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Comment by someexgamedev | Hacker News Reader

Why hasn't anyone, or pi-hole themselves, made a public DNS that does this? Pass everything not on the blocklist thru to 1.1.1.1.

The fact that this requires special hardware, bash commands, etc is severely limiting the audience. The more people blocking ads the quicker the internet changes.

Edit: thanks for the replies!

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They have: nextdns.io

There was discussion a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20012687

I'm slightly concerned about routing my traffic through a non-major player in Anycast when I don't control the routing or software. I'd be worried it's quite an easy target for someone to do some DNS hijacking or packet sniffing.

There's a certain level of trust when I use 1.1.1.1 or 8.8.8.8. I'm unwilling to take the risk for this solution. I'm not sure what would help in the trust department to legitimize a solution like this.

This is why you should use their DNS-over-TLS or DNS-over-HTTPS service instead of standard DNS.

Route hijacks can happen to anyone, even Cloudflare or Google. If anything they're more likely to be targetted than a smaller player like Nextdns.

The difference is one has a dedicated security team and the other does not.

What does a security team have to do with network routing?

There are a few services that are public DNS with ad blocking, but now you're trusting them with private data. The plus side is that you don't have to run anything yourself.

I run my own knot-resolver server that forwards everything to 1.1.1.1 over TLS and I generate an .rpz that is basically the same filter list as pihole. Most DNS traffic ends up at Cloudflare, so you may as well go straight to the source.

https://gist.github.com/jzelinskie/3d2b11830224993fc8a7441b3...

It doesn't require special hardware. Anyone running their own resolving nameserver can do it with two parts:

include "/etc/bind/ad-blacklist";

/etc/cron.daily/update-ad-blacklist

or equivalent for unbound, maradns.... whatever.

AdGuard DNS does something like this.

Just to be clear, what change are you expecting to happen? Not /s.

This is a good question.

I am not the relevant commenter, but what things would you expect to not change in a scenario where a majority of websites lost all ad revenue. (As admittedly unrealistic as it sounds the same was once true re moon landing and here we are, debating viability of not ruining our lives with advertising.)

Most of the blogs and content aggregation sites shrivel up and die. A bunch of pay walls go up around the good content ppl would actually pay for. There's less crap on the internet because there's less spying to make the crap profitable. Everyone claps.

I think your vision just concentrates the spying power into the hands of a few. Is that ideal? Additionally, a pay-to-play model would essentially make the internet only relevant to those with privilege and money.

pi-hole as a service. How much would that cost / month?

Or could fund it with some targeted ads. Oh, wait.

I have a Vultr instance that costs me $2.5 per month. Pi-hole doesn’t consume too many resources. While I’ve not done any math, assuming I can handle 10 ppl browsing at the same time, my cost per person is 25 cents a month. Assuming other overheads(my time etc.) and some margin , I’d say a dollar a month ? For better effect , I’ll say 1.49 per month ;-)

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