Pi-hole
Advertisement and tracking blocker
Introduction
Pi-hole is an application that validates DNS requests and allows or blocks it based on a list with "bad" domains.
This prevents seeing a lot of advertisements when your browsing but underwater it blocks also many tracking sites! These tracking sites use your visited websites to make a profile from your browse behavior.
This is my dashboard, and as you can see in the third yellow box, more than 50% of the requested website urls are blocked! And in total, one million domains are blocked. You probably think I can’t browse anymore because everything is blocked now, but I almost never bump to a website that isn’t loaded. If this happened and I want to visit it, you can whitelist is forever or disable the blocking functionality for an X amount of time to visit the site.
The advantage of blocking these websites is also that the scripts and images from those websites are not downloaded which result in faster loading of the websites.
Website: https://pi-hole.net/
Installation
Via docker
Check the docker-compose file on the Pi-hole website with an example.
Via Home Assistant
Use the Home Assistant Pi-hole integration for this.
AdLists
An AdList is an online page with a list of domains that will be blocked when you load this list. You can combine multiple lists. These are the list I use:
- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/StevenBlack/hosts/master/hosts
- https://gist.githubusercontent.com/anudeepND/adac7982307fec6ee23605e281a57f1a/raw/5b8582b906a9497624c3f3187a49ebc23a9cf2fb/Test.txt
- https://github.com/justdomains/blocklists/raw/master/lists/adguarddns-justdomains.txt
- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/chadmayfield/my-pihole-blocklists/master/lists/pi_blocklist_porn_top1m.list
- https://phishing.army/download/phishing_army_blocklist.txt
- https://urlhaus.abuse.ch/downloads/hostfile/
- https://www.github.developerdan.com/hosts/lists/ads-and-tracking-extended.txt
- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/badmojr/1Hosts/master/Xtra/domains.txt
To update the list and apply them:
- Go in the menu to Tools;
- Select Update Gravity;
- Click on the big button Update to download the latest versions;