[Alien]FW v 3.2.2 : Added DNS-based ad blocker (pi-hole?) : what is it ???
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Hi.
with this versione, there is a pi-hole installed ??? Please, tell me about this function
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It's been there since the start, it's not new. It is what it says, it blocks ads on all devices on your network.
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Wait did they built pihole into the firmware?
I'm just curious, because that could be interesting especially if they keep up with piholes software updates, but painful if too many domains are added.
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@edward-dolezal So how do you enable it?
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@chris-duke when I have an alien I'll be able to tell you, I have a raspberry pi with the pi hole software loaded on it.
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from AmpliFi Support :
"This is a very simple DNS-based ad blocker similar to pi-hole"
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@絵馬絵馬 thanks for the clarification I appreciate it, I almost thought the loaded pihole to it lol.
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Any chance this is going to make it to the HD?
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@sean-i That is a great recommendation and we will add it to our list for future consideration.
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This feature blocks all googleadservices links as well as cbs applications / streaming. Just as a random heads up.
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@luke-maxcy What do you mean when you say "as well as cbs applications / streaming"?
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TL:DR- Blocking ads breaks a lot of things because if they don't get telemetry/serve the ad then they don't move onto serving the next step.
@James-Earl-Ford it means that when you chop the analytics off of a lot of services they break. So you block the analytics off of streaming apps and then they won't serve you video, chop analytics off some websites, they won't load at all. Generally they serve in a linear order, ad/telemetry THEN content. If the chain breaks such that ad/telemetry isn't served then you don't get to the asset that you actually want.
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@entropyrising depends on how the adblocker does it's blocking , also on how the ads are served, the issue being that DNS based ad blocking is good but you need some of the element hiding and disabling that a proxy server provides.
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The DNS-based ad blocker is probably configured to be conservative as possible; there are numerous ads that manage to get by on my end—mostly Twitch stream and mobile game ads.
It would be pretty cool to be able to configure the ad blocker, as the ability to white/black list is very powerful.
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@Lawliet-Keffor Great recommendation, Ill add it to our feature request list. Thanks.
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I enabled this when I first set up my Alien thinking it would be a great feature to utilize. Unfortunately, if you are a Google search user you will become extremely annoyed by it. When I perform a standard Google search and click on any googleadservices links, it won't let me get there and blocks me. This is annoying as hell. Even though they may be ads based on my search, a lot of times I want to see the content of those items. If I click on the link I should be able to get there. I ended up disabling this feature because it was so annoying and frustrating I just couldn't take it any longer.
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@bshaheen Many services are affected by AdBlockers in general. You may have to disable it for them to work.
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@bshaheen What happens if you use DuckDuckGo as the search engine instead of Google?
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@James-Ford I just enabled the ad blocker and tried using DuckDuckGo (Bing?) and it did the same thing that Google search does. I have now disabled the ad blocker again.