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drone
@drone

there's lots of chatter about blocking ads lately and god, I am HERE FOR IT. I hate adverts. online or IRL. they're a blight on our society and to our senses and it's a topic I've been passionate about for years. yes, you should switch to Firefox. today!

but what about everywhere that your browser's adblock extension doesn't reach? do you like the sound of universal ad blocking AND telemetry blocking for every computer and device on your network, whether wired or wifi, with no setup or config needed on said devices? or perhaps you're interested in an entry-level tech project with a microcomputer (like a raspberry pi or alternative) that has a tangible and positive impact on your day-to-day life? if not both of those things?? well then: most of you big nerds on cohost like me probably already know exactly what I'm gonna talk about and can keep scrolling!! hOORAY!! for the rest of you, check out:

Pi-hole!

my personal pi-hole dash. holy shit that's a lot of filtered garbage.

you can install it on something like a raspberry pi or alternative tiny computer, or perhaps a server you're using for other things. I've run it just fine on a raspberry pi zero W, so it's incredibly lightweight too.

so how does it work, in layman's terms? unlike a browser ad-block extension, pi-hole has a huge blocklist of domains that you can give it, and rather than filtering out ad domains upon load in the browser, pi-hole stands in between your client and the Internet, and filters out all those domains before they even reach your computer! it actually makes your browsing experience faster (probably intangibly, but still)!

how do I install it? you can either install it on Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora or Raspbian (there's an easy one-line install command) or on any OS using Docker. then you need to run the setup wizard, and also set the IP address of the machine running pi-hole as the DNS server on your router.

these installation and configuration steps might seem a little cumbersome at first if you've not done much of this kinda thing before, and you might even end up needing to just start from scratch if you've messed up a step and troubleshooting seems like too much. but that's the joy of lil tech projects like this!

there's also a star trek theme??

is there anything it can't do? only speaking from my personal experience, it cannot block youtube ads when running from a TV's built-in youtube app. same goes for amazon TV, etc. (personally I just VPNed to India and pay £1.30ish per month for youtube premium)

which blocklists should I use? in pi-hole you just provide URLs to a text document with a list of domains to block. here is the definitive List of Lists you can feed in, separated by category (ads, telemetry, suspicious/virus-y etc).

can it ever be too aggressive? I've never had an issue, but my housemate has sometimes had issues playing free-to-play mobile games where she couldn't load the ads to continue playing. but pi-hole has a whitelist system! check out this nice and easy whitelist tool you can run for generally harmless domains that are can get blocked (URL shorteners and the like).

does this track and log internet activity? yes it can, which can be good for diagnosis and troubleshooting, but you have granular options on what exactly gets logged. I've switched on full anonymity as I live with other people.

I don't usually do writeups like this so I hope it's been clear enough! finally I'm going to plug something I did for fun: a tiny e-ink dashboard I made for a raspberry pi zero. it's not super useful, but it was fun to make.

good luck and have fun! seriously, fuck advertisements


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in reply to @drone's post:

Aaagh I hate commenting with this but it just scrolled across my desk a week or two ago: did you hear that Raspberry Pi hired a former cop and introduced him with an intro glowing about his (allegedly unrelated?) history building covert surveilance tech, and when people on Mastodon & twitter suggested this was somewhere between tone-deaf and Bad, the official account called them bullies and blocked them?

I do not think this automatically counterindicates liking/using pi– there's more than one possibile set of extenuating circumstances (for ex. official account may well be a rogue unsupervised asshole) but I do feel like it's worth knowing about/being aware of, unfortunately. :(

I was aware personally and it sucks for sure, but I didn't want to detract from the main purpose of my post as if I put in all that extra detail it would just get way too long and lose the focus. especially since pihole isn't limited to RPis despite the name, you can just use Ubuntu or docker etc on another alternative.

thanks for post. i very much agree with your feels on ads and adblocking but have never taken the step to set up a network-level block like pi-hole as it's outside my nerd comfort zone. this has me pondering it a bit more though... 🤔

it's really quite doable, but I definitely understand how intimidating it can look. definitely worth considering if you ever find yourself in the mood to roll up your sleeves and get out that comfort zone a bit :)

so the last time i tried to buy an rpi i found it tremendously difficult and was only saved by the grace of knowing someone who had an extra to toss me. obviously this no longer applies to me, but what can those of us without rpis do in pursuit of actually getting one, in the face of that difficulty?

I think the lowest barrier to entry would be setting your default DNS to a public ad-blocking server (like adguard or similar)

That has the caveat that it’s hard to know how the owners of the server actually run it

A relatively easier self-hosted solution was adguard server, compared to pihole imo. But it still needs some amount of computer savvy to setup