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How have you optimized your Pi-hole? (mander.xyz)

submitted 2 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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A few months ago I set up a Pi-hole at home. I tried to create a decent blacklist by first adding some regexes I found online and then doing some manual optimization by finding ads and blocking the ad requester through the queries page. But in the end it did not work so well. I still get a lot of YouTube ads, for example. So I still rely on uBlock for my ad-blocking.

I just read that Chrome is planning to start weakening ad blocker plugins. I use Firefox, but it is still worrying that the space could potentially keep moving in this direction over time. So I am now more invested in learning how to have more control over my ad-blocking.

Has any of you managed to optimize your Pi-hole to the point that it is possible to browse the internet without an ad-blocker? If so, how did you do it? Are there other good ad-blocking alternatives?

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Pihole will only ever be able to block so much, because it works at the domain level. When ads are served from the same domain as the desired content, which I believe is the case for youtube, Pihole is ineffective.

Adblocking plugins aren't limited by this and can filter the actual content and HTTP requests made by the browser.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Thanks!

Adblocking plugins aren’t limited by this and can filter the actual content and HTTP requests made by the browser.

Why is this the case? What rules do Adblock plugins use that allow them to determine that something that is being served is an ad? I understand from what you are saying that Adblock will block on the basis of the HTTP requests instead of filtering at the DNS level - do ads come with specific HTTP headers that are not processed by the pi-hole DNS server and thus can't be used for filtering? I don't fully understand yet the details of how the two ad-blocking mechanisms operate, so their differences are not obvious to me.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Let's say YouTube has a video and 2 ads:

The video is served from videos.example.tld/video.mp4.
The first ads is served from videos.example.tld/ads/ads1.mp4.
The second ads is served from ads.company.tld/ads2.mp4.

PiHole will be able to block only (3) because DNS applies at domain level, as in videos.example.tld. DNS requests only send the domain part and re-use the response for all addresses using that domain.

Browser extension, on the other hand, sees a request to .../ads... and block it since it handled each HTTP/S request and know the full URL.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Thank you - that makes sense!

I think I understand why this is done now. Most HTTP requests are hidden by the SSL encryption, and the keys to decrypt it are client-specific. So, if one wants to block ads at the network level without needing to get the SSL keys of every client that connects to the network, then this is the most specific amount of information that you can provide the PiHole with. The HTTP blocking needs to be set up in a client-specific manner, and that's why they work well as browser extensions.