upvote

points

by ripdog8 hours ago |
comments
upvoteby godelski5 hours ago|
next
[-]

  > That's something people should run themselves. I run Adguard Home on my router.
I'll second this. People should really be flashing their routers. OpenWRT is simple enough that if you're on HN I think you'll easily be able to do it. And like most routers, you set it up and forget it.

But you'll also get a bunch more benefits from OpenWRT, to make it worth your while.

  - I was able to buy a router for <$100 that was WiFi 7 capable (W1700K[0]) and had better hardware than most consumer routers. You can find plenty of cheaper routers that are flashable and more capable.
  - Adguard Home
  - Split tunneling/VLANs: Since we're talking Mullvad, you can put devices behind Mullvad on a VLAN. So activate Mullvad by changing SSIDs.
    - Trivial to put IOT devices on a VLAN (can make one directional too so you can access from your main network but they can't reach back. I throttle everything IOT)
  - Tailscale
  - QoS (Control the speed and prioritization of different connections)
  - It's a fucking computer, you can even run shell scripts
[0] You don't need something like this unless you're getting >1Gbps from your ISP. Big thing I wanted is the 2 10G ports.
reply
upvoteby sgc8 hours ago|
prev|
next
[-]
It's probably the software I trust the most on my network to 'just work', and with the local caching I can use slower upstream dns providers and still have sub 1ms average latency (no performance worries by excluding google and cloudflare). I don't use it for dhcp, but it is a good fit that it's available as well. Couldn't be happier.
reply
upvoteby Brybry8 hours ago|
prev|
next
[-]
I use Mullvad's adblocking DNS server on my phone which is not always behind my home router.
reply
upvoteby godelski5 hours ago|
parent|
[-]
If you're on Android, FF supports add-ons.

If you're on an iPhone, uBlock is now supported: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ublock-origin-lite/id674534269...

There's also Orion browser, but I found it to be a bit more glitchy, especially around sites like YouTube (fuck the app, I'm not watching videos there): https://orionbrowser.com/

reply
upvoteby Brybry5 hours ago|
parent|
next
[-]
Yes, I use Firefox on Android with ublock origin, it works great. But using adblocking DNS on your phone will also block most in-app ads which is a big quality of life improvement.

I could also use a VPN to keep my phone always on my home network and thus behind my own ad blocking DNS but Mullvad's adblocking DNS was really nice and convenient.

reply
upvoteby godelski2 hours ago|
parent|
[-]
Really? I never found it effective unless I messed with certs on my phone.

For example, DNS blocking isn't going to block YouTube ads if you're using the app since they don't need to respect your DNS, but it will if you're in browser because they can't control that.

For apps I always use revanced.

reply
upvoteby Denatonium4 hours ago|
parent|
prev|
next
[-]
The uBlock Origin lite that can run on iOS is very limited compared to the uBlock Origin that runs on Firefox Android.
reply
upvoteby godelski2 hours ago|
parent|
[-]
Sure, but you're on iPhone. It's better than nothing.

I'm on your side but telling people to buy a new phone doesn't solve their problem. Short of that uBlock and/or Orion are their best options

reply
upvoteby oofdere5 hours ago|
parent|
prev|
[-]
It's not the same thing at all. Mullvad DNS blocks all ads across the system.
reply
upvoteby windexh8er2 hours ago|
parent|
next
[-]
I've been using NextDNS [0] for a long time. It's worth the price because you can set up all kinds of different blocking profiles and have different ones on different devices, allows you to have overrides for local network items (or internals like on a Tailnet, Pangolin, Wireguard, etc) and a lot more. The ad blocking ends up working so well a lot not only are ads blocked on web pages but it works with some streaming audio ads as well as VoD that has ads injected. Highly recommend.

[0] https://nextdns.io

reply
upvoteby godelski2 hours ago|
parent|
prev|
[-]
Up until the developers roll their host files into their app. That's why a pihole doesn't stop ads when you use the YouTube app.

Look, I still run AdGuard on my router, but it's not the same thing

reply
upvoteby oofdere5 hours ago|
prev|
[-]
I could, but DoH/DoT seems very involved to run yourself, and sometimes I need to give a recommendation to someone less tech-savvy.
reply
upvoteby XenoCyber04 hours ago|
parent|
next
[-]
I stopped recommending anything I host myself for those people. When it breaks I'm the support team, and I'd rather not be. NextDNS free tier is what I give them now, takes two minutes, and I never hear about it again.
reply
upvoteby PhageGenerator3 hours ago|
parent|
prev|
[-]
I'd argue you don't need to run DoT/DoH yourself if it is just for your local network.

Setting up a local resolver, such as a Pi-Hole or Unbound on a firewall can serve unencrypted responses to your devices. Those resolvers in turn can use DoT/DoH with their upstream resolvers to encrypt the requests that go through untrusted networks on the Internet.

This is the best of both worlds, the simplicity of unencrypted DNS while encrypting traffic where it matters.

reply