Show HN: Ad-Free Life – Adblocking as a Service

Re:Show HN: Ad-Free Life – Adblocking as a Service by Brendinooo on Wednesday August 02, 2017 @11:53AM (#14911521)

I'm not the most networking-literate person. How does this work? In the case PiHole you set your router force all of the devices on the network to go through the Pi, correct? So for this service you'd be routing all of your internet traffic through a remote server run by a company you know very little about? That feels sketchy to me, but again it might just be due to ignorance or misunderstanding.

Also, to anyone who has used PiHole - what do you do when a news site bugs you about using an ad blocker? What's the equivalent of "open up your other browser to access the page"?

Side note: why are people flagging this? Seems like a normal "Show HN"-type of post to me, but I'm not always savvy to the etiquette here.

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Re:Show HN: Ad-Free Life – Adblocking as a Service by adfreelife on Wednesday August 02, 2017 @12:01PM (#14911638)

I'm not sure why it keeps getting flagged, but it seems to be removed quickly afterwards.

It actually only sends your DNS traffic, which turns a pretty url (like https://www.adfree.life) into an ugly IP (like 70.42.251.42) and then returns to your computer to make the actual call with all of the important stuff. It is not to be confused with a VPN, where your traffic could actually be logged. You can read more about it here http://computer.howstuffworks.com/dns.htm

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Re:Show HN: Ad-Free Life – Adblocking as a Service by jmcdiesel on Wednesday August 02, 2017 @12:23PM (#14911910)

Getting the URL of every site a person visits is quite a data mine... not something I'd personally be up for paying for. I have to give AT&T Gigafiber extra money to not track my stuff...

Without trying to be insulting, I think everyone is getting a little too greedy lately with the information they want sent into their "cloud".

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Re:Show HN: Ad-Free Life – Adblocking as a Service by Bartweiss on Wednesday August 02, 2017 @01:05PM (#14912407)

To be blunt, that's still too much for me. I'm already unhappy about my ISP having my DNS history, I certainly don't want to offer it to a third part for a service that I could run without giving up that info.

I don't say that as a product criticism, I see why you can't do it another way and plenty of people won't mind. But if you're curious, that takes me out of the pool for this service. Shipping trusted hardware that could go behind a router is about all I'd be open to.

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Re:Show HN: Ad-Free Life – Adblocking as a Service by shock on Wednesday August 02, 2017 @03:21PM (#14913728)

Give dnscrypt a try. Someone will still know that your IP made those requests, but it will be much harder to tie your identity to the IP.

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