I was reading my daily news feed and an article caught my attention with headline “Popular Twitch AdBlock shuts down after Twitch breaks extension“. I know and love my twitch.tv but relying on an extension is not the way my friends.
Let me introduce you to the ways of the Pi-Hole. Add a simple Raspberry Pi to your network, it doesn’t have to be top of the line, install Pi-Hole and point your devices DNS to the Pi. You don’t even need a dedicated Pi because you can even run Pi-Hole in a docker on any Linux server you have running if you have one. I can confirm this blocks the Ads at the time of writing this post and blocks 41% of unwanted network traffic in the process.
PiHole is a DNS sinkhole that checks your web queries / DNS requests to see if it should direct you to the site or block the connection. You can blacklist (block), whitelist (approve), use public lists to mass block or do everything manually.
Install onto a Pi is easy as… running “curl -sSL https://install.pi-hole.net | bash“
Once setup it will give you a web address and password.
Now here is where I get to put my two cents in on the configuration. I use a few public lists in my configuration to expand the default ad-blocking to maximize effectiveness and manual whitelist to allow tracking for sites I like to have my history saved in.
- Log into your Pi-Hole interface
- Go to Group Management
- Select Ad-List
I use https://firebog.net lists so every URL that is green and with a checkmark to the left, add to the address field on the Pi-Hole Ad-List page and put a comment in if you want to track what they are for.
I also use the developerdan but only the Ads and Tracking list.
After this is done you need to update the Pi-Hole lists by:
- Go to Tools
- Update Gravity
- Press the update button
This will take a minute but should net you around 580k URLs to block. For me I do like some tracking and what this will do is block your YouTube watch history, twitch.tv VOD location, Amazon view history and many more. To solve this is easy.
- On Pi-Hole navigation select whitelist
- For the Domain add Amazon.com
- Select Add Domain as Wildcard checkmark box
- Press Add to whitelist.
Repeat for Twitch.tv, YouTube.com and any other site you find your history being blocked and would like that functionality. I also recommend adding aax-us-east.amazon-adsystem.com because that breaks the Ads inside Amazon for suggested products.
That is all you have to do, you can use an add-on to regularly update the Pi-Hole Gravity or just remember to do it manually once a month or every other month like I do.
— nothing important but just my back story as to why I hate Ads.
Now I know some-people advocate that these Ads provide revenue for site and people to operate but normally the people saying this are the ones running Ads or use them for revenue in some way. I wouldn’t have problems with Ads IF they were to respect me but they don’t.
Examples:
- Ads that track me: I feel weirded out when I search for something and now I have nothing but Ads for that thing and I switch devices from my phone to my tablet and the same Ads are there.
- Is this just me? Because I feel like to stalking laws should apply because it really is that bad.
- Video Ads that interrupt videos I am watching: The come in at 130% the volume of the content I am watching.. If I am watching something chill, I don’t want the WWE Announcer popping up yelling “JOHN CENA!” like an asshole.
- Twitch.Tv that thinks it is cool to give you 9 (Not exaggerating) video Ads in a row at 15-30 seconds each.
- Web Pages that decide to popup a video player at 40% of your screen and auto play sound at maximum levels.
- My child has a tablet, I let her play kids games, every 10 seconds it pops up an Ad for another game, she downloads every single game in the Ad because she doesn’t understand. Or it show inappropriate Ads that automatically makes any parent in their right mind instantly reach over take it away and have to explain to their kids that it was inappropriate. Trust me, we are talking about a game with a sperm entering an egg, becoming a baby as a game which advertising to a freaking 4 year old.
I had an Amazon Fire Tablet “HD8”, wife got it for me a few Christmases ago, it ran slow as tar and showed me Ad at every turn. She bought it on sale and to get $15 off they make you agree to Ads. I hated that tablet so much but wouldn’t you know that once it stopped querying for Ads, that tablet actually worked like a dream. For that price, battery life and the high quality speakers it has, it is a better tablet than an iPad in my opinion.