cobright
DIS Veteran
- Joined
- Jan 6, 2013
First... I know websites have to make money and inline advertisements pay the bills. They can be intrusive and annoying but I'm okay with reading past them or buying a subscription to a website I read a lot in order to make them go away.
But some ad providers are not too scrupulous with who they sell ad space to and websites we all know and love sometimes end up blasting us with an ad that takes over the screen or screams an audio message or worse. I'm kinda looking at DIS here, but really it's everywhere.
There are adblock extensions for browsers but most of the time they don't work well or are so aggressive they break the web page you're trying to read. Or they trigger detection in the web page and you get locked out until you turn the ad block off.
So I've been reading about a program called PiHole for a while and finally got around to playing with it. It's free and open source, and it gets set up on a Raspberry Pi computer board. A raspberry pi zero W can be bought for $5-$10 and with a $5-10 micro sd card is all you need to run PiHole. You can read about PiHole at pihole.net. The entire process from start to finish, including setting up the little computer board took about 10 minutes of actual work (there's a 30 minute wait while it unpacks and installs the RPi file-system). Now, whenever a really intrusive ad happens I grab the address of the ad and add it to my PiHole blocklist and it never comes back. It also speeds up my browsing overall because the needless back and forth communication between ads as they load and the server farms all over the planet gets dumped into a DNS sinkhole.
Installation involves downloading and copying the file-system to the raspberry pi, then setting it up like you would a new computer (selecting language and timezone and such). Then turning on the Raspberry Pi and typing some commands into a window to install PiHole. It really does everything else for you.
I would only ad that when you choose which block lists to activate, leave the ad related lists unselected and create your own blocklist with only the most intrusive and malicious ad-servers.
But some ad providers are not too scrupulous with who they sell ad space to and websites we all know and love sometimes end up blasting us with an ad that takes over the screen or screams an audio message or worse. I'm kinda looking at DIS here, but really it's everywhere.
There are adblock extensions for browsers but most of the time they don't work well or are so aggressive they break the web page you're trying to read. Or they trigger detection in the web page and you get locked out until you turn the ad block off.
So I've been reading about a program called PiHole for a while and finally got around to playing with it. It's free and open source, and it gets set up on a Raspberry Pi computer board. A raspberry pi zero W can be bought for $5-$10 and with a $5-10 micro sd card is all you need to run PiHole. You can read about PiHole at pihole.net. The entire process from start to finish, including setting up the little computer board took about 10 minutes of actual work (there's a 30 minute wait while it unpacks and installs the RPi file-system). Now, whenever a really intrusive ad happens I grab the address of the ad and add it to my PiHole blocklist and it never comes back. It also speeds up my browsing overall because the needless back and forth communication between ads as they load and the server farms all over the planet gets dumped into a DNS sinkhole.
Installation involves downloading and copying the file-system to the raspberry pi, then setting it up like you would a new computer (selecting language and timezone and such). Then turning on the Raspberry Pi and typing some commands into a window to install PiHole. It really does everything else for you.
I would only ad that when you choose which block lists to activate, leave the ad related lists unselected and create your own blocklist with only the most intrusive and malicious ad-servers.
