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My experiences with Pi-hole
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Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
Pi-hole is OK, but for good measure it's easy to set up a "hosts" file that blocks all that stuff locally. You can use your findings from Pi-hole. On Linux you just pop your entries in
/etc/hosts
, or other OS equivalent. Here are some curated lists. For Mozilla telemetry - https://github.com/MrRawes/firefox-hosts/blob/firefox-hosts/hosts Massive list for everything - https://github.com/StevenBlack/hostsThat's for one device.
Where does a smart TV keep it's hosts file? IPhone? Android?
DNS (PiHole) works for all devices on your network, which I'd argue is better than a hosts file.
Use both.
Why maintain the same thing in multiple places? If the pi-hole is blocking it, the pi-hole is blocking it. What added value is there in also maintaining the hosts file?
On mobile or on networks with a bigger load on the DNS server it could make sense to make things faster, but otherwise a pihole is fine I think. If the pihole is not working as it should, that should be found out and fixed ASAP.
The amount of times I've seen people request help because Pi-hole was not blocking/functioning properly, well a hosts file just ensures nothing leaves that you want blocked. Besides, you may have different machines set up to be strict or permissive depending on their use case.
With Pihole you can restrict or be permissive with different devices, based on MAC or IP address.