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Set up a cheap cloud hosted adblocker in an hour for $2.50 a month
- SnaKeZ 10y agoTL;DR: Vultr + Pi-hole
- dvno42 10y agoThis 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 https://github.com/julian-klode/dns66
- SeriousM 10y agoThanks 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 :)
- Splines 10y agoI use Netguard (https://github.com/M66B/NetGuard https://github.com/M66B/NetGuard) and found it to be better polished than DNS66, check it out if you're interested, I'm a happy user.
- tomaskafka 10y agoIf that's a Samsung with Knox, you can use Adhell without rooting (recommending as a happy user): https://www.reddit.com/r/Adblock/comments/5aovzp/adhell_ads_and_tracker_blocker_for_samsung/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Adblock/comments/5aovzp/adhell_ads_...
- aaattt1 10y agoKnox appears to be a privacy nightmare on it's own
- draw_down 10y agoHmm, that sounds like it could be useful for other things, but for ad blocking, running a blocker on the device seems to work fine...
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- chrisabrams 10y agoTitle should be amended to clarify "if you use android"
- Racsoo 10y agoIt's really platform independent. If you have an iPhone or iPad, these settings could be used: http://osxdaily.com/2014/08/08/change-dns-settings-ios/ http://osxdaily.com/2014/08/08/change-dns-settings-ios/ to set it to the adblock instance IP. Otherwise, it could also be set at the router layer to use the cloud instance to block the ads.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- JustSomeNobody 10y agoWhy? One can set up any device to use the pi-hole machine as their DNS server.
- bitmapbrother 10y agoBecause iOS apps don't have ads, right?
- inferiorhuman 10y agoApple allows ad blocking software in the app store.
- bitmapbrother 10y agoSo does Google. In fact nearly every browser in the Play Store blocks ads.
- msh 10y agobut not chrome, which is the major browser on android...
- 10y ago
- bberrry 10y agoMy 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.
- JohnTHaller 10y agoWhy not just use Firefox with uBlock? Or do you use a lot of free apps with ads that don't offer a pay for no ads option?
- colept 10y agoPi-hole with raspberrypi is free.
- thesimon 10y agoAs long as you get a free raspberrypi and free electricity.
- purrcat259 10y agoConsidering how little a Pi consumes, you might notice the electricity cost after a few years.
- rz2k 10y agoProbably 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. [1] http://m.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=5+watt+*+months+at+13+cents+per+kWh&x=0&y=0 http://m.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=5+watt+*+months+at+13+cen...
- colept 10y agoThe software is free. At least when you're done with it, you get to keep the hardware which over time will pay for itself.
- leipert 10y agoCloud 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.
- sgloutnikov 10y agoJust a small fyi about the Vultr match credits: unused credits expire after 12 months. Vultr are great by the way, love them.
- oszione 10y agoChanging 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.
- lern_too_spel 10y agoOr you can set it up on a free instance of GCE. The author doesn't get affiliate fees though.
- bitmapbrother 10y agoIt's already been mentioned that the egress limit is 1 GB.
- lern_too_spel 10y agoAt $0.12 per GB, he would have to do more than 20 GB of DNS queries on his phone to reach $2.50 / month. Also, my comment about using GCE was first, so it wasn't already mentioned.
- lend000 10y agoPi-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.
- georgemcbay 10y agoUsing 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.
- felixfurtak 10y ago... or simply subscribe to Ad Free Time for $1.99 /pm https://adfreetime.com/ https://adfreetime.com/
- oriettaxx 10y agoyes, very good! Just curious, if I use their DNS, how to they know it's me? from the hardware address of my network card?
- smallet 10y ago"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.
- aembleton 10y agoIf you want something even cheaper, check out https://www.time4vps.eu/pricing/# https://www.time4vps.eu/pricing/#! If you purchase a 512MB RAM machine for two years it is €0.99/month!
- joering2 10y agoHorrible 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.
- sena 10y agoActually, 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.
- m3Lith 10y agoThe 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.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- boyter 10y agoI 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/ 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.
- fny 10y agoYou must be blessed enough to have a fast upload speed. I'm still trapped at ~10Mbps. Thanks, Spectrum/TWC!
- boyter 10y agoNot at all. I am still unlucky enough to be on ADSL2+ with 1Mbps upload. Possibly will be looking at 40Mbit in the future but that depends on how lucky I get in Australia with the NBN, so not expecting much.
- OxO4 10y agoIt would be even better if there was a way to pay $2.50 that get distributed among the creators of the consumed content.
- Markoff 10y agobrave browser try this business model with their ad blocker, though i am also using adaway
- homer168 10y agoI messed with this for years. This app recently solved it all for me without root : https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=co.netpatch.firewall https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=co.netpatch.fi... You can use the custom rules to add any of the adblocker lists such as HP hosts, etc. Also whitelists play nice with voip apps too.
- MaikuMori 10y agoHow sad is that we need to jump trough hoops to just disable ads on our devices. And before ads advocate responds - ask for my money instead of polluting my mental space.
- oxide 10y agoUntil 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.
- wernercd 10y agoObligatory Forbes push to stop ad-blockers... followed by serving malware: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160111/05574633295/forbes-site-after-begging-you-turn-off-adblocker-serves-up-steaming-pile-malware-ads.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160111/05574633295/forbe...
- tehlike 10y agoThere 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. Ps:google emp.
- true_religion 10y agoI'm not sure what you mean by "doesn't work". 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 are merely less egalitarian.
- userbinator 10y agoNote 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.
- j_s 10y agoWoah, Proxomitron, that's a blast from the distant past! Has anyone picked up development of anything similar these days?
- userbinator 10y agoThere's Privoxy and Proximodo, but they both lack HTTPS filtering support. There's also https://github.com/amate/Proxydomo 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.
- joosters 10y agoThere'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.
- Ir3eu1yo 10y agoAdgaurd 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]. [1] https://adguard.com/en/adguard-dns/overview.html https://adguard.com/en/adguard-dns/overview.html [2] https://github.com/jedisct1/dnscrypt-proxy/blob/master/dnscrypt-resolvers.csv https://github.com/jedisct1/dnscrypt-proxy/blob/master/dnscr...
- Orangeair 10y agoJust a heads-up, you can get 1 CPU and 0.6 gigs of RAM for free with the new entry tier of GCP: https://cloud.google.com/free/ https://cloud.google.com/free/ (Disclaimer: Google employee, unrelated product area)
- nkkollaw 10y agoSo, one gets 1 VPS for free forever..?
- homero 10y agoYeah it's pretty cool
- trollsonson 10y agoYeah. Forever. That's how cloud works.
- indexerror 10y agoIt seems like it is $300 for the next 12 months. There is no mention of always free.
- nyolfen 10y agofrom the parent's link: > Always Free Products > 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.
- Laforet 10y agoNotwithstanding the irony of one google service hurting another, the free tier only has 1GB of free egress traffic right?
- Orangeair 10y agoDang, 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).
- Oxitendwe 10y agoWhat kind of insane world do we live in where we can't block ads on our own devices?
- diego_moita 10y agoAnother solution: install DD-WRT or Tomato in your WiFi router and disable all ad servers on the DNS: http://dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Ad_blocking http://dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Ad_blocking 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.
- cptskippy 10y agoMy 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.
- calferreira 10y agoWhy would i do this if i can do it for free ? If it's a PC: - Change the hosts file with adblocked domains or.. - Install an extension on the browser; On the phone we have firefox with adblock extensions as well. So, why would i pay for adblocking ?
- PetahNZ 10y agoDid you even read the first sentence of the article? "I recently got fed up enough with ads while regularly using my mobile Android Marshmallow phone"
- calferreira 10y agoAnd i said: "On the phone we have firefox with adblock extensions as well."
- detaro 10y agoNot all ads are in the browser.
- msh 10y agofirefox for android is really slow rendering pages compared to chrome.
- ricketycricket 10y agoI 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.
- Magnets 10y agoSeems like overkill. Why not just use openwrt and the adblock package? Grab a tl-wr841 for <$20 on ebay - some go for $5 You could even get an orange pi or Rpi zero + ethernet to usb adapter and hang it off your existing router for power.
- amelius 10y agoOut of interest, would somebody be able to reconstruct those blurred-out IP addresses and password by using deconvolution? [1] http://www.deconvolve.net/bialith/Research/BARclockblur.htm http://www.deconvolve.net/bialith/Research/BARclockblur.htm
- jansenv 10y agoI can't help but mention that one of the methods is called a Weiner Filter. Heh.
- retube 10y agoIsn't there a really simple work-around to these dns-hole adblockers? Ad links just need to use actual IP address surely?
- Aissen 10y agoI would very much prefer an ansible playbook so I can deploy this in a blink, than all those countless manual procedures.
- xbeta 10y agoCan someone tells me the est. bandwidth traffic per month on such setup?