this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2025
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I wonder how much longer that will work. DNS over HTTPS is now a thing and totally defeats the mechanism of a pihole.
VPN running on a WRT router? I know very little about this stuff I just know the buzzwords for street cred.
Pihole's act as a DNS or "Dynamic Name Server". All internet traffic is IP based once it leaves your home because routers dont know how to forward traffic for "https://samsung-ad-hell.com/", so there is a dedicated kind of packet for "Where is https://samsung-ad-hell.com/ located?" and that is a DNS Lookup. The Pihole pretends to know because it maintains a list of bad urls that host websites that only support privacy exploitation and advertisements and tells them "oh you want to go to 0.0.0.0, that's where you'll find your stuff" as it snickers.
But DNS Lookups were always plain text. When your laptop says "Where is https://big-booties.com/" your ISP knows you want porn. Now there is a new variant called "Secure DNS Lookup" which encrypts the url you're asking about. The ISP knows you're asking for a domain's IP, but it can't know which one and it no longer cares. Neat.
The trouble is that the Pi-Hole can no longer protect us from all the stupid fucking smart devices that want to earn a fraction of a penny per device by spying on us because THEY use the new Secure DNS Lookup.
Interesting... Well, this prompted me to search what Pi-Hole has done for this, and they seem to have a way to continue blocking even DoH, using "cloudfared", which is another daemon that needs to run with Pi-Hole... They can't possibly think their enshittification will continue to work.
It works on 99% of consumers. As long as preventing the enshittification from stealing your data requires effort and knowledge, this will continue to be the case. Hence the arms race between enshittifiers and human beings, two grouos that are mutually exclusive.