Ad Blocking is Cyber Security

downpunxx@lemmy.worldbanned from sitebanned from site to Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ@lemmy.dbzer0.com – 538 points –

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For additional content, you can accomplish ad blocking in a number of ways. The ones that immediately spring to mind:

  • browser extension: most modern browsers have some extension framework available. I've been using ublock origin for a number of years with reasonable results
  • VPN: some VPNs include ad blocking as a side benefit to their primary function. Nord doesn't seem to block ads on all mobile apps or is at least inconsistent in my experience
  • Network packet filter/PiHole: this has been on my to-do list for a while. Catches network traffic that looks like ads before it even reaches your device. Most involved and least portable

I've had some good results with NextDNS, as well

I’ve been using NextDNS for over a year now and it’s great. Been using that with hagezi pro block list with great results and minimal breakage.

Any idea if it runs DNS over TLS? I’d prefer my DNS requests be encrypted.

Sure does. You can also do DNS-over-HTTPS. I have a 100% encrypted DNS request rate across all my devices and anything behind my router.

The only option (other than mitm-ing yourself and stripping ads from the html maybe) for blocking first party ads or spoofed first party ads is ublock origin on firefox

dns filtering can only block domains, ublock does full cosmetic filtering.

Ive been using DNS filtering for years and many sites actually collapse the advert space when it’s not used, and while a plug-in certainly can improve the UI, the DNS blocking also disables the resulting tracking, the network requests still happen with the plugins.

Additionally DNS filtering happens outside of a browser as well, so will block ads in literally every app as well, when setup correctly it’s also device independent.

When I still ran my own PiHole, there where days where as much as 60% of the traffic was adverts and trackers.

DNS filtering also extends to blocking things like malware and spam domains

A Pi-hole is easy to set up if you already have a Raspberry Pi and a router that supports changing the DNS (I had one that was rented from an ISP that didn't).

Love my pihole. Didn’t help with YouTube, which is the latest ad scandal.

Yeah, sites that hosts their own ads like yt can’t be blocked by dns-level blocking for the most part. You end up blocking yt itself.

On that front you need ublock in browser (for now) or a modded app like revanced on android, uyou on iOS, smarttubenext on firestick, etc.

Firefox Focus works on iOS as well, as does Safari with Focus’ Adblock rules imported!

It is. And even if you wanted to localize it to specific devices, there's also a standalone version. I'm using it on my laptop with Arch and it's pretty good. Adblocking on the go, or if you don't want (or can't) mess with the router for some reason.

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