alt Hacker NewsAnyone using a PiHole to block on their network? I've been aware of it, but honestly, ad blocking was good enough that I didn't go down that route. Is PiHole good enough? Is there a big problem with false positives?
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It can't handle YouTube ads unfortunately.
Id argue pihole is roughly equivalent to what you can do with manifest v3 based afld blockers. I use it as my primary ad blocker as well, and don't really understand why folks are upset about losing V2 that much. It seems like removing root in favor of more granular permissions which is generally a good thing.
I love my PiHole. I block more stuff than just ads with it. No problems with false positives in default setups. I went a bit nuts adding blocklists, personally (it's not necessary lmao; be judicious with what blocklists you add!) so sometimes run into something, but whitelisting things is really simple and I can't remember the last time I had to do it. My not-very-technical husband learned very quickly how to look in the query log to check if the PiHole is blocking something. He hasn't had to in ages. Temporarily disabling blocking is also super easy (simple, quick, effective escape hatch), and so is managing the various lists, so if my husband whitelists something from the query log and I want to refine it for some reason, I can without working hard. The configurability of blocking per configured group or client is amazing (and simple) as well; the video game consoles have separate rule sets than everything else which works super well for me.
Once again, I went stupid adding blocklists so the level of management previously required is kinda worst case-y and it is absolutely my own doing and since working through my idiocy it just works its magic without needing intervention. If you're more careful about not adding blocklists which say 'this will break things' (not hard) you'll be fine.
I'm using nextdns - happy with it.
Yep, and it's great. Beyond ads, you can also configure it to block malware. Got a phishing email from scammer.ru? Nothing happens even if you to click the link in it because that name won't resolve. There were a very short list of exceptions, maybe 2 or 3, I had to add to ours over the years, mainly for hostnames like tracking.shippingcompany.com that got added by mistake.
Note that it does nothing to block DNS over HTTPS lookups. If your browser insists on going around your LAN's DNS setup, Pi-hole can't help you.