So I’m a bit new to the homenetworking and homelab situation but I have a Unifi DM-SE as my router and I’m trying to establish the best way to block ads at home and away.
So I am currently primarily using either extensions or content blocking apps on my devices to block ads but I’ve been looking into DNS based solutions lately.
I’ve looked into setting up PiHole and it looks pretty simple to do and I have a dedicated small computer with Proxmox that I use for things like Homebridge, Scrypted and I think could set it up easily on there. But it looks like it only works at home. A lot of people say you can set up a VPN but I’d rather not have to turn on and off my VPN on my phone whenever I leave home.
I also looked into Next DNS which seems also pretty easy to setup, but I couldn’t tell if it’s better to set this up per device or network wide via my router.
There’s also the extensions and content blocking apps which would be device specific.
Which is the fastest, performance wise, and easiest to interact with daily?
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”
Pihole v6 Beta (and I have a fallback to v5). Runs together with unbound in recoursive mode. Super slick and fast!
If you’re on android you can use tasker to automatically connect to VPN when not at home
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.
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?
You can set up WireGuard to only route local addresses to the peer, so you would only be routing dns requests through the tunnel and everything else goes via whatever other interface you have. So performance is minimally impacted in that way.
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:
- I can black list some urls that are annoying - including ads but web pages don’t see that as adblocking so no p
- I can use the re-write tool if I’m getting sick of hearing about someone on the news all of the time.
- I connect other devices on my wifi to it like my android (for above and debugging apps)
- They can act as a cache with makes things faster though not a real issue these days with GPS internet.
- There are blacklist collections peaple socialize
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.
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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.
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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.
Bugman
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 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 =|
You could setup WireGuard on your UDM-SE and install the app on your phone. You can tell the app what wifi networks to not establish the vpn when connected to. This works for iPhone, not sure about android.
Do you have experience, I’m worried about consistency mostly thanks
At home I’m in the process of moving from Pihole to pfblockerNG for DNS blocking. On all my machines (including my phone) I use Firefox with Ublock Origin.
unbound adblock is what I’m using. Hand it a couple of pihole lists and it fits the same thing without the fancy gui.
This is still only locally like Pihole though right?
Correct*, unless you vpn home. Please don’t run a publicly accessible dns server. It’s going to get used in a dns amplification attack.
*And even then only for devices that use your dns server. Many iot devices have hard coded dns servers to use. And with dns-over-https (DoH) they will get pretty close to unblockable.
What is a publicly accessible DNS server? Would something like NextDNS count as that?
adguard+ublock origin pretty much does it for me.