I'm running unbound. I have a cronjob (bash+python) that downloads StevenBlack's blacklist (https://raw.githubusercontent.com/StevenBlack/hosts/master/hosts), turns it into an unbound config file, and restarts unbound.
Happy to provide a copy if anyone is interested.
uBlock origin + Pihole. uBlock covers just about everything on your PC but I mainly use Pihole for mobile devices and as a "catch all net"
If you're on android you can use tasker to automatically connect to VPN when not at home
Pihole v6 Beta (and I have a fallback to v5). Runs together with unbound in recoursive mode. Super slick and fast!
Just PiHole and then VPN with split tunnel so that only DNS is using home one.
I’ve heard of using Wireguard for VPN when away from my local network. How does performance get impacted with something like that?
To be honest the advertisers have won this battle as far as I'm concerned but hear me out. It's the "please turn off your ad blocker and support this site" pop-ups got more annoying than the ads. Using a VPN just means I don't get personalized ads, just random ones.
I run everything through a local install of Charles Proxy (though Proxyman or Sqid on Linux can do the same). This lets me see all of my traffic and see ssl traffic in plane text and I use this all day for debugging.
Couple Advantages to using a Proxy instead of a blocker:
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Using a VPN just means I don't get personalized ads, just random ones.
You can ask Google for non-personalized ads too, its in the settings. They will track you either way.
I’ve allway wanted the advantages of a proxy but I’ve had a hard time picking hardware, lmk
I like blocky adblocker (https://github.com/0xERR0R/blocky). It is easy to configure using YAML file and also easy to backup.
You can setup Wireguard VPN server. On your phone, set the VPN DNS server to your adblocker IP and set on-demand connection to only connect to VPN when it is not connected to your home network.
What are the advantages of Blocky over something like piHole?
I just use AdGuard Home. For me it works better then PiHole and runs native on my opnsense box.
In any case, if you want to filter your traffic when you're away (be it with a network ad blocker or a proxy server) you will need to have a way to connect to said server.
Local browser extensions only detect what has been shipped to the browser by the web server, which is why they work at home or on mobile data, all the processing is done locally on the device.
A filtering DNS server, or a proxy server, will position itself between the web server you're trying to join and your device, and take out the ads and tracking. But to be able to use that server, it needs to be on the same network as your device. It's all good when you're at home, but when you're away, suddenly you two are separate. Hence the need for a VPN to connect your phone back to your home network.
You could make it public facing, but that's pretty much the worst thing you could do, security-wise. There are so many automated threats that actively try every waking minute of the day to get into an insecure home network to find of value, or to lay a time bomb that will allow them to do more, that you don't want to mess with that. For real. Don't mess with public-facing services.
Does connecting my phone to my home network via VPN when away from home impact speed?
Yes. It will hit your speed. How much? No idea, but it will.
TL;DR: If you find value in a service, be ready to pay for it. Either in time or dollars. If you say it's not worth it, you probably won't spend enough time there to care about an AD anyway.
Novel concept: if I consume a significant amount of content from a platform (> ~10 hours a month, and the ADs detract from my experience in a noticeable way, I pay to remove the ADs from that platform.
This group should at least know why as well. Hardware costs money. Power costs money. Cooling costs money. We optimize our labs to run as cheaply as possible, but expect content to be delivered to us freely. Some of you spend more keeping a Plex server operating per month for fewer hours of consumed content than you'd pay YouTube for the same viewing hours.
I've ran an AD blocker a total of 3 days in my life like 6 years ago. The amount of sites that stopped working or became broken was nowhere near the inconvenience of just ignoring the ad in the side bar. I've had 0 issues with drive-by malware, 0 issues with not knowing what link to click. It's odd, staying off the sketchy parts of the Internet seems to lead to a pretty unintrusive Internet experience.
I pay for a YouTube premium family plan and because Google actively incentivizes it, 4 of my friends get it for free as well. I would have gotten the family plan anyway because two individual subs is more than one family, and 6 people get to benefit from it.
I hope the advertisers win. The Internet isn't sustainable long term without a path to profitability. Things become ephemeral, unstable, unusable, and uninteresting if no one cares about making it. How many new creators have you found with interesting content on PeerTube? How many of you are ready to maintain a BBS/forum software in perpetuity because you have an engaged audience? Or there's one popular thread that gets thousands of views per month for some unknown reason?
I don't want ADs to win because I like them. I want them to win because in a world where everyone expects things to be free, someone has to pay. If they don't, the Internet gets more fragmented, and less interesting. Maybe one day that won't be a problem, but at present, platforms serve a role as an aggregator. Somewhere to reliably land and find something that fits your interests. I'm not likely to have as enriching of an experience on natively Lemmy, or in the fediverse, or on PeerTube/Vimeo/Floatplane, etc. because they don't have the content or reach. I might reach them through an offshoot of where I normally spend my time online, but never directly.
Bugman
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Don’t disagree with that sentiment. I do pay for YouTube premium etc… it’s more the intrusive ads that get on my nerves.
Fair, one of my points was the similar to an another commenter's: The blocking is becoming more intrusive than ignoring the ADs. I think we're just delaying the inevitable where sites start to pull all of their content through JavaScript, and if anything interferes with the display, it just doesn't display at all. Or injecting full unskippable ADs in video streams.
When I tried one 6 years ago, the experience of using the Internet was worse than without blocking. The ADs I am served now are less of an inconvenience to me than the constant fight to tune and block them that I see people complain about.
I pay for a YouTube premium family plan and because Google actively incentivizes it, 4 of my friends get it for free as well.
That's not possible. Your friends have to pay or watch ads themselves.
If it were possible for some people to pay and others not to pay, then YouTube would have survived for over a decade, including periods of profitability, even though some people blocked ads. Oh wait...
It's definitely not because YouTube has 2 billion viewers and expanded to all regions of the world, and there only real way to increase revenue is to squeeze the existing customers.
Sounds like I do have to remove them. I've had the family plan since it was Google Play Music, and at that time it was permitted/quazi-encourage to make a family plan, a family and friends plan. It doesn't change the economics vastly for any of us, but you've made me re-read the terms for a service. A family plan still ends up cheaper than two individual plans, and that was the basis for it in the first place.
To your other point, Alphabet/Google is profitable overall. YouTube is not, and never has been. If it was, they'd be on the quarterly earnings calls bragging it up and trying to pump the shit out of it. That doesn't happen. The sudden surge of all the AD supported platforms trying to find any cash they can isn't 100% because they're just greedy. It's because they aren't sustainable how they operate now. That compounded with the fact that borrowing money is expensive again, they actually need to have positive revenue to survive.
While I don't like Elon or Twitter, the public dumpster fire it is gave us a bit of a look at how much money these platforms bleed. Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, et al. don't make money, they bleed it, but cheap borrowing rates made it easy to keep them afloat on the promise they'd make money eventually. We just reached the point where eventually needs to be now for them to survive.
I started with unbound dns blacklists and then moved to adguard home. Dns based blocking is just easier and covers the whole LAN imo, I didn't want to deal with various extensions on all my machines/devices.
It's still not bullet proof but it's good enough for me. While you don't need a VPN, I run one so my phone is on it while away from home. That was two fold, dns based blocking and screw my cell carrier getting to snoop. Well and off course I wanted to learn how to setup a VPN server 😁
I just use basic DNS ad/scam/spam/etc-blocking, via technetium.
I mostly relays on ublock/sponsorblock, as they are much more effective, and tend to "break" less of the internet.
DNS block-lists tend to do a nuke-from-orbit approach, while not being nearly as effective as you would want. (For example- its not going to effectively hide most youtube ads, facebook ads, etc.), while ublock, is extremely effective at the task.
i use AdGuard Home on a pi3\rasbian for my home. For me it worked better then pihole, more stable.
What do you use when you are away from home?
I use DNS blocking as addons are not really a thing on all mobile devices, but I also roll out uBlock Origin via GPO on Windows as it can better target scripts instead of blocking whole domains and is most of the time able to block detection scripts. The best of both worlds I guess.
NextDNS (on a Windows server serving as a proxy for the entire network) in combination with Brave browser. Haven't seen an ad or even the dreaded warning on YouTube ever.
Whenever I'm not at home, I VPN through my FortiGate into my home network.
Made an entire video about how to do this with your pihole and unbound.
Technitium! Soo many features, runs on just about anything. Amazing integration with DHCP. Way easy to set up.
adguard+ublock origin pretty much does it for me.
Cellular is a completely different network so their is no solution unless you owned a cell tower and did it from that litterly impossible by design for cellular stick to extensions!!! I wouldn’t vpn just for no ads but would use a local ad blocker on my network
NextDNS works on cellular, since you install the config on the phone itself. Works brilliantly, anywhere I travel.
It's actually quite easy to automatically let vpn turn on or off depending on whether you're home or not.
I personally use wireguard for this. On my wife's iPhone there's a setting in the wireguard app that automatically disconnects vpn when connected to specified ssid and reconnects vpn when disconnected from specified ssid. On my android I use the tasker app to get the same functionality. I used this guide to set it up: https://hndrk.blog/tutorial-wireguard-and-tasker/
I haven't set up dns ad blocking yet, but this is exactly the usecase I've come up with for this setup, that and always having our phones on home network for selfhosted services is great.
Hope this is the solution that you're looking for :)
I look after two AdGuard Home installations.
One is local, running on a super-tiny PC (Intel Atom x5, 4 GB RAM, 64 GB eMMC, Debian 12, and I see no reason why AGH wouldn't run just as well on a 2 / 32 GB version of that PC). The average handling time for a DNS request is 30 ms. You could easily do something similar in a Proxmox container, give it a local IP address, and have you router use it as the DNS server instead of whatever it's using now.
The other is in the cloud, running on a virtual server with 1 GB RAM. The average handling time for a DNS request is 10 ms.
Adguard home
My firewall (opnsense) does this... With very little configuration. Using UnboundDNS with its block list features makes filtering most ads out rather easy.
Ditched pihole and went with NextDNS running natively on my UDM Pro. Performance is much improved.
I can't use any of this stuff, my ISP router is so shit that changing the DNS to Cloudflare or Google's breaks my internet =|
I have multiple layers of ad blocking.
I use AdGuard Home, in a Linode instance, and point my pfsense box to it.
NextDNS for the win. You can set it and forget, or tweak it to your heart’s desire. Works on your home network plus on all your devices anywhere in the world. No restrictions. You can tailor settings for each individual device if desired. IMHO, it’s incredibly cheap for an excellent service.
I actually became interested in them simply because where I live, they’re the fastest DNS provider - faster than my ISP, Google, CloudFlare, all I tested over months. The ad-blocking was secondary to me, but now of course I see it as the primary value since it’s so easy to use yet so configurable at the same time.
Some script that parses blocklists into unbound local-data statements, combined with cron and unbound-control