I went as far as installing network level ad blocking on both my home network as well as devices.
Recently, I’ve had a few friends over whom are… not as technologically adept. They were incredibly surprised that after joining my guest WiFi, suddenly they were able to browse most websites almost completely unobstructed. No ads, no popups, no BS. Aside from the usual cookie agreements, of course.
If you can, help your friends, install ad blockers for them, make their internet experience better. Even DNS level adblocking is relatively easy to set up, and the only thing this hurts is the unscrupulous megacorporations that want to milk you for every single bit of personal information to sell.
The reason I haven’t installed DNS level blocks is I’m always worried they will break random content and it’ll be harder to debug. Have you experienced that?
A few, mostly for my mother who wanted those email ads where she got points or whatever for clicking on them.
On the pihole, I just disable it for 5 minutes (there’s a button) and then see if it works. If it does. Then I look at the logs for what it blocks on a load. If not, it wasn’t the DNA blocker.
Look at piHole to get started. It runs on a raspberry pi and acts as your dns server. It blocks so much garbage. You add and remove sites on whitelist and blacklist, use 3rd party block lists. If you think dns is causing an issue, switch to a public dns temporarily is easy. And its free.
It’s not terribly difficult if you’re the one who set up the pihole or equivalent. But I typically use adblockers on end devices because they’re easier for other people to use (toggling a browser extension is accessible to most people, especially if I pin it to the menu bar).
I’ve only had network level ad blocking break online retail sites. Not every one but especially the ones that load separate frames for the CC processor on the check out screen. Blocking trackers breaks clicking on ads in email and search results though which a surprising number of guests have complained about.
Also be aware, DNS is pretty vital for using the Internet, if the thing hosting your DNS goes down, your Internet and any internal name based routing goes down too unless you know how to circumvent it.
Make sure the pihole doesn’t get unplugged basically.
My friend hates it, because it breaks some sites and services. Everytime he’s here he says “oh, right… you got that blocker thing on the network”, because he hit a snag once again.
I’m not sure what he does or how he uses the internet, but I don’t even notice that it’s there.
I went as far as installing network level ad blocking on both my home network as well as devices.
Recently, I’ve had a few friends over whom are… not as technologically adept. They were incredibly surprised that after joining my guest WiFi, suddenly they were able to browse most websites almost completely unobstructed. No ads, no popups, no BS. Aside from the usual cookie agreements, of course.
If you can, help your friends, install ad blockers for them, make their internet experience better. Even DNS level adblocking is relatively easy to set up, and the only thing this hurts is the unscrupulous megacorporations that want to milk you for every single bit of personal information to sell.
The reason I haven’t installed DNS level blocks is I’m always worried they will break random content and it’ll be harder to debug. Have you experienced that?
A few, mostly for my mother who wanted those email ads where she got points or whatever for clicking on them.
On the pihole, I just disable it for 5 minutes (there’s a button) and then see if it works. If it does. Then I look at the logs for what it blocks on a load. If not, it wasn’t the DNA blocker.
Look at piHole to get started. It runs on a raspberry pi and acts as your dns server. It blocks so much garbage. You add and remove sites on whitelist and blacklist, use 3rd party block lists. If you think dns is causing an issue, switch to a public dns temporarily is easy. And its free.
I thought piHole blocked Cloudflare, but then I see you are using Cloudflare (lemmy.world). Did you configure it to not block Cloudflare?
It doesnt block cloudflare by default. I use it and havent had to touch pihole to do it.
It’s not terribly difficult if you’re the one who set up the pihole or equivalent. But I typically use adblockers on end devices because they’re easier for other people to use (toggling a browser extension is accessible to most people, especially if I pin it to the menu bar).
I’ve only had network level ad blocking break online retail sites. Not every one but especially the ones that load separate frames for the CC processor on the check out screen. Blocking trackers breaks clicking on ads in email and search results though which a surprising number of guests have complained about.
Also be aware, DNS is pretty vital for using the Internet, if the thing hosting your DNS goes down, your Internet and any internal name based routing goes down too unless you know how to circumvent it.
Make sure the pihole doesn’t get unplugged basically.
Your router software probably accepts multiple DNS entries so you can have backups if your pi goes down.
My friend hates it, because it breaks some sites and services. Everytime he’s here he says “oh, right… you got that blocker thing on the network”, because he hit a snag once again.
I’m not sure what he does or how he uses the internet, but I don’t even notice that it’s there.