This raspberry pi installation is a very cool and useful device that though it may be a bit outdated, is still a very cool design theory with practical applications for the everyday user.
Pi Hole is a software installation you can put on a raspberry pi that will effectively block advertisemants. The way it works is you will set it up as a DNS connection through your router settings. Then whenever a device on that routers network has a package request with a link it will first go through the Pi Hole as a DNS request. The pi then scans the link in the request if it is a know advertisement link in it’s database. If it is than nothing is returned by the pi thus you don’t get an add. You can whitelist domain names to allow certain traffic through if theres an ad you would like. I guess this really only makes sense for superbowl comercial or holliday ads. If there is an ad you get that you don’t want or shouldn’t have gotten then you can find the domain of that add and add it to the block list on the pi. Any other network traffic requests that aren’t labeled as a blocked add will be passed along as normal.
I ended up following along this youtube tutorial and some other random stack overflow Q and A’s if I got stuck. Unfortunatly the project was a little outdated when I did it because advertisers have found ways to recognize this is happening and have found a workaround for this. I did notice a drop in advertisements for a day or two when I set this up, however they quickly went back to normal.I believe these companies get around this by having their add baked into another DNS request that isn’t soley ad-based. such as just the request for ayoutube video, so that if the pi wanted to block this ad then it would also block the content the user is requesting and thus defeating the entire porpus. I’m sure there is or will be another way around this, however I understand ads are neccesary for supporting the content and creators I watch. This was really just a fun project to get ready to work on more raspberry pi projects.
If the video is not showing up then I presume the link is broken. But it is a Linus Tech Tip (big surprise there) video on the Pi Hole software and installation set up.
