Pi-hole Adblocker
Posted: Sun May 13, 2018 9:33 pm
Bloomberg recently carried out a feature on the Pi-hole adblocking community (a network level DNS adblocker), a really interesting read with others facts on adblocking as well. Though I've never used it I think maybe I should.
Interesting takes:
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https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-05-10/inside-the-brotherhood-of-pi-hole-ad-blockers
- In the early days, it was privacy activists and people who had an objection to capitalism in principle,” [speaking of adblocking] says Sean Blanchfield, chief executive officer of PageFair. “These days, it’s just average people.”
- Barely 100 digital-only ad-tech companies operated in 2011; today there are about 2,000.
- some 30 percent of the internet’s top 10,000 sites now use software designed to subvert browser-level ad blocking.
- In 2016 someone showed up in the team’s chat room with a carrier pigeon avatar, a number of sophisticated technical suggestions, and what sounded like inside information. “He was like, ‘You know, this isn’t going unnoticed,’ ” Drobnak [Pi-hole dev] says. “Or, ‘The advertising business, this is something that concerns them.’ ” The carrier pigeon was active for about two to three months, then disappeared.
https://www.ndss-symposium.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/25/2018/02/ndss2018_04A-2_Zhu_paper.pdf