC has a popup player. I can use the tablet to run every app I could run on a smart TV. I also own a 32" LG TV which I almost never use because carrying the tablet with me around my house is much more convenient thn sitting in front of the TV. I block ads with Blockada and I don't have ads in YouTube because I use NewPipe.
Maybe it depends on the country? I've got a LG C9 and can't recall _ever_ getting any ads in webOS since buying it. In fact, the most annoying thing is the Rakuten button I never use on the "smart" remote.
I've overall been very happy with our LG TV and have been recommending it highly over our old Samsung - which was slowly updated to remove features and eventually took about 45 seconds to boot up.
tl;dr: If the TV is working well enough already, it may be ill-advised to connect it to the network. The apps, while convenient, can be supplanted by an external AppleTV or similar for minimal cost relative to a nice TV. This protects the TV not only from being a privacy threat and general ad-ridden nuisance, but also from receiving potentially harmful updates that can lead to performance regressions.
That just seems to shift all concerns from one device to another. Is AppleTV or similar devices so much better when it comes to privacy? Or is the selling point just that they don't show ads?
Luckily I came accross knowing this abysmal insult from the greedy and user hostile TV manufacturers and avoided LG in the first place. They are banned in my household for life. But in second place thought to go for a huge PC monitor (for me it is 43", enough in this household) and AppleTV (which is ok so far concerning ads ... so far) which eventually turned into a Sony instead disconnected from netwoks completely (I simply like the Sony's screen features, build style and hardware quality). But in the very first place I kept my old TV as long as it was physicly possible. I will not feed this dishonest bullying of intrusive schemers.
Pi-hole seems a more elaborate and powerful approach though.
There's been cases where TVs sent data signals back to the cable boxes over coax. There's now high-frequency, outside-human-hearing ID triggers the that are released into the air and ‘heard’ by smart phones with proprietary apps installed with trackers and too many permissions allowed. They can even send out signals via gyroscopes.
Do that pcap, it's doing _a lot_. Mine's on a seperate VLAN and runs via squid, as well as being rooted. 95% of packets out from it are dropped.
That said, good luck finding something better. Most smart TVs run Android garbage that gets progressively worse as updates fome
out, and no dumb TVs (in my country) have the feature set of the big boys. I can't find anything better than LG, even with the absurd lengths I have to go to make it suit my needs.
> but the TV was absolutely packed with ads via the home screen and pop-up toasts
i also have an oled tv from lg and haven’t seen any ads on the home screen but did get 1-2 pop-ups about a year ago. but that’s about it. it’s a 4 year old model, running a webos version that can’t be updated to the latest one. i also bought it in europe.
does anyone know if what the poster describes happens based on continent/country, or webos version? it seems so strange to have such a great panel, pretty much the best OS, and relatively high prices just to spoil it all with ads worth pennies.
Same experience here from another European user. I've only accepted the bare minimum to be able to use and update the TV and its apps. I haven't seen any ads ever, or not that I can remember anyway. Not even recommendations for TV shows and the likes. It's an LG C9 with an older version of webOS. I do see in the DNS logs that the TV and some of the apps connect to analytics domains.
I also have a pihole in my network and it blocks 30% of all requests. But for TV I use a NEC MultiSync ME501 50“. A dump display. Use it my home gym for Zwift and workout displays.
"It's mind blowing to me that this is the user experience on a TV that costs over $1k."
Perhaps this will put to rest the idea that internet-based tracking and advertising are necessary for products and services to be "free" and paying for these products and services is a way to "remove the ads". Even paying a high premium to a company that privacy washes^1 its products will not stop the data collection and advertising.
Some companies can survive without using the internet to violate privacy for profit. Anyone born before 1993 knows this is true. Certainly a company like LG could survive, however "tech" companies cannot.^2 Conducting commercial surveillance on internet users is too easy. It's like money on the table. There is still inadequate regulation to slow it down, let alone stop it. Companies that connect their products to the internet can cash in on "tech" company intermediary-style surveillance. Welcome to the "Internet of Things".
Being able to control DNS in the home is essential, IMHO. Hopefully Pi-Hole users are not pointing dnsmasq at shared caches run by entities engaged in data collection for commercial purposes and internet advertising services, whether those are ISPs or Google or similar.
The now classic "tech" company meme is that the internet, what other folks would call the web, would not exist without advertising. Yet it did exist before advertising was permitted, so that cannot be true. It still worked and no one using it wanted to see advertising. The person who put the first ad on the internet was globally lambasted.^3 Citing this historical fact does not imply anyone wants to go back in time to the early internet. It just means that the "tech" company meme that the internet does not work without advertising, without "tech" company intermediaries conducting extensive surveillance on every internet user to support this advertising, is pure BS. "Tech" companies try to use FUD something like, "If anyone changes anything that interferes with advertising, then the internet and therefore life itself will suck." Yeah, right.
As if "tech" companies are the only sources of vision for the future. They want a future that continues to let them profit obscenely from using the internet for unregulated data collection and advertising.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution offered trial subscriptions that claimed to bring back the "newspaper reading experience". While the layout was nicer, the ads far fewer in number, and it gave access to long form reporting before it was released to non-subscribers, almost none of the trackers were gone. Newspapers are some of the worst about using third party trackers to make money and even a subscription to the online version of the paper doesn't keep you from being tracked. The double dipping might work short-term but ultimately it seems self defeating as the demographics of those most likely to pay for a subscription likely overlaps quite a bit with those who don't want to be spied on. If there's a potential revenue stream, some manager somewhere in the company is going to try to access it and leverage it for their own benefit, regardless of the larger long-term impact on the company as a whole.
I used to swear by LG TVs because their smart features used to be one or the few on t he market that wasn’t intrusive. I even have a bunch of friends who have bought LG TVs based on my recommendations. But the one I bought a couple of weeks ago had the same issues you described and it has left a really sour taste in my mouth too.
As an aside, can you share the additional domains you added to PiHole please.
> it was making DNS queries for _several_ data mining services that analyze what's being shown on the TV.
What? I don't believe you.
Are you saying if you are using it as a PC monitor it would effectively send data back about apps you're using, games you're playing, etc?
this would have incredible privacy violation implications.
we just got a super shiny brand new samsung s95b that's oled and really nice but it will never see the light of day on the Internet precisely because of this bullshit.
I used to use pi-hole. Then I replaced it with adguard home. Adguard home is a single go binary, and it properly supports HTTPS and secure DNS out of the box. Pi-hole is great, Adguard home is greater I think.
At the end of the day though they both provide the same service. But I like that with adguard home I can have TLS DNS so I can have my mobile phone use private DNS via it even when it's not at home.
This always makes me conflicted about AdGuard. I don’t mind they’re Russians, they cannot help “their” president being a tool. But the shadiness and opaqueness doesn’t jive well with me for a company that can basically see all my internet traffic.
I’m currently happily using https://nextdns.io/ but I don’t thing you can install that on a Raspberry Pi.
What do you mean add blocklist in batch? Do you mean assign a particular blocklist to a particular client? If so then yes, this is the one feature missing from Adguard home.
Its other features more than make up for it.
I use to be anti AdBlock, as a lot of the creators I follow get food over the table thanks to ads... But man, things got out of control, the industry have gone so hostile, where a typical site went from 30% ads 70% content to the inverse and worse.
What I hate the most it's how the try to scam no savvy tech people, like grandparents and for those scenarios pi hole it's a tool made in heaven (specially as there are not global adblocks extensions for mobile devices)
I still don't use for my personal network, but for my senior family members that use tech only for video streaming or reading the news, this it's an amazing gift.
> What I hate the most it's how the try to scam no savvy tech people, like grandparents and
Oh, that's my utter bane. My mom knows better, I've taught her how the manipulations work, and then she'll show me a pertinent article on her tablet, and see an utterly outrageous clickbait link from Outbrain or Taboola or the like, like "This mom found out her kids were smoking WHAT?!" and pictures of some bugs or whatever.
And she'll get a guilty and tortured expression and say "Oh, I know they're probably manipulating me, but I have to find out what this is about." No!!! You really don't have to!
I tried to sneakily install ublock, but I made ONE mistake when trying to add a custom filter on a site she regularly visits, which broke her user experience for 3 minutes before I fixed it, and she demanded I immediately uninstall the "hacker programs".
My grandmother was like that with the National Enquirer and Weekly World News. She knew it was fake garbage but she couldn't resist reading it and you could tell some of it did end up sinking into her mind as being true on some level. But at least those tabloids weren't tracking her. She bought them at the grocery store each week so they didn't even have her on a mailing list. I do believe they had some scammy ads in the back of each issue but I don't recall that ever being a problem for her. Granddad had no interest and just kept to his Popular Mechanics and Popular Science magazines, both of which at times had articles and ads of questionable quality but were far better than the tabloids and modern online clickbait.
I’m in adtech, and it always frustrates me that the product managers make all of their projects around how can we squeeze out more demand out of existing listeners/viewers. One would think it would be a better experience for all to see fewer, but higher quality/higher CPM ads.
Viewers see less ads, but probably wouldn’t resort to ad blockers if they only saw one ad on a website instead of 10. Advertisers would get better click through rates because you aren’t competing with as many ads. The downside is advertisers have a higher CPM, and maybe the data shows high CPM campaigns don’t work.
Regardless, after working in it for awhile I see how we got where we are. I don’t foresee a world with no ads since the vast majority of people don’t want to subscribe to every website they visit, but maybe there will be a better model in the future.
I even wrote an article on a related topic: push notifications acting as a way to deliver malware to devices by relying on non-technical users being scared into clicking allow.
Yeah a lot of sites (articles) there's an ad between every paragraph or they scroll you to the bottom which has those garbage sites as you try to leave.
One crucial thing I use my pihole for is to forward traffic going to the .lan top level domain to my reverse proxy (traefik), I couldn't figure out how to do this in the pihole UI so I just added a custom config file to /etc/dnsmasq.d which works perfectly.
I'm not sure what adguard uses but would be interested to here if it's possible!
EDIT: just seen it supports DNS rewrites, which seems to do a similar job. Nice! I might give this a shot for a while
For me, it was the fact that AdGuard Home supports a lot of good things out of the box. For e.g., DoH/DoT for upstream resolvers, really easy to enable DoH to the AdGuard Home interface itself etc.
I had a pi-hole set up for quite a little while, but my partner complained that they could no longer click on google shopping links. It boggled my mind that anyone actually clicked on these, but now I have to find a way to whitelist their devices.
We implemented a web extension specifically to allow this. It basically worked by giving the user a warning that they would be tracked if they proceeded, then gave them a button to proceed anyway. This was a top feature request for our first year of business, driven mostly by our users' wives.
It was actually a pretty tricky bit of technology to build, as it had to work not only for the original link, but all of the associated trackers which were triggered by the event (otherwise the ad might not load).
As others have stated I worked around it by setting up a wifi connection with different DNS servers and adding '- No Adblock' to the SSID.
Not all routers have this functionality and if it doesn't you should be able to flash Tomato or similar, or use PfSense. Depending how home baked you want to go.
Using Google Shopping is a cheat code to getting cheaper prices. Companies will mark their products down way more than any other coupon that can be found online, just to appear at the top of the results. It's amazing at saving money, if you already know what you want to buy.
Exact same reason I stopped using pi-hole. It bugged out Google shopping and my partner complained. And the whitelisting / access control is annoying UX imo so I went back to normal DNS. Might return to it eventually but not enable it for every dhcp client.
Edit: and her iPhone changes its MAC address randomly so the access control was tricky to maintain.
I don't use Google shoppings, but I click Amazon shopping ads on some indie/personal sites all the time.
For example, one of the them is a music database website. Its ad shows the links to buy the CDs (it's in Japan, FWIW). I find it very continent; I often just go Amazon to check info even if I don't want to buy.
The developers made a great release awhile back that allowed you to make custom groups of users with their own whitelists. I created a group that whitelisted all google shopping links and then put her in it. Works flawlessly
My Pi-hole has been running in a Docker container on my main workstation for several years. I tend to refresh it once a month or so with a simple configuration as shown in the example files.
Readit News
As for the pi-hole setup itself, it's working great. It's a great backup to locally installed adblockers, and I have my EdgeRouter as the primary DHCP DNS server, which makes requests to pi-hole. Both the router and pi-hole have caching, and my DNS query latencies are good. Pi-hole also has a nice interface for pointing `.local` domains to local IP addresses, which is much easier than messing with dnsmasq settings on the EdgeRouter.
Thankfully, it’s almost unpossible to buy a telescreen without telemetry (and always has been), so Big Brother will know what you are doing. But you should still stop by the local MiniLuv for reeducation, just in case.
Are you sure about that? I'm pretty sure I recall being able t&%@^0158
NNNNNNNN@*^&
NO CARRIER
The analogy is Tesla is the only one making good electric cars. When there's competition, I will never buy Tesla because of the shitty experience.
Also for >$1k it should let you use the TV as an HDMI multiviewer. It has 4 HDMI ports on the back, let me view plug in my personal laptop on the port 1, work laptop on port 2, and divide the screen to give each laptop a "2nd monitor". Or even 2 monitors each.
I was able to resolve the wifi issue by resetting the region to another and back and turning off the auto setting for it, but frankly it’s appalling an update can go out that breaks something as basic as Ethernet.
-Jack Sparrow, LG CEO
LG 43UN700-B
Asus Merlin firmware handles this nicely.
I have a nice script that does the same on an edgerouter, some variation on ‘if port 53 and not from Pihole, send to Pihole’.
I used to have an EdgeRouter which was a huge improvement to the ISP-provided crappy box but ultimately the configuration was so complicated and inconsistent that I switched to a small fanless debian box. I put Pi-Hole there, which also covered DHCP and DNS services (synchronized together).
It has been a blast and I have more confidence that I will understand what is happening (vs the ER magic)
This is why I have Pi-hole set up as well. I wanted to have custom DNS records so I can resolve multiple named services to the single IP they're hosted on. With my Ubiquiti Security Gateway you have to do this by SSHing in and modifying the dnsmasq settings. It's much easier for me to manage this on Pi-hole. The DNS request metrics and blocking are just a bonus for me.
> but the TV was absolutely packed with ads via the home screen and pop-up toasts. To add insult to injury, the home screen would lag for several seconds at boot while it pulled down all those ads.
I was shocked to read this. I've been running AdGuard Home for awhile now and had no idea that my TV was capable of showing me so many ads. Even my spouse breathed a sigh of relief (and possibly admired my setup just a little!) when I read her these lines.
The problem is, for anyone who wants a smart TV, every brand is just as bad. Samsung, Sony etc.
I know some people say "get a dumb TV" and use chromecast etc - but I just want an all in one integration etc.
One thing I've been feeling lately with internet-connected home devices is that I'm being pushed towards products from big tech companies like Google. Google might mine my data still, but at least they'll ostensibly do it competently and securely. Not a great feeling. Despite not really being in the Google ecosystem, maybe my next TV will be one with Android TV support. On the smart home side, I did get into self-hosting Home Assistant recently. I didn't expect much from it at first, but it's remarkable how liberating and useful it feels compared to the one-size-fits-all approach of Google Home or HomeKit. I'm actually excited to try and get some more smart home devices now, beyond just a few lightbulbs.
Edit: found this on GitHub https://gist.github.com/wassname/78eeaaad299dc4cddd04e372f20...
It's listed on https://firebog.net/
I've overall been very happy with our LG TV and have been recommending it highly over our old Samsung - which was slowly updated to remove features and eventually took about 45 seconds to boot up.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31707222
tl;dr: If the TV is working well enough already, it may be ill-advised to connect it to the network. The apps, while convenient, can be supplanted by an external AppleTV or similar for minimal cost relative to a nice TV. This protects the TV not only from being a privacy threat and general ad-ridden nuisance, but also from receiving potentially harmful updates that can lead to performance regressions.
Pi-hole seems a more elaborate and powerful approach though.
That said, good luck finding something better. Most smart TVs run Android garbage that gets progressively worse as updates fome out, and no dumb TVs (in my country) have the feature set of the big boys. I can't find anything better than LG, even with the absurd lengths I have to go to make it suit my needs.
i also have an oled tv from lg and haven’t seen any ads on the home screen but did get 1-2 pop-ups about a year ago. but that’s about it. it’s a 4 year old model, running a webos version that can’t be updated to the latest one. i also bought it in europe.
does anyone know if what the poster describes happens based on continent/country, or webos version? it seems so strange to have such a great panel, pretty much the best OS, and relatively high prices just to spoil it all with ads worth pennies.
I am using them sparingly though, and I live in EU, if that makes any difference.
Perhaps this will put to rest the idea that internet-based tracking and advertising are necessary for products and services to be "free" and paying for these products and services is a way to "remove the ads". Even paying a high premium to a company that privacy washes^1 its products will not stop the data collection and advertising.
Some companies can survive without using the internet to violate privacy for profit. Anyone born before 1993 knows this is true. Certainly a company like LG could survive, however "tech" companies cannot.^2 Conducting commercial surveillance on internet users is too easy. It's like money on the table. There is still inadequate regulation to slow it down, let alone stop it. Companies that connect their products to the internet can cash in on "tech" company intermediary-style surveillance. Welcome to the "Internet of Things".
Being able to control DNS in the home is essential, IMHO. Hopefully Pi-Hole users are not pointing dnsmasq at shared caches run by entities engaged in data collection for commercial purposes and internet advertising services, whether those are ISPs or Google or similar.
1.
https://www.context.news/surveillance/opinion/user-beware-pr...
https://dt.gl/privacy-washing-do-as-i-say-not-as-i-do/
https://dataethics.eu/privacy-washing/
https://medium.com/discernible/communicators-steer-clear-of-...
https://getsession.org/blog/privacy-washing
2.
The now classic "tech" company meme is that the internet, what other folks would call the web, would not exist without advertising. Yet it did exist before advertising was permitted, so that cannot be true. It still worked and no one using it wanted to see advertising. The person who put the first ad on the internet was globally lambasted.^3 Citing this historical fact does not imply anyone wants to go back in time to the early internet. It just means that the "tech" company meme that the internet does not work without advertising, without "tech" company intermediaries conducting extensive surveillance on every internet user to support this advertising, is pure BS. "Tech" companies try to use FUD something like, "If anyone changes anything that interferes with advertising, then the internet and therefore life itself will suck." Yeah, right.
As if "tech" companies are the only sources of vision for the future. They want a future that continues to let them profit obscenely from using the internet for unregulated data collection and advertising.
3.
https://web.archive.org/web/20080919130455/http://www.l-ware...
As an aside, can you share the additional domains you added to PiHole please.
What? I don't believe you. Are you saying if you are using it as a PC monitor it would effectively send data back about apps you're using, games you're playing, etc? this would have incredible privacy violation implications.
It would make me furious to find ads in software that I've already paid for. Hopefully when I need to replace this TV there will still be options.
Deleted Comment
I’m currently happily using https://nextdns.io/ but I don’t thing you can install that on a Raspberry Pi.
What I hate the most it's how the try to scam no savvy tech people, like grandparents and for those scenarios pi hole it's a tool made in heaven (specially as there are not global adblocks extensions for mobile devices)
I still don't use for my personal network, but for my senior family members that use tech only for video streaming or reading the news, this it's an amazing gift.
Oh, that's my utter bane. My mom knows better, I've taught her how the manipulations work, and then she'll show me a pertinent article on her tablet, and see an utterly outrageous clickbait link from Outbrain or Taboola or the like, like "This mom found out her kids were smoking WHAT?!" and pictures of some bugs or whatever.
And she'll get a guilty and tortured expression and say "Oh, I know they're probably manipulating me, but I have to find out what this is about." No!!! You really don't have to!
I tried to sneakily install ublock, but I made ONE mistake when trying to add a custom filter on a site she regularly visits, which broke her user experience for 3 minutes before I fixed it, and she demanded I immediately uninstall the "hacker programs".
Viewers see less ads, but probably wouldn’t resort to ad blockers if they only saw one ad on a website instead of 10. Advertisers would get better click through rates because you aren’t competing with as many ads. The downside is advertisers have a higher CPM, and maybe the data shows high CPM campaigns don’t work.
Regardless, after working in it for awhile I see how we got where we are. I don’t foresee a world with no ads since the vast majority of people don’t want to subscribe to every website they visit, but maybe there will be a better model in the future.
https://www.lloydatkinson.net/posts/2022/consider-disabling-...
Yeah a lot of sites (articles) there's an ad between every paragraph or they scroll you to the bottom which has those garbage sites as you try to leave.
One crucial thing I use my pihole for is to forward traffic going to the .lan top level domain to my reverse proxy (traefik), I couldn't figure out how to do this in the pihole UI so I just added a custom config file to /etc/dnsmasq.d which works perfectly.
I'm not sure what adguard uses but would be interested to here if it's possible!
EDIT: just seen it supports DNS rewrites, which seems to do a similar job. Nice! I might give this a shot for a while
It was actually a pretty tricky bit of technology to build, as it had to work not only for the original link, but all of the associated trackers which were triggered by the event (otherwise the ad might not load).
Not all routers have this functionality and if it doesn't you should be able to flash Tomato or similar, or use PfSense. Depending how home baked you want to go.
Edit: and her iPhone changes its MAC address randomly so the access control was tricky to maintain.
Not sure it can be done on android.
it's also telling me that a lot of tech products are not tested with women customers at all.
For example, one of the them is a music database website. Its ad shows the links to buy the CDs (it's in Japan, FWIW). I find it very continent; I often just go Amazon to check info even if I don't want to buy.
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The developers made a great release awhile back that allowed you to make custom groups of users with their own whitelists. I created a group that whitelisted all google shopping links and then put her in it. Works flawlessly
https://adguard-dns.io/en/public-dns.html#addresses
Also ublock-origin works on Firefox mobile.