this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2025
1018 points (99.6% liked)
Technology
66783 readers
6472 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
PiHole.
My friend doesn't understand this reference, could you elaborate, please?
you can get a raspberry pi and install something called pihole on it, it's a DNS server with ad-blocking. basically, it converts a domain name like example.com into an IP address, but rather than just faithfully supply DNS, it also effectively blocks some adverts by acting like the domain names don't exist for servers that run ads
once it's set up it'll just work, and it should protect everyone on your network/wifi from some ads
Beautiful, I like the sounds of that.
Just gonna add that it can also be installed directly to any Linux PC or in a docker container. The raspberry pi isn't necessarily necessary.
Install a Pihole server on your network. It's a DNS filter. When a client tries to access a domain that has been blacklisted (ie a known ad or tracker domain), it denies the lookup.
On my roku homescreen it just has an empty placeholder where it tried to put the ad, but my Pihole server denied it.
Is there risk of a sort of arms race wherein services will update and decline to render services to those who block said blacklisted ad domains, or has that already happened?
I can't imagine that happening with today's systems. Yes, it's theoretically possible. It just seems unlikely that they'd go through the trouble of denying service to someone who didn't fetch data from one specific domain but did get it from another.