Hacker News Reader

Comment by ohgr | Hacker News Reader

You don't need an Apple account to install an adblocker. You just install it from here https://adguard.com/en/adguard-mac/overview.html

And you don't have to pay for it, just close the ask.

View on HN

Do you need a blocker if you run PiHole?

It seems to do the job for the house very nicely.

Probably not. I don't own one as I'm lazy. I actually paid for AdGuard and use it on my iPhone and iPad. It comes with a mini PiHole implementation built in.

Oh wow. Thanks for this.

I just run Pihole in a container, and a spare one is on a NAS. I’ve learned the hard way, losing DNS is a shit show and a spare server saves you.

Added complexity has its downsides.

Yeah it's not perfect on iOS but better than maintaining your own stack. Basically it creates a VPN to localhost then proxies the DNS and traffic over that. It only modifies the DNS using a blocklist and passes your normal traffic straight through.

Works well. Even the crappiest nasty sites won't get through it.

Yes you still do. Sophisticated companies (Amazon, Google, Meta, many others) will serve ads from the same domains that serve the content you actually want. Pihole can't block the ads without blocking everything. Ad blockers are necessary to block specific pieces of content from amazon.com, youtube.com, etc., while still letting you use the service. It's a constant cat and mouse game, but ublock origin does a good job of staying updated.

Thanks, I'll give it try!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com