this post was submitted on 18 Apr 2024
120 points (97.6% liked)
Privacy
32465 readers
420 users here now
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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.
That’s for one network. That’s why I switched to Next DNS and have protection at home and everywhere else.
I ran PiHole for years. It started as a way to block ads but then also a way to block games and YouTube for my kids so they get a break. I had to manually control this though. I switched to NextDNS last year because this can be done on a schedule and they can't get around it such as swapping to mobile data on their phones.
In the house though I run AdGuard because there's no way differentiate traffic for each of my kids NextDNS profiles. With AdGuard it can proxy DNS requests to take traffic from the TV in their bedroom and convert it to DNS over TLS so the traffic hits the correct profile. I don't use AdGuard for anything else. It does not filter anything. It's purely to make sure traffic hits the correct NextDNS profile.
Use both.
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?
On mobile or on networks with a bigger load on the DNS server it could make sense to make things faster, but otherwise a pihole is fine I think. If the pihole is not working as it should, that should be found out and fixed ASAP.
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.
With Pihole you can restrict or be permissive with different devices, based on MAC or IP address.