I've been using ad blockers and NoScript plugins for longer than I can remember. Before that I was using /etc/hosts file based blocking. I've never felt like I was stealing nor do I know anyone that feels that way.
On the contrary, I've always felt that content to display, and in particular code to execute, on my device is my decision and mine alone.
It's an incredibly slippery slope that leads to complete loss of autonomy for individuals.
If I refuse to read roadside billboards, am I now stealing?
If I tear up newspaper ads and throw them away, am I now stealing?
If I turn off my tv during ads on a cable show, am I now stealing?
I think any sane person would definitively say "NO!", I think it's an incredibly dangerous line of thought that associates loss of attention as theft.
Fundamentally, we have the right to choose what we pay attention to. Some sites block me when I have adblockers enabled, I think that's fine. But don't serve up your content and then complain that I choose to ignore parts of it. I have free will and autonomy.
The strange thing is it's one of those conversation stoppers, the other person usually gives me a funny look and does not reply at all. This is perfect and I recommend trying it out.
I think this is an excellent analogy.
What if broadcasters transmitted control codes that could reconfigure your TV or even disable its functions? You're watching something, a commercial begins and suddenly your TV's volume is maxed out by the broadcaster because they want to reach people who left the room. You try to set it back to what it was, but the controls don't respond. You try to mute the TV but the function appears to have been disabled. Changing channel doesn't work. Turning it off doesn't work. It's as if they were saying "So... You actually thought you could get away with watching our stuff for free, huh? You think you're so smart... Now we've made it so you HAVE to watch this commercial. See how you like THAT!" This attitude is straight up hostile to the subscribers. It attempts to control them, lest they escape from the publisher's money-making machine. Such audacity, right? How dare they not watch my commercial! Can you imagine the rage and indignation the publishers must feel?
How much time would it take before TV manufacturers realized TVs which ignored the broadcaster's commands were objectively superior to those which didn't? The broadcasters would probably call use of such TVs "stealing", too. They'd probably call these manufacturers a "brotherhood of non-standard television manufacturers". They'd probably force narratives saying "hey I hate commercials as much as the next guy but really it's stealing if you don't watch them". They'd probably lobby for laws that criminalize devices which automatically remove ads from recorded footage. They'd probably try to introduce new ways to control the user's hardware in order to make the user do what they want.
This is what Javascript does. "I see you're using an ad blocker, so let me just put an overlay on top of the text so you can't read anything without "paying" for it." Sometimes publishers take issue with something as basic as copy-paste: "trying to select a portion of my page, huh? Must be a lazy pirate trying to clone my website. I'll manipulate the clipboard and make it contain a scathing message instead, just for you!" It's so hostile, sometimes I think they hate users and only see them as potential click-throughs and conversion rates. It's dehumanizing.
The former CEO of Turner Broadcasting, Jamie Kellner, thinks that you are:
Frankly, if the ADS have real value, and yes that is entirely possible to do, people won't block them anywhere near the level of concern.
Self selection will improve performance too.
An example I saw play out, and had a small hand in was an auto shop doing political ADS. They combined great advocacy and informed people, leaving their business info low key in there somewhere.
The returns on those were excellent. People actually considered them a part of the programs, and radio station identity.
You presented analogies, which I will respond to if you respond to my question at the conclusion.
With the case of billboards, it was never expected nor included in any societal contract that you are supposed to look at them: their sole purpose is to accidentally grab your attention, not mandate it.
With newspaper ads, as above, it was never mandated for you to look at them except incidentally as you flip through. Even after deciding to tear them up, you still had to have looked at them for a moment, at which point they have succeeded in doing all they ever tried to do.
With tv ads, I refer to the exact same reasoning used above.
Now for my question. Since adblock is most prominently used in the context of youtube, answer this - why should you be able to enjoy youtube's content for free without giving anything back to youtube? Are they a charity? And why shouldn't they choose the method by which you give back to them (via watching ads), since it is their platform?
Advertising can cross the line in many cases allowing for the self-defense of ad-blockers, but blocking all ads on principle is an even more dangerous, immoral line of reasoning.
But no, they got a bad label and then every major ISP has blocked / tracked them since ever
In the case of web ads, you're not usually paying for the content, and so they're expecting you to see the ads.
I don't know why people go to websites to read their content for free while block their ads. To me that just says "I am consuming too much shit."
You don't HAVE to go to these websites and consume everything in the world, you know? Life will go on without these sites.
Really, we need to get people to not consume so fucking much.
Just like TV, where the best thing is to not watch so much commercial TV.
If ads bother you, you're already doing way too much internet. And if you're going out-of-your way to block ads by setting up a network device, you're REALLY consuming too much internet.
Absolutely. I reserve the right to decide what gets displayed on my computer, and what code runs. Websites can try to serve me stuff I don't want to see, but if they do, I am well within my rights to remove it.
That doesn't stop at ads, either. I often use my ad blocker's element hider to remove all the superfluous cruft that adorns so many websites. I don't want to see your social media sharing buttons, your half-page auto-playing videos, your cluttered sidebars, or enormous footers. And I definitely don't want to see your "Open in App" buttons that occlude the lower portion of your content.
If you want to ruin your site with user-hostile design, then fine, but that won't stop me from making it usable again on my device.
Sites like the BBC go in for this nonsense with their “Breakinng News” pop over.
Or Reddit taking a third of the screen to push their app.
Even this Bloomberg article has one of those annoying scroll back vanity flaps.
Adblockers are a way of asserting control over how content is displayed, something that was part of the original design of the web.
Many content creators think only they should control display of information hence the push to apps and removing control from users.
I don't want to see them, and I don't want them to see (track) me either.
Its like industry is trying to actively change history.
Practically no one saw or has seen ad-blocking as akin to stealing. This is a line completely made up by the advertising industry to try to co-opt a publicly available communication and content publishing system that existed and was being heavily used BEFORE advertising was prevalent.
Advertisers came along and polluted the internet after the internet was being used and free content was already being posted.
Ad-blocking arose as an organic and natural reaction to advertisers beginning to appear and moving onto the free internet, not internet denizens thinking/conspiring to get their hands on the sweet juicy content of advertisers and trying to fight their way into the advertisers domain.
> I've never felt like I was stealing nor do I know anyone that feels that way.
Never understood that concept either. It probably originated with people who were making a quick buck with ads on their sites defending their turf when the winds changed.
For a while advertising was like free money, so that's understandable.
The problem with content providers (news, quality blogs and such) is that they didn't look for a better model earlier. Therefore many were left trapped with this dreadful advertising revenue model.
As it turns out, nobody wants to pay for micro-transactions, and organizations with more then 1 employee can't survive off Patreon.
So, you get labour of love bloggers, a handful of donation-funded individuals making youtube videos, and everyone else in an arms race to put as many frigging ads on their sites as they can.
That’d be me (kinda):
I used to make exception for web comics I subscribed to and other websites I visited regularly, using adblocker only for browsing the random internet at large.
Until looking for group served a malware.
So now everything gets blocked.
So I would probably put myself into the “understands ads are your revenue and once upon a time was permissive” category.
I say this as someone who uses an AdBlocker daily. Of course it's stealing. You're violating the contract you implicitly agree to when you visit the site. This may or may not have legal force, but it's clearly stealing. If you don't want to see ads, don't visit sites that have them. THAT is how you retain the sanctity of your experience and avoid stealing.
From my point of view advertisers pay to access channels where they believe their messages will have an impact. Presumably they will pay more for higher-impact channels and less for low-impact ones, it would be unreasonable for them to expect their message to have 100% consumer penetration. If people without technical expertise have chosen to package "valuable" content along with a low-impact advertising channel in a way where the ads can be trivially stripped and relying on these ads to be profitable I posit that these entities deserve to go out of business and stripping their ads is no more stealing than buying a gizmo from a company that has unwisely decided to offer their product for less than it cost to produce.
We've entered no contract, you have no right to dictate any terms to me at all. Period.
If you'd like to chose to not display your content when I have a blocker enabled, so be it, I'll leave and never come back.
But to make an assumption that you have any sort of control of my time and attention is insidious. Fuck off.
I'm not stealing when I drive by billboards without reading them, I'm not stealing when I turn my tv off when commercials come on, I'm sure as fuck not stealing when I block your ads.
If you'd like to enter into a contract that actually tries to enforce your ludicrous idea that my attention is implicitly yours to demand, I'd suspect you'll find very few takers...
To state the same points others already did in a different way - you put out data on the Internet, over HTTP protocol. You agreed to abide by the terms of the involved protocols, which say that if I send a proper HTTP request to your public server, and your server responds with data, then you gave me that data and it's now mine to view[0]. The browser is merely a rendering device for that data. At the HTTP level, you have no right or way to dictate to me what program should I use to render the data. Want the data rendered your way? Use a different protocol, leave HTTP alone.
Now you're free to use technical and legal means to enforce your business model. It's your prerogative. Please do make me register an account and consent to a TOS contract, and deny access if I don't. HTTP protocol supports that too. If you do that, then I'll be morally and legally expected to follow the contract. But if you serve stuff unconditionally on publicly routable servers, you have no moral right to tell people what to do with that data.
EDIT: also, you're free to detect I'm not parsing your content correctly (by e.g. not requesting appropriate files from your servers, or not running scripts that ping you back), and refuse to send me more content. That's your right. But if you send me content, your rights end, and I decide how I want to view it.
--
[0] - There are legal caveats there that supersede this basic idea, like copyright and unauthorized access, but there are no laws nor any reasonable moral expectation that would force me to render the data I received in exactly the way the server wants.
Oh, really?
What about the websites who allow dozens of third parties to serve me an unknown quantity and quality of content that I did not request? They steal my bandwidth, compute cycles, and privacy.
And what about data brokers? My browsing history is my work product; I create it through my own actions. Much of the information that data brokers sell about me would not and could not exist without my direct contributions. When they sell that data, do I get an appropriate share of their profits? No. They are regularly stealing and profiting from my work. The websites you claim I'm 'stealing' from are giving away tons of my information without anything even approaching affirmative consent.
The fact that my web browser received a 200 from the server. Server seemed to think it's okay to give it to me.
You're violating the contract you implicitly agree to when you visit the site.
I will once again remind those that pull out this argument that the "implicit agreement" is that my web browser sends a request, and if the server thinks I am worthy of viewing the content, it sends said content along with a "200: everything is A-Okay! Happy to be of service!". If the server thinks me unworthy, it can send a 403.
If someone wishes to redefine the "implicit agreement", please include a reference to the relevant RFC. Because otherwise it's just some marketing person trying to redefine the world the way they wished it were. Should someone care to redefine the World Wide Web experience such that I do not control what my browser displays, well, maybe the WWW isn't appropriate for their business.
You have the right to say it, and I have the right to ignore it, because that's the way the Internet is implemented. You may pretend that it works differently, but until the day it works like broadcast TV, users will have the right to pull whatever content they want from servers.
No it's not and no you aren't. Entering a public area isn't trespassing and there's no such thing as a contract you implicitly agree too.
If I record a TV program off-air and fast-forward through the commercials, am I stealing? If I arrive at the movie theater 20 minutes late to skip the trailers, am I stealing? If I change radio stations during the commercials, am I stealing? If my DVR automatically skips commercials, am I stealing? If I'm an eccentric billionaire and have my butler clip the advertising from my magazines and newspapers with scissors before I see them, is that stealing?
By looking at the ads and executing the code we download to your computer, our site assumes full responsibility for the code, ads and content, and will reimburse you for any damage (physical, material, emotional) caused to you by the software we serve.
We will not blame it on the "ad network", or "ad exchange" or a "google". Nope - if you got it from us, it's ours. So feel safe in deactivating your ad-block and surfing our site, because we got your back!
The idea that there are "terms" when there's never even been a negotiation is absurd.
That is it exactly. If you (knowingly/willingly) transmit information to a person, what they do with their copies of it is entirely up to them. This is items zero and one in (my particular ordering of) the set of inalienable right fundamental to sapient beings. If you don't want people to read your articles without seeing your ad, then don't publish your articles.
Nearly everyone who is bodily able and has the land- can farm or mine. You can specialize in a certain fruit, or in a certain growth method- but these are easily copied, and thuse the price differences in the long run always gets equalled out or - if there is a surplus, even drop below the point of creation.
Content can be created by nearly everyone who is able to write sentences and glue stockfootage into it.
Its the agriculture of the e-industry, the raw ressource. Once it is created, you loose controll over it, it goes from hand to hand, is traded, trafficked, refined and reused. And all those millers, traders, feedalot farmers, butchers and finally the customers- of the content world will be better off then the content creators - perpetually for eternity by the nature of the trade.
The only way out, is to create brands and fashion waves ala "organic" content. Which if succesfull will be aped by all and surplanted.
Contentcreators - welcome to hell.
No.
>What makes you think you have the right to the content, without abiding its terms?
The server has already sent it to me. The data is already in my computer. I can do whatever I want with it. Does a magazine publisher get mad if I rip out the advertisement pages and throw them in the trash?
>You're violating the contract you implicitly agree to when you visit the site.
Nobody implicitly agrees to anything. Is that even a thing? People simply open up sites and consume whatever's on them.
>Of course it's stealing. >it's clearly stealing
That's about as dishonest as claiming piracy is stealing. Making copies of something doesn't subtract the original from its owner, therefore it is obviously not stealing. It's called artificial scarcity for a reason: it doesn't actually exist. Receiving ad-loaded copies of something and then using a computer program to remove the noise is not stealing, it is user experience improvement.
Sound ridiculous? That's because a web request and response is a collaborative effort of the two computers. The World Wide Web wasn't built for this kind of shitty, vaguely-adversarial, commercial-transaction-like interaction that everybody seems to want to turn everything into.
If you place your "content" for "consumption" on the World Wide Web, you are saying clients can connect to that server and request content. To say that certain content is mandatory is completely ridiculous. Restricting content can only be subtractive, that's why a paywall is the only sustainable model for anyone who insists on eternally Septembering their way to profit and riche$ on the WWW.
Sure, if they’re on a private network. If you’re broadcasting though, hell no. It would be like a tv network demanding that you don’t use a DVR because it lets you skip ads. If you want the benefits of broadcasting to the open web, you’ve already tacitly agreed to let people consume that the way they see fit. You don’t get to set the volume of their audio, or anything else, including what gets displayed.
There was certainly a way that the distributors wanted me to consume the content with the ads, but I'd think that my muting and selective recording was socially okay. The media companies were welcome to stop broadcasting cartoons and sell movies or high-margin DVDs if they wanted.
I don't really see a bunch of HTML and JavaScript as any different. I'd prefer that they revert to a paywall if they don't like the their content being modified locally by the end-user.
I personally do block most ads, which is kind of justifiable to me because of malware concerns, but I'm not going to pretend I'm doing nothing wrong. I try to pay for content when possible. I support non-advertising business models.
Free online content was around before the ads were :\
Certain KINDS of online content will go away without advertising, but when you look at a great deal of that online content, I think there's at least a debatable moral argument to be made that the moral position is that it should be gotten rid of.
It's not just semantics. Words matter. It's important semantics. Using an ad-blocker is neither stealing, nor free-riding (web-content is excludable and other consumer are not paying for it.)
This is much more akin to making use of a facility with a suggested donation and not making a donation. The morality here is fairly grey and heavily circumstantial. If you can easily afford the donation and the facility is the verge shutting down due to lack of funds, the the immorality seems fairly clear cut. If making a donation would preclude you from being able to use the facility or the facility is sufficiently funded, then few people would fault you from making use of it, especially if you make a point of picking up trash or making other efforts to improve the facility.
Online advertising not a clear cut case. Do we need to make sure our content creators get paid? Certainly. Does online advertising do a good job of rewarding skilled content creators? Sometimes. Does encouraging content creators to use advertising for reimbursement lead to access to better content? Doubtful.
I think you can easily offset any moral qualms you have about using an ad-blocker by funding direct donations, patreons, kickstarters or any of a number of other means of funding content creators and publishers directly.
Overall, I think paid advertising is an inherently immoral way of funding the content I consume. Why should I force the customers of companies I'm never going to buy anything from to pay for my entertainment?
Now, sites with value have either figured their strategy out or have something like Patreon, which I'm a big fan of. I'll donate to the Guardian if they flash that yellow banner, you know?
So no big loss for the other 99% of the web that feels slighted by ad-blockers and complains or shills for the ad network industry to save their bacon. If they fold, it's no loss.
[1] I know you can run pi hole on your desktop OS, which is technically free, but you need to leave your computer on 24/7 which undoubtedly raises your electricity bill.
If you have an excuse to run a Raspberry Pi at home for any other purpose then use Pi-hole to piggy back off it and the cost you cite becomes a writeoff. I had a Rpi running OpenVPN for myself, throwing PiHole on it was a no brainer.
For example, mine blocks Samsung telemetry from my TV, so I can still use the TV apps without having my info sent to Samsung.
Answered your own question. That list does not include chrome, smart TVs, fire TV, Roku, Kindle, game consiles, iot devices of all types. Nor all guests.
You need both. Security / defence needs to be deep and layared and mukti-vendor to be effective.
That was addressed in the parent comment under footnote [1].
It will also be faster than most browser based ad blockers since the browser has to analyze every webpage whereas pi-hole blocks by simply not making a request.
Also if you want a DNS that works outside your local network it would be trivial to get a cloud server for $5 a month put pi hole on it and route DNS through that. Then you could get free https certs and have a pretty sweet private DNS just for you!
And if you're someone trying to setup their own local DNS it's likely you have a spare pi or computer laying around somewhere to use.
And finally it offers pretty great convience. Instead of having to setup blockers on every device it just needs to be set on the pi.
In my household we have four people with smartphones and another four laptops. That's a lot of ads to block.
Blocking ads on my laptop made a more noticeable improvement to web browsing than increasing my network bandwidth.
Maybe with Chrome, but there's an Android version of Firefox that lets you install uBlock Origin:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.mozilla.fi...
But I still combine it with a browser-based ad blocker. It's worth doing both, because the network-based blocker will also block other LAN devices connecting to tracking servers, increasingly important in this IoT age.
According to my router's stats, the most blocked sites are:
device-metrics-us.amazon.com e.crashlytics.com ssl.google-analytics.com www.googletagservices.com www.google-analytics.com nexus.officeapps.live.com api.stathat.com www.googleadservices.com
[1] Such as the 1450 requests in the last 24 hours to watson.telemetry.microsoft.com
I run a VPN on my Edgerouter X and use that while out and about to keep things ad free and reasonably safe.
I'd caution about that claim. Google pulled AdNauseam[0], a uBlock Origin extension, from the Chrome Web Store since it was fundamentally disrupting Google's business model via click fraud. (It automates clicking ads in order to create noise in user tracking.) This was far, far before it became as popular as AdBlock Plus.
PiHole takes an even more aggressive stance against ads, blackholing entire networks. It poses as much as a threat to the ad industry as AdNauseam. So I'd wager that PiHole will get shut down long before it reaches the popularity of AdBlock Plus.
1) Unlike AdNauseam, Google can't do much to get in the way of Pi-Hole. This isn't within its ecosystem.
2) Actually, while it's not great for publishers, it's not that disruptive (at that scale) because it doesn't impact the advertiser's ad spend. No request > No charge.
Now if you wanted to create something that would be quite disruptive, you'd need to combine the 2, with a twist :
You could have a headless browser in a VM (for safety) that makes some of those calls and mimic a click + follow the redirect + stay on the landing page and browse another N pages.
Not every single ad obviously because that'd be easy to detect but at random, in an erratic way. That'd be like simulating an actual user.
Throw in there some cookie dropping / reset to mess with tracking and it could have some pretty interesting effects.
The reason why it'd more dangerous? Because it'd throw off performance of those ads and ML optimizations done by various vendors. Usually you expect a click-through rate (CTR) of 0.X % to maybe 2-3% and similarly an actual conversion rate in the single digits.
On a large scale, you'd see a a CTR that either go up or stay on par, but a conversion rate that is free falling and that would have some serious consequences for both the advertiser's marketing team and the publisher / ad network.
Take it one step further and have a TOR like network of those pi-holes taking care of that both to prevent device finger-printing and maybe coordinating a specific publisher / ad network / advertisers and you could see that advertiser looking at reducing its ad spend quite drastically when performance goes down the drain. And an ad network / publisher having to do some explaining.
Some kind of "activist" bot network to force specific advertisers to reduce ad spending or simply occur costs.
2) If the goal (of PiHole and other ad/tracking blockers) is to encourage a subscription model over an advertising model for publishers, I'd argue that making ads ineffective for publishers is much more important than directly attacking advertisers' profits. Without publishers willing to host ads, advertisers will lose anyways.
Is there any reason they couldn't start ignoring system DNS resolvers for "key properties" in favour of using DNS over HTTPS to themselves "for your comfort and safety"? And use pinned keys for those DoH resolvers to stop you MitMing it.
You could maybe still transparently proxy things or firewall specific hosts, but that's a lot less straightforward and higher risk of collateral blockage.
Also, a link[1] to the Pi-Hole page.
> Install by running one command:
> curl -sSL https://install.pi-hole.net | bash
installing arbitrary software off the internet by piping curl output to bash is a terrible idea. At the very least, I would have expected them to sign this script... considering this software has unlimited access to your internal network, and the ability to influence ALL network traffic into/out of your internal network.
>Our code is completely open, but piping to bash can be dangerous. For a safer install, review the code and then run the installer locally.
You're probably getting a net performance win without all that add data being loaded.
One thing that became immediately apparent was how much faster browsing the web got after I turned it on.
Our install Pi-Hole points its upstream DNS to 1.1.1.1, with uBlock Origin where possible installed on our devices. Can't imagine going back.
And that's what ads are, per se, in the 21st century. "Ads", as the current implementation defines it from my perspective, are no longer general-purpose and static. No, they chase you around the web and then for weeks will try to sell you the thing you just purchased. They'll load random executable code onto your machine. I, too, have no problem with a static JPG at the top of the screen, but that hasn't been what ads are in over a decade.
Now the counter-argument would be, "but TV and print ads are not like that, so not all ads." Okay, fair argument though that might be, it's only because TV and print can't, and it's not for lack of trying. Print had the CueCat[0], TV has tried (and mostly failed), but those Samsung TVs are looking pretty creepy from what I'm reading.
So to me, it's like saying, "I don't have a problem with authoritarian governments per se, it's all of the spying, control of the citizenry, and propaganda I have a problem with." Well, that kind of defines an authoritarian government, ergo...
Anyway, I'm just being pedantic. Load up those ad blockers, and get Pi-hole running.
Btw, you know you're on a site which occasionally does "native" advertising/promotions, if with decency? Also, think of tech coverage in the last decade or so; it's dominated by big media pushing their agenda aka the "consumerization of IT" (cloud stuff, Fb and Google web frameworks).
There's an ample literature, in media studies and elsewheere, to this effect.
Mentioned in TFA:
Among other things, the online advertising business model has incentivized clickbait—and worse—at enormous scale. Facebook Inc. and YouTube LLC figure out how to make people spend more time on their sites to maximize ad inventory. This has abetted the spread of fake news, violent children’s content, and Logan Paul.
I installed a Pi-hole last week, totally worth. Best amount of time and money I've spent so far this year.
I think it's terrible for our health and our minds.
Yes, citizens, watch your daily dose of ads or else the economy crumbles! For the good of capitalism, watch ads, citizens, watch ads!
Gotta earn those 15 million credits!
The setup needs upgrading for DNS over https and maybe run it in Kubernetes?
Questions:
1) is this black hole concept sustainable? Or, does it require significant management, and is likely to be circumvented by serving content through a proxy anyway?
2) Why do you run this on the cloud? Don’t you then incur significant bandwidth costs? Or, if DNS only are there speed issues with your EC2 instance lagging?
#!/bin/sh
PATH="/bin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/usr/sbin"
rm -f /tmp/badsites
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/StevenBlack/hosts/master/h... -O /tmp/badsites
if [ -f /tmp/badsites ]; then
grep '^0\.0\.0\.0' /tmp/badsites | awk '{print "local-zone: \""$2"\" redirect\nlocal-data: \""$2" A 0.0.0.0\""}' > /etc/unbound/badsites.conf
rm /tmp/badsites
rc-service unbound reload
You don't have to use the hosts file (or addn-hosts ), but performance starts to suffer once the list of domains gets past 120,000.
jacobsalmela says: June 24, 2015 at 06:53
It's partially due to the amount of domains on the lists controlled by the other sites. ~120,000 seemed to be the sweet spot. Once it got higher than that, the hosts format performed better. But a faster SD card can make a difference..."
https://jacobsalmela.com/2015/06/16/block-millions-ads-netwo...
The "list of domains" here is a list of domains to which the user does not want her computer to connect.
The author is suggesting list sizes over 120,000 begin to trigger performance issues, using this dnsmasq-based approach.
What about another "list of domains" that comprises all the ones to which the user does want to connect.
Would it be more or less than 120,000?
For over 15 years I have been running authoritative nameservers on the local network, using tinydns and later nsd, including a custom root.
cdb, the key-value store used in tinydns, on its own is useful for storing domain->ipaddr mappings. I can store lists up to 4GB.
If I understand correctly, the rough equivalent in Pi-Hole is perhaps serving /etc/hosts or some other list of hosts via dnsmasq. (I believe pdns_recursor can also serve /etc/hosts if I recall correctly.)
IME, controlling both /etc/hosts and authoritative DNS has made it very easy to block ads since they almost always rely on DNS.
However I use authoritative DNS as a substitute for recursive DNS.
/etc/resolv.conf lists authoritative nameservers, not resolvers.
As such, DNS is primarily used not to block but to selectively permit. (To build the zonefiles, I use a separate method for "prefetching" needed IP address in bulk that does not use recursive DNS. It has worked beautifully for over 15 years. On the local network I have encrypted DNS lookups via authoritative queries to CurveDNS-proxied authoritative nameservers; no recursive resolvers are needed.)
Foregoing recursive DNS, the approach is similar to a firewall ruleset where the default is to block everything. The user then adds specific rules to allow desired traffic (or in this case domain resolutions).
In other words, the approach I chose was to determine what domains I wanted to access instead of trying to identify every possible domain that needed to be blocked. Every domain is blocked by default until I allow it.
Although I have no need for Pi-Hole personally I would like to see it succeed. I am glad to see that other users taking an interest in DNS.
The reason I ask the question about the size of the "allow" domain list is that over 15 years I am not even close to reaching 120,000 domains. I wonder how many domains other users visit.
To rephrase the question again: If there are two lists of domains: 1. all the domains to which the user wants to allow and 2. all the domains she wants to block, then which is the larger list?
The answer will vary from one user to another.