Hardware Hacking

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Sick of unskippable ads on everything? Block ads from all traffic on your router with a Raspberry Pi (www.raspberrypi.com)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by Number1SummerJam to c/hardwarehacking

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[–] smolyeet 25 points 1 year ago (2 children)

You’ll piss off family members potentially , even with the default settings. Google advert links , like the ad links at the top of Google searches will just fail. This is probably a good thing to most people but it’s still someone you should be aware of and have to train family members or roommates on.

Also , if you’re going to go this route you should probably set up a secondary server or use an external one just incase your pi goes down.

[–] XaeroDegreaz 9 points 1 year ago

Or, just change the DNS settings in your router. Point it to NextDNS or something. There's no need for an extra point of failure like a Pi.

[–] turkelton 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Speaking from experience ?

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If only it could fully work that way. If your on youtube, it still shows ads. Facebook? Still shows ads.

It works by blocking domains from specifically known advertising domains, usually ones that would pop up as banners on the side of a website. But if the ads come from the domain you're in, you're fucked, and still have ads.

It's a good first step though

[–] Kid4today 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

How good is this in reality? It’s something I’ve been meaning to do for a long time but I wonder if it’s worth the effort?

My ad blocker already gets rid of ads on web pages so the only thing I’d really want this for is ads on YouTube. Can it get rid of those? I recently saw some stories about YouTube potentially banning users who were blocking ads. Do I run this risk?

What about ads inside apps, can it get rid of those? For example, mobile games.

I currently use a VPN, would pi-hole affect this and if so, how?

[–] Potatos_are_not_friends 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It gets rid of them from the router level vs the browser level. It blocks them before it even comes to the device. For anyone using your wifi, like wifi on your phone or guests browsing, it's amazing. Not to mention the speed boosts, as your browser doesn't have to render ads.

Also YouTube isn't "banning" people, just throwing more popups. It'll be a nightmare for YouTube and Google to do any banning. If you're concerned about being "banned from YouTube", create new Google accounts just for those purposes.

Ive been adblocking since 2005, and I also have multiple Google accounts for business.

It always makes me laugh when people go, "But what if they ban me?" Like bro they struggle with banning malicious users.

[–] Mrduckrocks 2 points 1 year ago

People really think Google gonna ban them for using ad blocker, are out of reality. They not gonna ban you they gonna block you from using service.

[–] lemming741 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If you use the wireguard protocol, the DNS is a required part of the config. Commercial VPNs should default to their own DNS because your ISP or whomever could still see what domains you're visiting if you leave your ISPs router set as your DNS, since that looks local to the VPN.

PIA and others offer pihole type functionality. Your local pihole needs an upstream server, and whichever one you pick will see what domains you visit (outside any VPN) so pick one that you trust.

[–] Kid4today 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I’ve been looking in to this a bit more. I was interested in what you said about PIA so I had a look at my current VPN’s options (airvpn). Turns out they also have ad blocking options that I do remember configuring one time but then completely forgot about them.

I think I’m still going to try the pi-hole option though as my problem is with my Apple TV. I can’t install a vpn app on that. Looking at the link that op posted it’s possible to use the pi-hole on a per device basis by changing the DNS setting on the device rather than on the router, so I’ll continue using my VPN on my computer and mobile devices and just route the Apple TV through a pi-hole

[–] lemming741 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yup, you got it. If you want to give it a test run, you can also use adguards free public DNS. It's like a public pihole, but I'm sure they're collecting data.

https://adguard-dns.io/en/public-dns.html

[–] Kid4today 1 points 1 year ago

Oh that’s cool, I’m gonna give that a go right now.

[–] turkelton 1 points 1 year ago

Can't set DNS on my shitty new dumbed down T-Mobile router