
“This is why I use ad blockers and a pi-hole server” - slater
https://twitter.com/poa_nyc/status/1220199103658971143
======
Terretta
Shout out to nextdns.io, they run a global pi-hole grid. OK, it’s better, but
conceptually.

 _”Block ads, trackers and malicious websites on all your devices. Get in-
depth analytics about your Internet traffic. Protect your privacy and bypass
censorship. Shield your kids.”_

All you do is point your DNS at it. (Or let one of their apps point DNS for
you.)

But I really like the ethos:

 _”NextDNS was founded in May 2019 in Delaware, USA by two French founders
Romain Cointepas and Olivier Poitrey. Olivier has been working on Internet
infrastructures for the last 20 years. In 2005, he founded Dailymotion, the
largest video sharing service after Youtube and the most popular European
website in the world at the time. He is currently Director of Engineering at
Netflix, working on Open Connect, Netflix 's home CDN also known as the CDN
moving about 30% of the total US Internet traffic. Romain and Olivier closely
worked for years at Dailymotion on many different projects. Romain ended up
leading the mobile & TV department.”_

 _”We are true supporters of the net neutrality and Internet privacy. We
believe that un-encrypted DNS resolvers operated by ISPs are detrimental to
those two principals. Alternative solutions like Google DNS or Cloudflare DNS
are great, but we think more actors need to step up and provide alternative
services to avoid centralization of powers.”_

In ~8 months it’s gotten mom proof while also being something I can recommend
to techos. For me, it’s been more reliable than the enterprise Zscalar DNS
filtering, and more configurable than other filters, particularly in allowing
ad blocking and custom block lists and white lists along a rich set of built-
ins.

I’m at 7% blocked out of 4 million queries in last couple months.

    
    
        Ads & Trackers 256,212
        Facebook         7,150
        Spotify          1,245
        Messenger        1,027
        Snapchat           938
        Twitter            916
    

I should note that I don’t use Facebook, Spotify, Messenger, Snapchat, or
Twitter.

~~~
cocochanel
Cool, sounds great! I went to NextDNS website only to find out they run Google
Analytics...

~~~
MrStonedOne
What should they use? And don't say matomo until it supports drilling down
byond one level.

~~~
TeMPOraL
They should not use anything.

Or server logs, if they really must.

~~~
mrweasel
It seem like most people have forgotten that before Google Analytics, we all
just looked at our server logs.

Sure, you can't get the exact same information, but you can get enough to do
capacity planning and some basic stats.

I've started to wonder why people care about Google Analytics, what does it
tell you that you actually need to know. Again capacity planning is useful,
but other than that, isn't sort of pointless?

~~~
duckworth
Some of the larger website builders/hosting , e.g. Wix don’t even give you
access to server logs.

Sure you can setup and run your own site and CMS easily enough, but running
even hourly bulk log ingestion is usually not as straight forward and the
information you can derive is very limited comparative to js based tracking.

Matamo ( formerly Piwik) is decent but still takes some time to setup and get
right.

The main thing that the analytics tells you if you are promoting anything, is
which of those promotions is actually working and driving visitors to your
site.

~~~
mrweasel
>Some of the larger website builders/hosting , e.g. Wix don’t even give you
access to server logs.

I don't think it's unreasonable to require them to provide you some sort in
insight into your traffic data in that case.

You can to promotion tracking with just log parsing, depending on how your
system is built. There's a large number of sites that handle that by simply
having unique URL for each promotional partner.

------
hans1729
What really grinds my gears: they do the same thing when you're a paying
subscriber.

I'm with the nyt for two years now, and I can vividly remember seeing the
first ad that was displayed despite me being logged in. How is that okay?! And
btw: I wanted to cancel my subscription afterwards, but apparently you can't
do that via web from the EU (or not for my subscription type?) - so I need to
cancel on the phone, during american business hours. I appreciate the times
for their journalism, but their business practice with respect to selling
their customers data is beyond inacceptable. I'm already paying you money, get
your act together please...

~~~
blowski
It annoys me too, but I'm playing devil's advocate to reason it out.

When you buy a print copy, it also has adverts. The price you're paying is
subsidised by the adverts, it doesn't completely cover the costs.

Perhaps there are two possible ends of the spectrum. On one side, you have to
pay for all news that you access and there is no advertising. The news will be
expensive, so only the wealthy will have access. The government can subsidise
it, but that runs the risk of politicising it.

At the other, there is only advertising-supported news. The content you see is
decided by whoever bids the highest.

A blended subscriptions plus advertising model tries to find a middle ground.
I guess the argument is that advertising would be OK, if it didn't track your
every movement and share that information with thousands of scummy companies.
Is that even possible now? Would advertisers pay if they didn't get that
information?

~~~
hans1729
>I guess the argument is that advertising would be OK, if it didn't track your
every movement and share that information with thousands of scummy companies.

Honestly: no. I'd rather pay more than selling my attention, because that's
what ads are doing. My time is more valuable than whatever margin they're
making by showing me ads, and I'm _very_ confident that I'm not alone with
this position.

>Is that even possible now? Would advertisers pay if they didn't get that
information?

This is a really good question, and adding to it: how hard-wired are these
mechanisms into modern websites such as the nyt's? I'm pretty sure that there
is no simple on-off switch, but how much work would it be to implement one?

~~~
blowski
A sliding-scale subscription model would be nice, where I could say "I'll pay
$100 per month and have no adverts at all" or "I'll only $5 per month, and I'm
happy to have a lot of adverts".

But the advertisers probably want access to the kind of people who are
prepared to part with a lot of money to avoid advertising. You see this in the
FT and Economist where it's more expensive to advertise to subscribers,
because the advertisers know those people have higher disposable income. If
all they can have access to is lower-paid people, I guess there’s a risk a lot
of the advertisers will not bother.

Maybe there's just an inherent problem here. News can be good quality,
independent from government, free from advertising, and available to all. But
it can't be all of those things at the same time at a national level.

~~~
mr__y
>"I'll pay $100 per month and have no adverts at all" or "I'll only $5 per
month, and I'm happy to have a lot of adverts".

there is another problem with that model. As long as ads revenue is a
significant portion of publisher's income there is a risk of advertisers
influencing the content. At $100/month you won't see the ads, but the news
themselves could still be influenced by advertisers in some way. I'm afraid
that this would need all or nothing approach to be effective.

------
freediver
This has to be a highlight of the discussion

[https://twitter.com/paulcalvano/status/1000094415485132801/p...](https://twitter.com/paulcalvano/status/1000094415485132801/photo/1)

~~~
mindslight
Look at all that "innovation" being stifled...

~~~
Nextgrid
It explains why there's so much fear-mongering and misinformation regarding
the GDPR and how they're trying to make users hate it (by using _non-
compliant_ and annoying by design "consent" prompts). There are literally
billions being invested in all that cancer called adtech/martech that's been
made illegal by the GDPR.

------
3xblah
For those who prefer json to ads, trackers and bloat, below is a script to
fetch NYT by section in human-readable jsonp.

    
    
       #! /bin/sh
    
       case $1 in
       world        |w*)  x=world       # shortcut: w
       ;;us         |u*)  x=us          # shortcut: u
       ;;politics   |p*)  x=politics    # shortcut: p
       ;;nyregion   |n*)  x=nyregion    # shortcut: n
       ;;business   |bu*) x=business    # shortcut: bu
       ;;opinion    |o*)  x=opinion     # shortcut: o
       ;;technology |te*) x=technology  # shortcut: te
       ;;science    |sc*) x=science     # shortcut: sc
       ;;health     |h*)  x=health      # shortcut: h
       ;;sports     |sp*) x=sports      # shortcut: sp
       ;;arts       |a*)  x=arts        # shortcut: a
       ;;books      |bo*) x=books       # shortcut: bo
       ;;style      |st*) x=style       # shortcut: st
       ;;food       |f*)  x=food        # shortcut: f
       ;;travel     |tr*) x=travel      # shortcut: tr
       ;;magazine   |m*)  x=magazine    # shortcut: m
       ;;t-magazine |t-*) x=t-magazine  # shortcut: t-
       ;;realestate |r*)  x=realestate  # shortcut: r
       ;;*) 
       echo usage: $0 section 
       exec sed -n '/x=/!d;s/.*x=//;/sed/!p' $0
       esac
    
       curl -s https://static01.nyt.com/services/json/sectionfronts/$x/index.jsonp
    

Example: Make simple page of titles, article urls and captions, where above
script is named "nyt".

    
    
       nyt tr |  sed '/\"headline\": \"/{s//<p>/;s/\".*/<\/p>/;p};/\"full\": \"/{s//<p>/;s/..$/<\/p>/;p};/\"link\": \"/{s///;s/ *//;s/\".*//;s|.*|<a href=&>&</a>|;p}' > travel.html
    
       firefox travel.html
    

Only need one domain for viewing in graphical browser -- static01.nyt.com --
articles and images look great, at least on desktop

Can block everything else

~~~
hkt
..do they not just do RSS?

That's genius though, and I love it. You're clearly very dedicated to both the
NYT and privacy.

~~~
burkaman
They do, they have topic-specific RSS feeds that work great for me. Example:
[http://rss.nytimes.com/services/xml/rss/nyt/Science.xml](http://rss.nytimes.com/services/xml/rss/nyt/Science.xml)

~~~
3xblah
UTF-8 complexity

------
ronjouch
Also, if you own a router able to run OpenWrt (
[https://openwrt.org/supported_devices](https://openwrt.org/supported_devices)
), you have access to several packages providing the same technical solution
as a pi-hole (DNS-based blocking). As far as I know, the most common and
maintained is
[https://github.com/openwrt/packages/tree/master/net/adblock/...](https://github.com/openwrt/packages/tree/master/net/adblock/files)
.

It's easy to install, full-featured, ships with lots of lists to pick from,
auto-updates lists, doesn't need an additional device, and you will benefit
from router features shipped as part of OpenWrt and probably unavailable in
your router's proprietary firmware. Much recommended.

If that sounds attractive and it sounds like a good opportunity to change your
crumbling unpatched router, the question "what's today's good cheap router
running OpenWrt without trouble?" is frequently answered by
[https://www.reddit.com/r/openwrt/](https://www.reddit.com/r/openwrt/) :) .

~~~
qntty
Is it worth switching from AdvancedTomato to OpenWrt?

~~~
ronjouch
I don't know.

------
jasondclinton
This isn't any better on the NYTimes mobile site. Everyone should be running
Firefox for Android with uBlock extension enabled. Bonus: it reduces the
network traffic so dramatically, it's like getting a new phone.

~~~
laydn
I used to be conflicted about using ad blockers on sites I frequent and enjoy
and used to actively maintain my block list. After all, I want them to earn
money.

But almost all websites are getting out of control and I no longer have the
time and energy to do that. So Firefox+uBlock all the way

~~~
hans1729
>But almost all websites are getting out of control

And they don't care if you're a paying user! I susbcribed to the NYT, paying
them fair money every month for a couple of years now, just to be subjected to
the same mess regardless. It's infuriating. Why should I even pay for the
service when they still bombard me with ads and tracking?!

~~~
U8dcN7vx
Yet that's just how all newspapers traditionally operate, you pay for delivery
of their advertising platform.

------
mrarjen
Ads have gotten to the point I'm once again getting the feeling I'm on IE with
80% of the page blocked by toolbars. But this time it's ads and video's
blocking any content I want to consume.

Blockers are a valuable thing to simply be able to read or watch anything on
most sites now a days. I also happily pay for proper media, but not when you
complicate this by blocking parts of this action with ads to begin with.

------
Tepix
The amount of tracking is mindboggling.

With advertisers switching to 1st party cookies it will get harder to avoid
tracking, unfortunately.

~~~
Polylactic_acid
The cat and mouse games will continue until legal action is taken. Before
loading any tracking at all the user should be shown a Yes/no option.

~~~
adrianN
That didn't work out so well for the EU's cookie law. We need a different
solution I think.

~~~
dmitriid
I think it worked wonders with GDPR which exposed all this pus. Unfortunately,
there EU has been too slow acting on it. Only British Airways has been slapped
with a significant fine so far.

~~~
taurath
GDPR opt out rate is well well under 1%.

~~~
kelnos
What does that even mean? GDPR requires companies to request that people opt
_in_ to information gathering.

~~~
leni536
I rarely see opt in GDPR popups, it's typically "accept tracking" or "more
options...", the latter seemingly sending you down an infinite rabbit hole.
Well, now that I think about it, this might count as opt in, but this is
definitely a dark pattern.

~~~
lokedhs
This is supposedly not allowed under the GDPR, but we're going to have to wait
a while before this is actually tried in court.

~~~
tyfon
It's not, the consumer advocate in Norway has already released one report on
the subject [1, PDF]

Pushing all this through the legal system will take some time but the
watchdogs in different countries are not sitting idle.

[1] [https://fil.forbrukerradet.no/wp-
content/uploads/2018/06/201...](https://fil.forbrukerradet.no/wp-
content/uploads/2018/06/2018-06-27-deceived-by-design-final.pdf)

------
thrwer234334
Alas, a DNS server is no match for what India's public telco BSNL does viz. to
directly inject redirects non-HTTPs webpages.

[https://internetfreedom.in/venom-venom-venom-bsnl-
engaging-i...](https://internetfreedom.in/venom-venom-venom-bsnl-engaging-in-
code-injections/)

~~~
tra3
I believe one of the major US telcos used to do this too. Just another reason
to wrap everything in SSL. Super easy (and free) with lets encrypt.

~~~
philsnow
Belkin did something similar once upon a time
[https://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/11/07/help_my_belkin_rout...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/11/07/help_my_belkin_router/)

To this day I avoid Belkin products because of that, even power strips.

------
Santosh83
I run uBlock for the sake of not getting bogged down by resource heavy
ads/cryptominers and to mitigate the threat of malware, not so much tracking.
I would assume most major ad companies have already vastly improved
fingerprinting and will be able to track unique devices despite all
conventional trackers being blocked. Add to that how more and more sites
require you to be signed in to be functionally useful that ad tracker blocking
is becoming less useful as time goes on.

In any case ad personalisation does work with me as I never click on any ad,
personalised or not.

~~~
HenryBemis
If you are using Firefox, they have started the war against browser
fingerprinting: [https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/how-to-block-
fingerprinting...](https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/how-to-block-
fingerprinting-with-firefox/)

So, with a strong hosts file, a blocker/noscript/privacy badger we are in a
better place. It is always a cat and mouse game though..

My go-to for HOSTS is:
[https://someonewhocares.org/hosts/](https://someonewhocares.org/hosts/)

~~~
vic-traill
I've been using the MVPS HOSTS file [0] on Windows for a long time.

I don't know if it is maintained any better than any other curated HOSTS
files, but its been around for 20 years.

I've just confirmed that it is still a Filter Lists option in uBlock Origin.

The web page sure gets points for being state-of-the-art circa 1998. At least
there's no Blink tags. :)

[0]
[http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.htm](http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.htm)

~~~
HenryBemis
My "objection" with having some things ONLY on the browser, is that there are
other applications that speak with the internet (e.g. Windows Telemetry).

I didn't see anyone mentioning this, a very useful site for Browsers' filters:
[https://filterlists.com/](https://filterlists.com/)

------
mikestew
Five _million_ domains in the block lists? I need to upgrade my paltry list of
125K. Maybe that’s why NYT ads still get through at my house.

~~~
starky
The interesting thing to me is that despite having 5M domains in their
blocklist, they only have 8.2% of requests blocked. My dashboard currently
says 36% of requests are blocked while having 125k blocked domains.

~~~
_Wintermute
You might want to check if it's Firefox, VSCode or some other telemetry that's
getting blocked. I had a similar percentage blocked until I disabled those
apps phoning home.

~~~
Moru
Yeah, on our Pi-hole 45% of the blocked domains are only four domains. Three
Microsoft at about 35% and one Google at 10%. But we also have uBlock on
everything that accesses internet so that lowers the amount of google lookups.

------
Jaruzel
I did www.dailymail.co.uk:

[https://twitter.com/Jaruzel/status/1220262127958659073](https://twitter.com/Jaruzel/status/1220262127958659073)

I think it's worth someone collating all these together into a website-of-
shame.

~~~
aberforth123
I could make this list better?
[https://webtest.app/worst.html](https://webtest.app/worst.html)

~~~
efreak
If this is your website, please make the table header sticky, so it stays in
view as you scroll down. Having to scroll up to check it is a bit annoying.
Also, another column for Firefox (with it's default tracker blocking enabled)
would probably be useful.

The advanced metrics page should also have a css media query for screen size;
either split the table rows into a list or set a min-width on the table as a
whole. On my phone, the first column has only 1-3 characters per line, and
other columns seem to only show part of the contents (even the 0 is only half-
visible).

------
rbritton
Reference for what the different colors mean:
[https://simonhearne.com/2015/find-third-party-
assets/](https://simonhearne.com/2015/find-third-party-assets/)

------
chewz
DNSCloak is dnscrypt-proxy client for iPhone. Choose your own dnscrypt
provider, manage your own black- and whitelist.

[1] [https://apps.apple.com/us/app/dnscloak-secure-dns-
client/id1...](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/dnscloak-secure-dns-
client/id1452162351)

~~~
sergimansilla
Looks great, but it's suspicious that is free. What's their business model?

~~~
chewz
Free software is suspicious?

I cannot endorse the app but it is made by dnscrypt-proxy enthusiasts. Had
been removed from AppStore and brought back thanks to support of German
incubator

[https://techcultivation.org/#overview](https://techcultivation.org/#overview)

[https://github.com/DNSCrypt/dnscrypt-
proxy/issues/42#issueco...](https://github.com/DNSCrypt/dnscrypt-
proxy/issues/42#issuecomment-464354580)

[https://github.com/s-s/dnscloak](https://github.com/s-s/dnscloak)

------
alkonaut
I have quite a raspberrys around now but they seem kind of flimsy and
unreliable. When you really need your "server" to just work for 5 or 10 years
in a closet without worrying about it, you'd want something that isn't fed by
a 5V transformer that is prone to dying once a year.

I'd happily pay $100 or even $200 for an "industrial" raspberry(-compatible)
device. Something in a sturdy case with a reliable power supply.

I’m a bit reluctant to add another one to my closet as a 24/7 server until I
find a solution to the reliability issue. I don’t want to run a proper big
server because of the electricity cost either. I want something under 15W,
preferably passive, with high reliability.

~~~
htfu
Proper USB power supplies don't just randomly die once a year, that's utter
lunacy.

And what exactly is stopping you from getting any 5V power source or even just
rigging up an old PSU with a 10W resistor on the 12V rail and splicing the 5V
onto a USB cord? This is a non-issue.

Edit: wrote this before your edit, but still stands. If there's anything to
worry about reliability-wise in that timeframe it's SD card corruption, but
there's plenty ways around that, whether by limiting writes or using other
media.

Edit 2: hostile tone not intended, just perplexing seeing something almost
akin to concern trolling done in this manner.

~~~
alkonaut
I just don’t like tinkering. I want what you describe but I what to pay with
money, not time. Simply a raspberry with a good case, a good psu _researched
and tested by someone else_. They aren’t that easy to find. The market for
those of us who are happy to pay $50 for a case and $50 for a psu to house a
$30 computer is slim I suppose.

But the pi does have a bit of a dual personality problem where it is made
cheap enough to be a toy or hobby thing but people often want to run them
unattended for years.

I’m not trolling I’m genuinely looking for advice on more recommended psu’s,
cases, raspberry clones etc that don’t require any modding and still makes a 5
year uptime server from a pi.

~~~
htfu
Any case and any old original iPad charger will do you fine, seriously :) I'm
just saying, if you want something really sturdy nothing stops you from either
investing in or tinkering up whatever your fancy.

And don’t forget a pi-hole is just a MITM dns server, so if anything should
blow you'll just fall back to 8.8.8.8 or ISP default or whatever...

~~~
alkonaut
Most cases for rpi are $3 plastic shells around the board. With a stiff cat6
cable you can’t even make it sit on a flat surface but it will hover above
your shelf (good for cooling but feels a bit flimsy). That’s what my closet
looks like now. Tiny boxes suspended by their tangle of cables. Disconnecting
one always feels like a risk of disturbing another.

Just a bigger/heavier case, or one with good wall mounts, or a half with rack
tray where you can bolt one (or more) raspberries would be perfect to get some
order in the closet. Googling around now I see a lot of DIY rack mount
(stacked vertically in 2U seems to be the popular choice). Just need to find
someone selling that commercially.

Using iDevice chargers are a good idea.

Edit: googling further reveals this one too:
[https://revolution.kunbus.com/revolution-pi-
series/](https://revolution.kunbus.com/revolution-pi-series/) DIN Rails!
Situation has definitely improved a LOT and shows that there really is a
demand for more "industrial" use.

~~~
htfu
Glad you found something'

Since the pi does have screwholes you can also just literally mount them
straight on the wall :) me I like that asthetic out in the open but if they're
in the closet anyways it doesn't really matter.

ps. don't forget PoE!

------
whoopdedo
The reason I block ads is because I was served a fake full-window "virus"
warning while visiting ESPN.com.

------
nkrisc
I use an adblocker in my browser and a pi-hole as well. I hate ad networks and
it's been a long time since I've been redirected to a site letting me know
I've won a free iPad.

But some sites do advertising right and my blockers are useless against them,
and I'm OK with that. Take, for example, this site (and here's the owner
writing about ad-blocking): [https://css-tricks.com/discussion-around-ad-
blocking/](https://css-tricks.com/discussion-around-ad-blocking/) (2015)

Their ads are all first-party content inserted into the page. It's not even an
iframe. Just divs and svgs like the rest of the page with an anchor tag that
links to the sponsor. It even looks kind of nice and fits cleanly with the
site.

And most importantly, to me as a visitor, a link to a sponsored site is not
going to redirect me to a scam the moment I land on css-tricks.com, because
they at least always control what's on their own pages.

------
mataug
I do not condone the practice of selling out user data, but what can
traditional print journalism do to stay profitable ?

Print readership is down, online subscriptions aren't bringing in enough
revenue, people want their news for free. So someone's gotta pay for this ?

Maybe bundles are a good way to encourage people to subscribe and pay for
quality journalism ?

~~~
npsimons
We need to pay better attention. Things like The Correspondant come along
([https://thecorrespondent.com/](https://thecorrespondent.com/)), and they're
lucky if they succeed. I threw some money at them specifically because of the
problems of today's news (ads and bad journalism).

I wouldn't entirely be opposed to microtransactions, and I already send money
to people on Patreon.

ETA: I pay probably half a dozen services to eschew ads. I've been paying
Consumer Reports for years for online access. I feel that if you can't figure
out a way to make money without screwing over your customers (with ads or
invasion of privacy), your business deserves to die in a fire, the sooner the
better.

------
kmos
I use AdGuard - [https://adguard.com/](https://adguard.com/)

------
Iv
Going in a big for-profit news paywall thingie that require I shut down
anonymous browsing or ad blocking is to me the mental equivalent of picking up
an unindentified pile of trash in the street. You know you'll have to wash
hands afterwards.

Really, I think people will realize at one time that there is no way around
simply forbidding advertisements to make internet sane again.

If 10% of the ingenuity spent in the ad/tracking system went towards
microtransactions, instead of having to swim through a sewer of ads on any
website, we would be rewarding each other with micro-dollars for insightful
comments and giving 5% of it to the host.

~~~
cryptonym
Greedy people deceiving users... I hardly see micro-transaction as a solution.
Just like ad/tracking, we would be rewarding big corps and click baiters, not
each other.

~~~
Iv
Pay for content you liked, don't pay for content you don't. How do you propose
deception to work in that case?

------
threedots
I think they would benefit from a more dumbed down FAQ/set up. For context I'm
at the upper end of non technical people in some respects (I write pandas
queries everyday etc) but know nothing about DNS and this lost me pretty
quickly.

I'm still not sure whether this should be used in addition to or instead of
ublock (which is what I use now). The setup page is also a bit intimidating
given I don't understand what 99% of the things on it are.

~~~
nebulous1
You should keep using uBlock, but Pi-hole will also block traffic from sources
other than your uBlock enabled browser. Your mobile, for instance.

Where did the setup lose you? I would say you just got unlucky with a specific
term or concept you aren't aware of.

------
chubot
Is an ad blocker alone not enough? What's the difference between that an a
"pi-hole server"?

Ah I see it's for mobile, because you can't install ad blockers there?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pi-hole](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pi-hole)

Yeah I imagine it must save incredible amounts of bandwidth.

~~~
Night_Thastus
Ad-blockers (like uBlock Origin) and pi-hole operate on two different levels.

The ad-blocker prevents your browser from ever requesting data (like the ads)
from the place they come from in the first place.

Pi-hole on the other end works with DNS, or the Domain Name System. You set it
up so your router sends all DNS traffic to the pi-hole, which will then drop
any traffic that has a domain name it has blacklisted. So it only kicks in if
something on your network actually requested something from one of those
blacklisted domains.

It comes with many domains already included, but more can be added fairly
easily and large user-made lists and regexs exist to expand it.

Ad-blockers can be used on mobile versions of browsers (like Firefox for
Android) but for people using mobile apps (like the Youtube app) having a
pihole is a lifesaver.

~~~
chubot
Yes that makes sense, mobile apps need it! Funny I wrote a node.js HTTP proxy
like 5 years ago to run all my browsing sessions through. I downloaded a text
file of ad domains, probably from adblock itself. So yeah the benefit is that
you don't have to configure each browser.

Well it was an HTTP proxy and not DNS, so it did require some extra
configuration on the client. But you don't have to install an extension at
least.

But I stopped using it because it was a pain to administer and I didn't spend
much time making the code solid. But I will look into pi-hole -- didn't know
about it!

------
mkup
Let's draw similar graph for Windows 10

------
satyrnein
How does this compare to using something like Segment (or your own server) to
proxy the information to the 3rd party analytics tools?

Seems better from a performance perspective. With the 3rd party cookie changes
going on, is it equivalent from a tracking perspective? It also seems
"unblockable".

So is that the future?

------
aberforth123
Loading New York Times on Brave vs uBlock Origin vs Chrome on Webtest.app:
[https://webtest.app/?url=https://nytimes.com](https://webtest.app/?url=https://nytimes.com)

~~~
slenk
Heh. Brave downloads 10Mb less of data but still takes just as long to render

------
tyingq
I imagine the ad industry will kill DNS based ad blocking sooner or later.
It's just too much of a cat and mouse game to have only the hostname/IP and a
blacklist as your defense.

------
komali2
Is pihole any different from just having a fatass hosts file?

~~~
tra3
That's basically what it is.

Advantages:

\- the list is community generated \- you can disable it temporarily \-
there's a nice UI \- you can protect all devices on your network

Disadvantages:

\- gotta run it somehow (appliance, container, etc). Another thing to manage.

Overall it's been a net positive. The amount of filtering that happens on my
home network is staggering.

------
ipsum2
For uBlock Origin, you should block 3rd party scripts, frames and 1st party
scripts on NYTimes. It also has the unintended benefit of getting around the
paywall.

------
TheCabin
What exactly do we actually see here? (I am surprised because there are
vertices not connected to the origin, how were these detected?)

------
talkingtab
Are there open source tools that do the same thing as the website
requestmap.webperf.tools? Follow all the links etc?

------
hi41
I looked at the graph on Twitter but did not understand what it signifies. Can
someone please explain.

------
fnord77
correct me if I'm wrong, but couldn't a site easily defeat a pihole by return
a page with links to ad assets that have IP addresses rather than hostnames?

Resolve the hostnames on the server and simply substitute them in the
links/scripts/assets

~~~
GreenJelloShot
Yes, they could defeat the pihole by hard coding IPs, but that would cause a
whole range of other headaches and would most likely not be worth doing.

~~~
MattSayar
Yeah that sounds like a configuration maintenance nightmare for the relatively
minuscule population of pi-hole owners.

~~~
fnord77
Just resolve the IPs of the links as the page is being served.

------
gigatexal
How do I get his block list

------
Havoc
Sweet tool. Almost more interesting than the actual post

------
allovernow
Can someone please explain what the request map is showing? Is that tracking
data being exported multiple hops? What do the circle areas represent?

~~~
joeframbach
Without actually digging into it, I would assume that nytimes loads js assets
from a third party, that's the direct nodes from the center. The size of the
more is the size of the js asset. That third party then injects yet another
script onto the page. The next connected nodes represent these scripts and
their size. And so on and so forth. These scripts ensure to the advertiser
that their ad is actually being shown. The advertiser doesn't trust the
hosting page to correctly display their ad, so the ad injects their own
tracking script. That tracking script injects their dependencies. Thus this
madness.

------
dwnvoted2hell
You could just stop reading the NY Times. They've gotten enough wrong that
they shouldn't be the newspaper of record any longer. I'm a little partial to
the LA Times - during the elections as I recall, they had less lean one way or
the other.

~~~
swebs
NPR also has a great text version that's free of tracking.

[https://text.npr.org](https://text.npr.org)

Unfortunately, the original version of their site has tracking requests out
the wazoo.

------
ouid
Is there a categorical difference between advertising and fake news?

------
peterwwillis
Why do any of these people care about internet ads tracking them? Are they
bored? Yes, random corporations and political groups are compiling personal
dossiers about you. What is it you fear? That they'll be successful at selling
you something? That "ominous entity" will do "bad thing" because they know
"that thing about you that everyone else you know already knows" ?

If you have a real reason for serious concern for your safety, I get that. If
you're just afraid of people knowing things about you, yikes.

------
ginko
Small tangential rant:

Ever since an iOS update last year Firefox (well, the Firefox-branded Safari
browser for iOS) doesn't block ads for me anymore. I really noticed that my
mobile data usage spiked since then. There's all these adblocker apps in the
app store, but they seem rather scummy and the few I've tried don't appear to
be working with Firefox anyways.

It's ridiculous considering Apple is declaring itself the champion of privacy.
I might really have to rethink if I get another iphone next time I'm buying a
smart phone. Not that Android isn't equally terrible for different reasons..

~~~
lorenzhs
Uh, what? Content Blockers on iOS aren't scummy, they can't track you because
all they do is provide filter lists to the OS, which then runs them against
your browser traffic. They work just fine in Firefox. Firefox Focus provides
its tracking protection list as a Safari Content Blocker, which is nice. Other
than that, I use AdGuard because it's free and lets you choose which filter
lists to use.

You have to enable content blockers in Settings → Safari → Content Blockers.
Just downloading the app without following the instructions is not enough.

~~~
ginko
>AdGuard

I'm sorry, but a closed-source ad blocker offered by a for-profit company and
offering a pro version seems scummy to me.

~~~
lorenzhs
I'm sorry, but that's nonsense. AdGuard doesn't have any scummy stuff like
"acceptable ads", they make money by providing a fully functional free ad-
blocker and selling a version that has more features. That's as un-scummy as
it gets. (I have no relation to them. I use the free version. It does
everything I want.)

By the way, you can get the source code at
[https://github.com/AdguardTeam/AdguardForiOS](https://github.com/AdguardTeam/AdguardForiOS).

There's also a list of open-source content blockers at
[https://old.reddit.com/comments/btlwda/](https://old.reddit.com/comments/btlwda/),
some of them are non-commercial.

~~~
ginko
Welp, I tried AdGuard again and it still doesn't work with Firefox. Safari
blocks ads just fine but Firefox still shows them.

~~~
Marsymars
iOS content blockers only work with Safari.

~~~
praveenweb
Adguard Pro in VPN mode works system wide on iOS. I personally use this filter
list
[https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts](https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts)

------
mikedilger
I can't see this post because my pi-hole server blocks twitter [1]. But I bet
it's just grand.

[1] Actually, not just to be cheeky.

------
gav
Until sites can monetize content in other ways, they will have to be ad-
supported, which to be useful to advertisers, involve tracking.

People are simply not willing to pay:
[https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1219911533070897153](https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1219911533070897153)

~~~
dmitriid
For thousands of years people were able to advertise and sell stuff without
tracking.

~~~
ramraj07
That's because they couldn't track then. You could just put an ad in the paper
and hope your demographic sees it

~~~
rzzzt
That feels recursive. They didn't track because they couldn't, but now they do
because they can?

~~~
sbmthakur
Humans have always been experimental and some of us have never hesitated to
use shady practices to increase profits. For instance, back in the day empires
tried their best to restrict foreign products in their territory, no matter
how much inferior their own products were.

