Recently saw a post regarding pi-hole, and I am considering to try it out. I am wondering if it would fit my usecase, so I want to ask about specifically what it solves.
I heard pi-hole blocks ads at DNS resolution level, so it does not block e.g. youtube ads. For me and my family who mostly watch youtube with handful of blog surfing, what value would it bring? Most blogs do not seem to contain much ads, so I am not sure ad-blocking helps much there.
Given the praise pi-hole is getting, I guess there are more to it than limited blocking of ads. I would love to learn more about this topic, as I am blind on the networking stuff. Thanks in advance!
I get a lot of ads everywhere. And trackers. On most of the news sites, social media platforms, my email provider, .places where I look up information, … The majority of the internet is commercial and financed through advertisements. With few exceptions, like personal/indie blogs and places like this one. I mean if you read just blogs and Wikipedia, you might already be alright. But that’s not how 99% of people use the internet.
Yeah, Youtube ads won’t be blocked by a DNS blocker. You need a browser plugin for that. I use Firefox, uBlock and Sponsorblock. That removes most of the ads everywhere, including Youtube.
You can also set it up to point at unbound for either recursive resolving of DNS, or resolving over HTTPS/TLS, as right now most DNS traffic is sent over unencrypted connections, meaning your ISP can see all of the domains you are resolving.
Can’t the ISP pretty easily tell what website you are going to anyways? After all they are the one that ultimately connect you to the destination so they know the IP. Would just be one more step for them but they could figure out which domains resolve to that IP.