I recently set up a Pi-Hole for the first time, but I spun it down pretty quickly. On desktop / mobile I already have client-side ad-blocking, and it's not like the Pi-Hole can block embedded ads in adware apps like YouTube on iOS, so I just couldn't really justify keeping it powered.
I suppose if you have a house full of Samsung / Huawei / etc. IoTs that you really need to keep connected to the Internet for whatever reason, I could sort of see it, but I don't and I genuinely can't figure out other use cases for it. I'm far from a networking whiz though. Am I missing something?
There's a lot of advertising activity that ublock doesn't catch, but Pi-Hole does. Usually it's tracking APIs rather than ads themselves.
It's also useful for clients where I can't install client-side adblocking, ie smart TVs (which try to phone home a _ton_ of advertising/analytics information). I also don't use client-side adblock on my work laptop (can't install unapproved extensions) nor my iPhone, so Pi-Hole still lets me browse ad-free on those.
Back when I was working (a few years ago now), my company laptop had some lame Cisco DNS proxy installed in the name of "security." The laptop ignored the DNS servers provided by DHCP and the proxy used a pinned company DNS server. Any DNS requests that could not be resolved would redirect to some questionable server on the open Internet that also happened to have an ssh server on port 22.
None of this bothered me until the time I tried to ssh into one of my local boxes, was and redirected to the bogus server, which prompted me for my password, which I stupidly provided out of habit.
So now some random server on the open Internet has collected the hostname, username, and password for my local machine. I reported this to the company IT department and their response was a shrug.
I run a pair as my DNS. For me they're mostly there to block tracking over ads. Approx 10% of my DNS lookups get eaten by it using the standard ad list. Ublock / privacy badger grabs a bunch, the piholes still kill a bunch more.
> it's not like the Pi-Hole can block embedded ads in adware apps like YouTube on the iOS
Thanks for the info. I thought this was possible and it was the sole reason why I considered setting one up. Now I procrastinated on that project long enough to learn I can cancel it.
Use YT on the web. If you have an iPhone, get Stop the Madness, which can make the ads very short and easily skippable. It also removes a lot of annoying web behaviors and is highly customizable.
Some people (like me) primarily consume YT content on their TV. I also set up a pihole with the intent of blocking YT ads on my TV, but pihole is useless for that. Instead, it broke after a few weeks and had to be rebooted. So, sure, if you look into the logs, you see it blocked a lot of tracking chatter, but other than that, it had a perceived negative value if you ask me.
Instead I sideloaded SmartTubeNext on my Fire TV and just live with the banner ads.
Patreon – no. You pay a subscription to YouTube and you don't get served ads. Some of the money from these subscriptions is then divided between the creators, similar to how Spotify works.
YouTuber makes more money on average when a YouTube Premium user watches their video than what they would get from the ad-view if the person wasn't on Premium.
All in all it's reasonable IMHO. I might purchase it some time. The only issue is that this of course doesn't remove sponsorships baked into the videos, which annoy me just the same as the YT ads. So, I would still need Sponsorblock.
I suppose if you have a house full of Samsung / Huawei / etc. IoTs that you really need to keep connected to the Internet for whatever reason, I could sort of see it, but I don't and I genuinely can't figure out other use cases for it. I'm far from a networking whiz though. Am I missing something?