Hi there i always wonder if such a thing exists. Is it a possible thing to do adblocking much like adblock or ublock that i could imply for my whole home network? i have pihole already and that a good start. i would like something to monitor my network and pick and pull ads just like the browser plugins?
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Smart people will chime in later, but my $.02
So the two ways to block ads, would be blocking web sites (either IP or domain) or stopping DNS records(like using PiHole)
Some apps ignore the system DNS and get data direct from places, which are the ones that ignore PiHole.
It is possible to use a firewall to block at a site / ip level, before it reaches the browser, as long as the ad site is seperate from the good site.
I’m guessing more ad traffic will be coming from unblock-able domains in future, like YT ads from google themselves, or via cloudflare, but Pihole is a great first step.
Maybe a firewall might be the next step?
I’ve not gone to the trouble of blocking traffic like that, but I presume one can?
Good question though
One of the big advantages to Pihole and Ublock is they prevent the ads from even loading, saving you bandwidth and speeding up page load time.
Another program could do it, but without intergration into your browser or network, it would likely only be able to do so after the fact.
Central filtering is possible with several different solutions, but in fact almost all of them are based on filtering dns queries. Which is what PiHole does.
For example, OpenWRT has the ability to install Adblock / AdGuard for central filtering. But this is exactly the same filtering method PiHole does.
You want to have filtering as deep as ublock origin… The problem is that it’s not that layer of operations that you can easily do it centrally.
Filtering in the browser is not done only on the basis of dns queries, but through various component filters, this type of blocking is done on the basis of modifying the website code and displaying the corrected version.
By definition, it cannot be done centrally in a very simple way. This would require deep packet inspection and on-the-fly code modification, but above all, you would need to open TLS and then wrap it again, i.e. man in the middle, i.e. centrally you would have to have a properly working dpi with a proxy and a dedicated certificate on devices. An absolute nightmare to implement, although possible, but you only hear about such interference in data when a corporation or government wants total control over people.
Filtering based and firewall is old school, yes there are databases of hostile IPs but this is mainly used for a different purpose than filtering ads. This way you won’t filter out ads in 2023.
DNS based filtering is very useful but will never be able to filter 100%
DNS is pretty much as good as it gets, PiHole will do the same as blocky, AdGuard Home etc.