Privacy

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My experiences with Pi-hole (scribe.disroot.org)

submitted 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) by duikbrilletje@scribe.disroot.org to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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Pi-hole has helped improve my "relationship" with Firefox, or better phrased with Firefox forks like LibreWolf and Tor browser. Cool thing with Pi-hole is that you can watch the query log and see what happened in the background while you were surfing the Internet. I learned that :

After removing the sponsored shortcuts in Firefox and putting your own shortcuts there Firefox will make connections each time you start the browser. So, if you would have icons on your quick start page in Firefox for let's say EFF, Lemmy, Mastodon, HackerNews, with each Firefox start up, it would query these sites. which I didn't like so much. Since then I've gone back to a complete blank start page, removing search and all those quick start icons, using just toolbar folders with bookmarks.
Pi-hole defaults to blocking telemetry for Firefox and Thunderbird.
Signal uses Google servers I saw via Pi-hole. I thought that they were using Amazon servers, but looking at Wikipedia for the history of Signal hosting I learned that Signal went back to Google for hosting.
Firefox push notification services are hosted on Google servers. LibreWolf removes a lot of Google things that Firefox has by default, but not the push parts. With Pi-hole it is very easy to block that.

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[–] BearOfaTime@lemm.ee 17 points 7 months ago (7 children)

That's for one device.

Where does a smart TV keep it's hosts file? IPhone? Android?

DNS (PiHole) works for all devices on your network, which I'd argue is better than a hosts file.

[–] retrogirl@lemmings.world -2 points 7 months ago (4 children)

Use both.

[–] null@slrpnk.net 11 points 7 months ago (3 children)

Why maintain the same thing in multiple places? If the pi-hole is blocking it, the pi-hole is blocking it. What added value is there in also maintaining the hosts file?

[–] retrogirl@lemmings.world 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

The amount of times I've seen people request help because Pi-hole was not blocking/functioning properly, well a hosts file just ensures nothing leaves that you want blocked. Besides, you may have different machines set up to be strict or permissive depending on their use case.

[–] scott@lem.free.as 5 points 7 months ago

With Pihole you can restrict or be permissive with different devices, based on MAC or IP address.

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