Because I wonder what percentage of bandwidth (in terms of bytes) trackers/banners/ads account for.
Need to set up a pi-hole ... just too many other projects....
My pihole is showing 18.7%-23% of requests blocked :)
It would be nice to know how much we're wasting.
Is it their content to do what they want with? Sure.
Does the same logic apply to the $9 I used to give them each month? You're damn right.
Normal display ads all being blocked is generally fine 99% of the time, but if you care about not being permanently tracked across the internet then there are a couple more domains you have to add - except some sites make it mandatory that those invasive fingerprinting scripts and port scanners run and report back a session, otherwise you're refused login or banned.
They focus not only on tracking but also malware prevention, where possible via dns filtering.
Pi-Hole still does not properly support wildcard filtering, only via regex but that is not really efficient (requires tons of resources).
wget --quiet "http://PIHOLE_IP/admin/api.php?disable=60&auth=YOUR_API_TOKE..."
You can find the token in the pihole Web GUI at, Settings > API/Web Interface > Show API token
An no, there isn't "tons of alternatives". In theory there is. But in practice, they can really make your life harder. Some may say that Signal is an alternative for WhatsApp, but if people you communicate with don't want to use anything but WhatsApp, then Signal is useless. I hate Facebook but when I want to plan an event, I found nothing better, simply because that's the platform that reaches the most people. Network effects... But also, your favorite show may not be on "alternative" streaming platforms, sometimes your job, or worse, the government may require a specific website.
There are extremists who are ready to find alternative friends, shows or jobs just to avoid using some website. It is a good thing these people exist, that's how progress is made. But for most people you have to make compromises.
Ah! That's why I haven't missed Facebook. I am old enough that I don't plan events any longer.
(Or maybe I have no social life. Actually, that's right, I don't. ;-))
Best part? Trying to convince the operators of such sites that users they cannot see in their "analytics solution" are worth fixing their site for is not exactly a straightfoward job - from their narrow view, these users simply do not exist, because the tracking does not show them!
I can't effectively keep a mental black list of all the sites which I don't want to click on.
As of now, it is called whitelist/blacklist in PiHole [0]. Maybe it will change, maybe it will not, but there is already a place to fight that battle [1] and it is not HN.
[0] https://docs.pi-hole.net/guides/misc/whitelist-blacklist/
If the terms whitelist/blacklist are hurtful to some people because of all the racial baggage we've applied to the words white and black, why not switch to allow/deny instead?
Using allow/deny is more explicit and doesn't rely on the benign cultural associations with the colors black and white. The choice of colors used here is arbitrary. For example, one could just as easily use green/red in reference to traffic signal colors. Ask yourself, would it bother you if we used blue and pink for allow and deny? What if we used blue or white as synonymous with deny?
Two good reasons exist to change our habits, basic manners and clarity.
I'm sure I'll use the terms blacklist and whitelist from time to time out of accumulated habit. But there's no reason for me to cling to those terms. Being gently reminded to use objectively clearer terminology shouldn't engender hostility on my part. I try not to be an unpleasant person, part of that is when someone tells me my behavior has a negative impact on them, I try to listen to what they say and modify my behavior--while actually effecting change can be hard, the underlying concept is pretty simple.
Of course, my coworkers don't represent all black people, and especially wouldn't claim to represent African Americans, but if even black people can hold this opinion, are you surprised others don't see this as worth the effort to change?
This is an OSS project. If someone cares enough about it, they should submit a (non-breaking) patch along with a patch for the documentation. There are no costs to people who don't find it a valuable change.
> My experience talking to black (one African, one European) coworkers is their reaction is "That's the problem you're going to fix?".
Obviously this isn't fixing any of the fundamental issues, but it does bother some people. My preference is to respect the people who have problems with it. An easy policy is to simply avoid creating new software which uses that terminology and to accept any patches which fix it. That way the people who feel the change is important bear the burden of the cost (which is likely small some thing like this).
And throwing aside 600 years of clarity for "basic manners" also seems rather weird. Sort of like banning the word "engender" because a small minority might find that to be offensive. It isn't clearer to use a different word than has been used for over half a millennium.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversies_about_the_word_n...
Should all terms for the colour-that-is-somewhat-the-absence-of-colour now be banned? Is Vanta Black now racist?
Manufactured controversy leads you down a path of absurdism. It isn't helpful to the people it purports to help, whilst granting the vocal group the ability to say they're being helpful whilst actively ignoring any actual problems.
But my point is that, if people took the time to learn the background, perhaps (in both of these examples, and others), we could avoid the kerfuffles.
Nor can I find any example where blacklist is not a list of denied subjects. A blacklisted person, website or process is immediately clear within their context.
Where the clarity is lacking is not clear to me. However the mismatch between "allow list" and "whitelist", is. The latter seems to have a different meaning altogether.
Sorry but I find this claim (which I've heard from others too) ridiculous. "Blacklist" is an actual common English word in the dictionary. "Denylist" is an incredibly awkward-sounding neologism without any context or history behind it. There is no way that "denylist" is the "objectively clearer" one here.
EDIT: apparently setting allowlist/denylist won't work so it's not just being pedantic, it's wrong.
So, I kind of see the point.
To fix the problem, we either have to stop referring to any metaphor/symbol involving color with negative connotations; or we have to stop using color to identify and refer to people. I think the former is good for precision (allowlist/denylist are great identifiers in that regard), but won't really solve our other problems; while the latter is probably better for human dignity, mutual respect, and combating our propensity for tribalism/racism. (Or, why not, we could do both.)
Yes you have to log in to the interface unless you engineer a way around it
Can be nice to use to quickly disable pihole to get through to a particular website.
When I need to access ads.google.com or analytics.google.com for my company, I turn on Cloudflare, and pihole is bypassed.
I'm all for news sites, for example, hoisting ads if I knew they were getting the money from those ads, knew the ads were actually coming from their site.
I wonder if you could hijack those requests at your router and send them back to your Pi-Hole? But then they just switch to DNS over TLS...
In the corporate world, I think the future is managing your network by managing every single device on your network. Only let authorized/corp devices in and all those devices must be enrolled in an MDM solution that enforces all sorts of policy and includes monitoring traffic/DNS queries. Of course that's a lot more work than just monitoring things at the network level.
Your computer sends the raw domain name to pi-hole (e.g. ads.google.com), and pi-hole returns 0.0.0.0 if it's on the block list.
There's nothing Google or anyone can do to make pi-hole stop working.
For now, I've configured my router to force all UDP port 53 traffic to my Pi-Hole which overrides what I mentioned above.
But, in the future we may start to see IoT Devices hard-code DoH servers which will be harder to force over to the Pi-Hole.
Oh wow, how do you do that?
[i] Target: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/StevenBlack/hosts/master/hosts
[] Status: Retrieval successful
[i] Received 59896 domains
[i] Target: https://mirror1.malwaredomains.com/files/justdomains
[] Status: Not found
[] List download failed: using previously cached list
[i] Received 26854 domains
[i] Target: https://s3.amazonaws.com/lists.disconnect.me/simple_tracking.txt
[] Status: No changes detected
[i] Received 34 domains
[i] Target: https://s3.amazonaws.com/lists.disconnect.me/simple_ad.txt
[] Status: No changes detected
[i] Received 2701 domains
[i] Target: https://dbl.oisd.nl/
[] Status: Retrieval successful
[i] Received 1167690 domains
[i] Target: https://phishing.army/download/phishing_army_blocklist_extended.txt
[] Status: Retrieval successful
[i] Received 21379 domains
[i] Target: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/deathbybandaid/piholeparser/master/Subscribable-Lists/ParsedBlacklists/AakList.txt
[] Status: Retrieval successful
[i] Received 5 domains
[i] Target: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/deathbybandaid/piholeparser/master/Subscribable-Lists/ParsedBlacklists/Prebake-Obtrusive.txt
[] Status: Retrieval successful
[i] Received 3 domains
[i] Target: https://gitlab.com/quidsup/notrack-blocklists/raw/master/notrack-blocklist.txt
[] Status: Retrieval successful
[i] Received 14724 domains
[i] Target: https://gitlab.com/quidsup/notrack-blocklists/raw/master/notrack-malware.txt
[] Status: Retrieval successful
[i] Received 412 domains
[i] Target: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/hectorm/hmirror/master/data/adaway.org/list.txt
[] Status: Retrieval successful
[i] Received 9182 domains
[i] Target: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/hectorm/hmirror/master/data/disconnect.me-ad/list.txt
[] Status: Retrieval successful
[i] Received 2701 domains
[i] Target: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/notracking/hosts-blocklists/master/hostnames.txt
[] Status: Retrieval successful
[i] Received 209608 domainshttps://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts
What is the advantage of having DNS on a separate device other than that it provides ad blocking for multiple devices?
But also you can have more flexible block patterns. I run DNSCrypt-Proxy and my block lists can have wildcards. With /etc/hosts you have to enumerate each origin. It can also do things like IP blocking where if any domain resolves to a known ad network IP, then that request is blocked.
But mainly, DNSCrypt-proxy encrypts all my outgoing queries and round robins them across resolvers. (Also hi dheera!)
Kid's computer has dnsmasq as a similar solution.
Obviously not a NextDNS specific issue, it’d happen with anything that blocks the call, but just putting it out there for the next sucker that tries to google why their IKEA gateway suddenly stops responding.