Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login
Google’s attempts to undermine adblockers (magiclasso.co)
20 points by happybuy on March 18, 2019 | hide | past | favorite | 5 comments



> Adblocking could reduce this revenue to zero.

Yeah, sure. Like that's about to happen.

This is an advertorial, btw, they're trying to sell their product:

> Want to try a privacy focused adblocker for your iPhone, iPad or Mac? Download Magic Lasso Adblock for free and experience a cleaner, faster web.


PiHole. The easiest and most rewarding project I've ever put together.

Super easy to setup and incredibly effective.

Don't forget to donate a couple of bucks to the developers.


I'm interested, but ultimately always decide against it because I don't know what happens if sites stop working because of a missing advertising library.

Some sites don't load, and it's easy in uBlock to whitelist the site temporarily. Obviously the ad library writers should write their scripts in such a way that if the script doesn't load it doesn't bring down the site, but of course this goes against their revenue stream...

Also sometimes you have false positives... In NodeBB if you create a new topic that contains the word "advertising", you won't be able to access it. Oops!

How can a PiHole be shut down or allow access to a site? It's trivially easy on Firefox...

Edit: it seems there's a fully featured web interface, so I'll definitely be taking a closer look at this. Thanks for the recommendation!


>How can a PiHole be shut down or allow access to a site? It's trivially easy on Firefox...

>Edit: it seems there's a fully featured web interface, so I'll definitely be taking a closer look at this. Thanks for the recommendation!

Correct! When logged into the interface, you can easily disable blocking with one click, for a set amount of time. FWIW, I sourced multiple public blacklists/whitelists, and did as much research as I could ahead of time to research devices I routinely have on my network vs any issues PiHole might have with them, and was sure to add any necessary sites to the whitelist when I first set them up. It was really easy for me and I've had zero issues since (YMMV).


I don't use pihole, but I do have a similar setup blocking ad domains at my router. Very few websites actually end up breaking. The rare ones that do I just whitelist in the script that builds the list of hosts to block.

I think more websites are likely to break with ublock simply because ublock isn't blocking things based only on hostnames.

Not getting ads on mobile devices, game consoles, etc is really nice though!




Consider applying for YC's Fall 2025 batch! Applications are open till Aug 4

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: