Raspberry Pi As an Ad Blocking Access Point
coop0030 writes "Adafruit has a new tutorial that will show you how to use your Raspberry Pi as a WiFi access point that blocks ads by default for any devices using it. This is really neat in that it would work for your Android or iOS device, your Xbox 360, TiVo, laptop, and more without needing to customize any of those devices other than to use your Raspberry Pi as the access point for WiFi. Using an ad-blocker can be useful for conserving bandwidth, helping out low-power devices, or for keeping your sanity while browsing the web!"
Yeah, we've heard it all before, we'll hear it all again, and nothing much will change.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Why do you need a RasPi for this? Why not do this in the router itself and save a little bit of power?
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Privoxy can remove a lot more than just ads served from a given domain/server. It can remove ads served by the same domain/server as the source website, as well as a number of other features that make it pretty nice for speeding up browsing on devices that don't have ad/javascript blockers.
You mean I will no longer have to click on Slashdot, "Ads Disabled! Thanks again for helping make Slashdot great!"
Seriously, though, this is another utility to download ad server lists, fair enough, but when enough people do this, content providers will just switch to serving the ads directly, the ad companies will forward it to them. The rest is cost negotiation and more Akami (or whatever it is) type stuff.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
For me, I block ads because they are actually a threat to browsing. In the old days, Flash ads that would pop out a player which extended off the end of the window would crash the browser. These days that's less of a problem, but there are plenty of others still around.
Privacy: advertising is probably the biggest non-government threat to online privacy. I don't really care whether advertisers would respect *my* DoNotTrack headers; I won't even connect to their servers. Supercookies? You'd need to be able to set them, first. Even if a certain site is allowed for some reason, I don't let it see my other browsing history; it gets only a distorted and meaninglessly narrow view.
Security: Advertising networks are one of the biggest problems to online security right now. At least once a month (on average, it comes in waves), one of the web comics I read gets hit with a malicious ad that attempts to serve malware / exploit kits to anybody visiting the site. This has also happened to high-profile reputable news sites and so forth as well. The ad providers don't seem to give a fuck, and the sites serving the ads can't really control the ad content before it's served. Whether it's browser exploits, Flash exploits, Java exploits, embedded PDF exploits, or something else, ad networks cheerfully serve up malicious garbage all the time. You know that advice about "avoid the seedier parts of the web"? Yeah, you can't do that without an ad blocker. Everything is seedy otherwise.
For sites that need money to keep them running, I donate. A few hundred dollars a year in donations is no big deal for me, and it's probably more money than the sites in question would get from my ad impressions anyhow.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
Computer does thing other computers can do!
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Instead of shoving a list of addresses into a DNS server (dnsmasq) in this case, it would be better to use RPZ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Response_policy_zone)....
Next to that:
> Open the file with sudo nano /etc/resolv.conf and replace the contents with the following:
> nameserver 192.168.42.49
> nameserver 8.8.8.8
> nameserver 4.4.4.4
192.168.42.49 = apparently the address of the fake webserver (would be great if they configured that somewhere before making test queries....)
8.8.8.8 = Google Public DNS, no ads maybe but running all your DNS queries through Google is not helping much now does it.
4.4.4.4 = is not a valid DNS server, likely they meant 8.8.4.4 which is the secondary Google Public DNS address.
If you have a DNSmasq anyway, just let it recurse and play caching resolver, much better idea.
> iface wlan0 inet static
> address 192.168.42.1
> netmask 255.255.255.0
> post-up ip addr add dev wlan0 192.168.42.49/24
One just has to wonder which IP the box will be using for outgoing queries, depends a lot on the kernel.... .1 would always be chosen, but as a /24 magical things will happen
Now if that was 192.168.42.49/32 the
Etoomanypitholes and lots of people will be bitten.
http://unfix.org
Why not do this in the router itself and save a little bit of power?
Because not everybody's home router 1. is easily customized and 2. has enough memory. I've read that my seven-year-old NETGEAR WGR614 v6 doesn't have enough flash for DD-WRT, and some people don't want to bother soldering, and some other routers are tivoized not to run an unapproved kernel. If I were to replace it with newer hardware, what make and model of home router would you recommend for no more than the price of a Raspberry Pi?
4.4.4.4 = is not a valid DNS server, likely they meant 8.8.4.4 which is the secondary Google Public DNS address.
It's also possible they meant 4.2.2.[1-6] (of which 4.2.2.4 may be the most popular), which isn't really a public DNS server either, but may be close enough to count as a backup for Google.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
4.4.4.4 used to be a valid DNS server.
> post-up ip addr add dev wlan0 192.168.42.49/24 ... just adds the ip to the interface and sets the net mask to /24. Nothing magical about it, its not really and different than the lines above it really.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Could it be used to spoof an ad server? I have used a number of Android apps that will continuously try to reach ad servers if you use any sort of ad blocks, which causes extra battery drain. Could this system be set up to send some placeholders so the app will stop trying to pull an ad?
Silly DNS scripts seems like a bad way to achieve this, Privoxy would be better, and the Pi's ethernet-over-USB setup (and a USB wifi donlge) is going to make this pretty slow.
Why does this have to be a Pi-specific tutorial, you could do this better on pretty much any Linux box.
#include <sig.h>