Clever hacker fits 537,000 domains in a $5 ESP32 ad-blocking dongle

ssbulaev about 19 hours ago 26 commentsRead Article on tomshardware.com

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Discussion (26 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

maratc•about 17 hours ago

is it enough to block all ads on tomshardware?

Waterluvian•about 17 hours ago

Last time I visited Tom Shardware it felt like the whole thing is basically an ad. Is the content still any good? I recall back when it was the go-to.

undersuit•about 17 hours ago

They seem to have locked a lot of interesting content behind the Premium News package, correct me if I'm wrong I can't read the Premium content to judge how it compares to the free Reddit reposts.

That and the shuttering of Anandtech sucks.

sixtyj•about 13 hours ago

Any media have rough times.

We got used to consume digital content for free but on the other side we don’t love ads…

Ad networks give pennies to publishers, and to get high spending direct advertiser is almost impossible.

Not everybody is capable to develop a long-term feasible digital strategy eg as NYT.

tandr•about 14 hours ago

Remove permission to execute JavaScript (in your browser) on sites that use html-load.com and error-report.com in addition to blocking these two in DNS. Solved it for me, don't know for how long.

mikestew•about 17 hours ago

Even behind a pi-hole that whole site is a game of “find the tiny little x”.

BRB, the raspberry pi is sending CPU temp alerts now…

neuralkoi•about 17 hours ago

This really begs the question as to how much juice you can get from $5 compute.

This IS IoT in my opinion, not whatever bloatware comes with your Samsung fridge or wifi-connected faucet.

Rohansi•about 16 hours ago

> $5 compute

Unrelated but the author at Tom's Hardware is apparently unaware of AliExpress so they bumped the price from $2 (or less) to $5. And that's the price for just one. These things are so cheap you can throw them in everything. They're the perfect alternative to a Raspberry Pi because they have WiFi, Bluetooth, lots of GPIO, and decent compute. Not enough to run Linux but you don't need Linux for IoT.

Scoundreller•about 10 hours ago

I just bought an ESP32-C3 with a tiiiiny 0.42" LCD screen for CAD$3 from Aliexpress off their "Choice" items menu.

Rohansi•about 10 hours ago

And on the higher end you can get an ESP32 CYD (Cheap Yellow Display) which has a 2.8" or larger touch screen, SD card slot, LiPo battery connection and charger, speaker port, and maybe more for ~$15. Can make fancy UIs for it with LVGL or install something like MicroPythonOS on it if you have PSRAM.

https://lvgl.io/ https://micropythonos.com/

xboxnolifes•about 15 hours ago

There's very little compute going on in this chip. It's a few hashes per second. Which is to say you can do a lot with $5 of compute if you can figure out how to not need to use a lot of compute.

bombcar•about 15 hours ago

A pregamgamanagany test can be $5 and apparently it can run doom, so in bulk compute has to be pretty cheap.

ianmarcinkowski•about 15 hours ago

I no have a few esp32s sitting around. I no wonder what else I could use these for?

edoceo•about 10 hours ago

Greenhouse automation. Smart(er) home thermostat. Lighting effects on wizard staff.

buckhx•about 18 hours ago

Clever hacker needs to look up a Bloom Filter

Lukas_Skywalker•about 18 hours ago

Lazy commenters need to look at the README to see that the bloom filter is mentioned as a next step. The hacker is indeed clever.

amelius•about 17 hours ago

Only if the hacker also tests for false positives.

Lukas_Skywalker•about 17 hours ago

The way it's worded in the readme makes it sound as if this was exactly the intention.

amazingamazing•about 18 hours ago

> how it could grow : Bloom filter in RAM as a fast pre-filter (skip flash for the ~99% of misses)

https://github.com/M-Abozaid/esp32-c3-adblock

rustyhancock•about 17 hours ago

The README mentions it and conventionally it seems right.

But back of the envelope it seems you're shaving not much off if the latency is primarily WiFi latency (tens of milliseconds) not flash reads (microseconds?).

If you use loads of transient clients perhaps a LRU cache would help since round trips might be quite slow.

rurban•about 13 hours ago

Double space. Go from 42 bit to 46 bit and you get the same. Still wondering about the dynamic binary search. A static search can be faster, even on an AVR

Graziano_M•about 17 hours ago

I opened the article and immediately ctrl-f'd for the word "bloom". Though the author plans to use them.

intheitmines•about 15 hours ago

What do people use bloom filters for in production? I've only ever used as part of a blacklist

gtowey•about 15 hours ago

Search partition pruning in distributed databases is one concrete application I'm aware of.

Hashtables optimized for really large item counts; it can be a useful fast pre-check for item existence.