Dang, you're right, I forgot about that. So not so suitable, unfortunately.
Seems like root + a local hosts adblocker is still the best solution for Android, or a local VPN for iOS (do they have those on Android? never checked).
> or a local VPN for iOS (do they have those on Android? never checked).
It seems so; at least my Android phone has something named "VPN", which I sometimes use to capture traffic and look at what my phone is sending/receiving.
(Packet-capturing your phone traffic is a pretty eye-opening experience; I was surprised just how much data about you goes to ad/tracking services.)
for Android (local VPN) I am using the free "NoRootFirewall" on all my android devices [1]
for iOS (for jailbroken) via Cydia and BigBoss I am using "Firewall IP7" which is not yet updated for iOS10, costs $2.99 or near
both act as firewalls in learning mode.. it can be a little tedious in the beginning but as soon as you block most ads/trackers/beacons "globally" then you feel the difference on speed, bandwidth usage, and user experience
Geez, color me double-wrong. Yes, that should be plenty. I thought was a VPN-esque solution that required shuffling all traffic through the VPS instance, but yes you're right, it's basically just a custom DNS server. In which case this would be totally fine. I might even try it myself if I ever decide to unroot my phone.
DNS66 (https://github.com/julian-klode/dns66) doesn't require root. It uses the Android VPN system to capture DNS requests and forwards everything else.
Ideally you'd want to have L7 filtering so an SSL terminating proxy is the best thing short of running a fully functional copy of uBlock on your mobile device, lest you run into issues where removing ads on youtube also interferes with normal site function.
I use Firefox on Android with an adblocker installed via its extensions page without root and it makes me a happy browser. It obviously doesn't do anything for other apps, though.
Am I the only one who finds the cloud console interface very unintuitive? How do I actually make use of the free tier, and set up something I can SSH into?
> Use these products for free up to the specified usage limits during and past the free trial. These usage limits do not expire, but are subject to change.
My number one reason for rooting my phone is blocking ads on a hosts-file level. It also stopped me from being able to play pokemon go, which I assume is for the best.
A lot of my phone browsing involves apps with built-in browsers (reddit, HN) so hosts-filter is more practical. Killing ads in free apps is definitely part of the equation as well. The one downside would be not being able to click sponsored links on atop Google when looking for a particular product.
not-op here, but your question made me wonder: If you've paid for a freemium upgrade in an app that relies on Google's ad network, does that default to completely disabling the ads integration?
In other words, is the app still feeding data points into the ad network even though it may not be displaying ads? I had assumed it was, but your question makes me think otherwise.
just yesterday was checking many browsers, Firefox on Android is slow, was comparing loading times and it was very slow compared to Brave it RSBrowser or even Chrome plus no pull down to refresh is killer and there doesn't even seem to be plugin to add this only button or more fingers gesture or not just swipe down
on bright side on desktop i switched from chrome to Firefox and it seem ok, though it seem not so many pages are cached and need reload when switching many tabs
in the end I gave p even on desktop and I am back to Chrome, firefox just kept freezing or was unresponsive even with few tabs open, also always refreshing tabs when returning to them after while, while I experience no problems with Chrome :(
on Android I switched from YuBrowser to Brave browser, Firefox doesn't have simple pull down to refresh and it's not optimized for Snapdragon plus kinda slow in real life scenarios
I did the same thing but using an old netbook I had lying around. It lives under the house running Pi-Hole and a few other things. I wrote about it here http://www.boyter.org/2015/12/pi-hole-ubuntu-14-04/
No idea what power draw it has (probably $5 a month?) but I have a large solar array so I doubt it costs me anything to actually run. I also get to recycle some old hardware.
EDIT - Seems that post was linked to by the pi-hole project itself at some point. Was wondering why it got so much traffic each month.
Pay attention: this might interfere with some google functionality because it will block google ad-services. You'd have 2 workarounds: switch your searches to Duck-Duck-Go or keep google ad-services out of the disable DNS addresses.
Note that this is just a DNS-level adblocker, which is already quite useful (I use a HOSTS file myself) but isn't quite as powerful as an actual MITM/filtering proxy like Proxomitron which can more precisely remove the content you don't want without having to block entire domains. If you use DNS-only blocking, you will often see error messages in place of banners and other oddities, because of sites which partly host some of the ad scripts themselves.
You do have to do more initial setup with certificates and such, but IMHO the more fine-grained filtering is worth it. The entire category of sites which actually detect blocking can be worked around this way, as you can filter out that code too.
There's Privoxy and Proximodo, but they both lack HTTPS filtering support. There's also https://github.com/amate/Proxydomo which appears to be based on Proximodo and seems to use wolfSSL so it may be able to do TLS MITM, but the documentation is unfortunately all in Japanese.
...and of course at the high end there's the enterprise filtering middleboxes which are probably too expensive and difficult to configure for personal use.
There's also Privoxy, which can block ads based upon URLs, as well as doing other clever stuff like blocking cookies. It falls back to host-level blocking for SSL, unfortunately.
This is really neat and I had thought about doing this when I acquired a new Android device that I don't have root on.
Alternatively, a program was made to host a DNS process on the phone in userland that downloads blacklists as well as uses external well known nameservers. Then use build in VPN client to redirect all DNS queries through to the daemon. DNS66 has been doing a fine job since I started using it last week. https://github.com/julian-klode/dns66
I also use this and prefer it to DNS66 because I can use a hosts file rather than just changing the DNS server. Both work well though. Oh, and both are open source!
Thanks for pointing out this open source tool! There are many with similar functionality but none of them are open, and I don't trust closed source when it creates a VPN tunnel :)
Changing the DNS server on Android is really not ideal and in some networks outgoing DNS requests are blocked or redirected to the local resolver.
I know it's a lot more work but setting up Shadowsocks and Unbound with similar DNS blacklists is a much better solution. This also comes with all the benefits of using a VPN (technically, an obfuscated socks5 proxy using the android VPN interface). If you manage the network, pfSense and pfBlockerNG are also great and easy to set up.
Until ads went rogue and started serving me malware, I never had a problem with them.
After being served up a malicious pop-up that silently installed a bitcoin miner a few years ago, I started whitelisting javascript with a plugin, blocking ads, etc.
I haven't had a malware problem since I started doing this. I don't think it's a coincidence.
The most convenient solution I've found for my phone is using the Firefox app, which has extension support.
There are certain attempts to bring this "pay for content" to masses. Current model of subscribing to each site doesnt work. I dont think there is one widely adopted solution exists that would let you do one payment and access to sites. I sae attempts like cointent and brave, but whether they stick or not is yet to be seen.
Subscription payments can be extremely profitable, leading the the continued existence and even expansion of the site. The only downside is that only people who subscribe can see the majority of the content.
Ads merely mean that more people can access the same information, including people who could have never or would have never paid for it.
subscriptions today are per site. you have to maintain multiple subscriptions. Many people dislikes that. I wouldn't hesitate a second to subscribe if there was something that centralizes the subscription (like 10$ for month worth of content, split among publishers based on how much time i spend and what the value of content is).
"You need to log in to your Self Service area whenever your IP address changes (i.e. if you only configured your computer and you travel) so that your current IP is validated to your account. If you don’t do this, ads will start to reappear and region unlock will stop working!" -seems like it just registers the IP address when logging into their portal/page.
Adgaurd DNS is a free alternative although the web page says its in beta [1]. They also say they don't keep logs and support DNSCrypt. Convinently the DNSCrypt project also seems to have four resolvers configured for them [2].
Pi-hole is great, but there's no reason to dedicate an entire instance to it (assuming you have other uses for one) -- the resources used on my RPi 3 are negligible.
Using a public server instance would seem less likely a cost/resource savings than a convenience factor if you are adblocking on mobile platforms (linked article was mostly focused on adblocking for an Android phone, presumably one that will be used on-the-go and not just at home).
Setting up an at-home RPi solution is probably possible for most people but a lot more cumbersome dealing with inbound server tunneling (which may technically be forbidden by their ISP), dynamic IP services, etc.
My biggest gripe with network level filtering is making exceptions. I am currently running Pi.hole and making exceptions requires logging into the server via the web UI. SSL URLs also do not work and would require some sort of root cert.
With üblock you receive a UI notification of the block and the option to make an exception.
I ran this same setup for a while, but became nervous about the potential for DNS poisoning. I'm reasonably confident in my ability to lock down a public-facing system, but you sure are putting a lot of trust in that pi-hole install and your ability to make sure you're always using SSL on every device and site.
Cloud hosted Pi-hole is also free. You pay for the hosting.
With the cloud hosting you also get a fixed ip address which you can use from all the places, while most people have dynamic ip addresses at home (which you need to track and change in all devices). Furthermore initial cost of a pi and accessories are equal to 10-20 months of hosting.
Probably 50¢/month total, 47.75¢ for the electricity[1], and 2-something cents monthly opportunity cost of $30 earning interest in a money market fund.
The throughput on a Raspberry Pi isn't great though, even compared to a typical low end VPS.
Horrible company with absurd ID requirements. I stopped trying to be validated user after confirming my email, confirming my text message and being close to send them my government issued IDs for God knows who and when to hack into them and steal it for identity fraud purposes.
Edit: oh and don't expect much customer support help for 99cents per month, even if their customer support is located in Cambodia.
Actually, both their data center and their support team are located in Lithuania.
Time4VPS is essentially the international brand of the largest ISP in the country.
I was sceptical at first, but I have a VPS running there for a few months, serving 100k hits per day, with no technical problems from their side so far.
I just used their support once, but they responded in minutes.
The company you're talking about ("Interneto Vizija") isn't an ISP. They are, however, the largest .lt registrar (recently passed 100k domains) and the largest hosting provider (shared/VPS/dedi) in the country.
Firefox for Android has addons, so you can use uBlock Origin. That seems to be the go-to solution for many Android users. But just like content blockers on iOS, it won't affect other apps.
(Disclaimer: Google employee, unrelated product area)