![]() It effectively filters out unwanted content, such as ads, trackers, and malicious domains, at the DNS level, without installing any client-side software. Pi-hole is a network-wide ad blocker that functions as a Domain Name System (DNS) sinkhole. If you are interested in installing it (which I would highly recommend), you can get started here.Before I talk about the reasons for using Pi-hole, let's clarify what Pi-hole actually is. However, multiple environments and operating systems are supported. Personally I have installed Pi-hole on my raspberry pie 3 which runs on Raspbian. I am planning to write a follow-up article presenting some insights from my Pi-hole installation. We discussed the in and outs of advertising networks and we took a deep dive into how Pi-hole helps you stay ad-free. In this article, we explored the use of Pi-hole as a network-level online adblocker. Blocking the ads would inevitably also block the content, making the whole thing pointless. Facebook/YouTube/Spotify) are now serving ads from the same domains as the content. Pi-hole blocks ads for the entire network including computers, laptops, tablets, and mobile devices.Īnother benefit Pi-hole has over application-level ad blockers is that it frees up bandwidth which would be otherwise used to fetch the ad content.įinally, Pi-hole can also block telemetry domains from harvesting data about you and the way you use applications and devices. If you use a browser or any other application that does not have an ad-block plugin installed you still start receiving ads. Pi-hole operates at the network layer, whereas common ad blockers are merely plugins for your browser which operate at the application layer.Īpplication adblockers only stop ads on that one browser where the plugin is installed. I already have a browser plugin for ad-blocking how is that different? This can be annoying for some users, but personally I would rather have a blank space over an advertisement with a flashy red background and a big bold font style. You can see that in the ad space that was meant to display an advertisement has been left blank. ![]() Our browser never fetched the content from sharethrough and the page remained ad-free. In sharethrough's case, Pi-hole decided to block the request since the domain is included in its blacklist. If the address is classified as benign then Pi-hole will forward the DNS request to the DNS resolver of your preference, in my case Google's 8.8.8.8. If the domain is included in the blacklist, then the request is blocked and the domain is never resolved. PI-hole checks against its blacklist for domains that are related to advertising networks. ![]() In order to do so, the browser sends a DNS query to its resolver, in our case this is no other than the Pi-hole. find the IP address to which it needs to send the request. In order to fetch the content the computer first needs to resolve, i.e. But how did the computer know that this object is ad-related? Let's take a closer look at what happened behind the scenes. You can see the 5th request above is marked red because it failed to reach the domain it was meant to. We can see below the browser attempts to execute a javascript file to make a request to. The first request retrieves the index page of the website which includes references to other objects and scripts. Let's take a look at what happens when we visit the webpage of the popular magazine Forbes,. It is common for websites to sell a slice of their page to ad networks, this is known as ad space. This page has references to several objects which your browser needs to download in order to render it. When you visit a website, you are requesting the webserver directory index of the domain known as the index page. I explored the privacy implications of online target advertising back in 2012 on my paper "Towards Privacy-Aware Target Advertising" which you can read in IEEE's digital library. They are a convenient solution for website monetisation while at the same time provide businesses with a powerful tool for targeted advertising. Ad networksĪn ad network connects businesses that want to advertise online with websites that wish to host them. ![]() In order to understand how Pi-hole works, we first need to become familiar with how online advertising networks operate.
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