tracker-radar VS Pi-hole

I think the sub-domain that has the most fingerprinting is et.educationdynamics.com: https://github.com/duckduckgo/tracker-radar/blob/main/domains/US/educationdynamics.com.json

Essentially it creates a VPN configuration to allow it to filter traffic (necessary for that to work), but your traffic isn't actually routed through an external server like a real VPN. It blocks requests for personally identifiable data (device information, personal information, etc.) going to third-party domains that have been added to the DuckDuckGo Tracker Radar dataset. This makes it harder for ad companies to fingerprint you and track your activity across apps and websites for the purpose of targeted advertising.

Why are there so many trackers for this application? 96 attempts at collecting over 34 different metrics for Google when I launched the app. Fairly disappointed. Users feel free to try it yourself with the public duckduckgo tracking app protection here or install the browser through the play store. Go to settings and more from duckduckgo to enable app tracking protection. It creates a filter VPN on your device similar to how most root-free ad blocks work. Launch some apps, even reboot, and see what you find out. Quite a few apps feed abobe, Microsoft, and Google a ton of your info (read the metrics collected) and Plex is one of the top offenders for me right behind Google's own apps.

Considering how DDG maintains a list of known trackers, I was thinking "hey it might be possible to set up a Pi-hole using this", but perhaps this is more trouble than it's worth.

Yes, we are actively evaluating possibilities for add-on support. However, you do not need ublock origin here for privacy protection. Our tracker blocker is powered by our best-in-class Tracker Radar data set (https://github.com/duckduckgo/tracker-radar) which is based on monthly crawls of the web looking for third-party trackers and uncovering the latest tracking techniques. Many academics and companies (including Apple) are now relying on this same data set for research and tracking protection. Similarly our Smarter Encryption (HTTPS upgrading -- https://github.com/duckduckgo/smarter-encryption) is also based on regular web crawls and is many times more comprehensive then anything else out there.

You’ll also notice that your Google search results get far less dynamic as well. Everything will be within a certain proximity or relevance to your geographical location. You used to be able to turn it off and ask that results not be skewed based on it. Now it won’t allow me to. No more generic results. Apparently Google owns around 480 domains that are found to be trackers. Here’s a great compilation of domains and trackers you can look out for- it’s frequently updated and terrifyingly informative.

Yes, private relay is only iCloud users but with Safari 15, the browser hides the user’s actual IP address in requests sent to origins that are listed in DuckDuckGo’s Tracker Radar list. https://github.com/duckduckgo/tracker-radar

I work on App Tracking Protection. We'll have an app tracker dataset in Tracker Radar in the future, as well.

In terms of performance and customizability I don't think any extension beats uBlock Origin. I'm unsure what filter lists Ghostery's extension uses (likely crowdsourced ones) but I think DuckDuckGo solely uses their own Tracker Radar data set which you could probably just import into uBO via Blokada's custom domains version (more here):

PiFi includes network-wide ad and tracker blocking (alongside Wireguard/OpenVPN client support and NAS features)

From my experience, pihole is very easy to setup for this use case: https://pi-hole.net/

> Home routers can simply assign pi into e.g. pi.home when doing dhcp. Then you can "ping pi" on all systems. It fixes everything- for that reason alone these reserved TLDs are, imo, useful. Unfortunately I've never seen a router do this, but here's hoping.

dnsmasq has this feature. I think it’s commonly available in alternative router firmware.

On my home network, I set up https://pi-hole.net/ for ad blocking, and it uses dnsmasq too. So as my network’s DHCP + DNS server, it automatically adds dns entries for dhcp leases that it hands out.

There are undoubtably other options, but these are the two I’ve worked with.

Thinkpad 431s if you are on a low budget. It's the best performing cheap option, IMO.

Obviously block access to internet nonsense. I just started using ControlD.com and it works like a charm. Or, if you have the time, make the PiHole and your Home Lab & Network Lab a project that you two build together.

Make the command line kid friendly, like using bat instead of cat and LSD instead of ls and so on. Colors are stimulating and fun. Something like the hyper terminal is another idea.

I would appreciate someone building a faster alternative to the hyper terminal in C or Rust.

And then there's Nand to Tetris, which you should pick up together as well.

[0] https://controld.com/

[1] https://pi-hole.net/

[2] https://www.nand2tetris.org/

ublock origin will help.

but does your org do any kind of DNS filtering? depending on your setup (office or remote, etc) setting up something like Pi-hole[0] can offer a tremendous amount of time & hassle-saving as so many of the problematic ads will just not get to your folks.

a more managed equivalent of Pi-Hole might be AdGuard DNS[1].

[0] https://pi-hole.net

[1] https://adguard-dns.io

Si te preguntas, ¿por qué no usar Adguard o Pihole? 🤔

This is an overreaction, almost to the point of absurdity.

Risks inherent to pipe installers are well understood by many. Using your logic, we should abandon Homebrew [1] (>38k stars on GitHub), PiHole [2] (>46k stars on GitHub), Chef [3], RVM [4], and countless other open source projects that use one-step automated installers (by piping to bash).

A more reasonable response would be to coordinate with the developers to update the docs to provide alternative installation methods, rather than throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

[1] https://brew.sh/

[2] https://github.com/pi-hole/pi-hole

[3] https://docs.chef.io/chef_install_script/#run-the-install-sc...

[4] https://rvm.io/rvm/install

Pi-hole to block ads and tracking for my less technically savvy relatives

https://pi-hole.net/