Thread by @Tupp_Ed on Thread Reader App
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@Tupp_Ed: My son has set the house up with a Pi-Hole. It’s a raspberry pi running Ad blocking on the whole house’s network. We’re a few hours in and we’re seeing effects, as well as some teething...
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My son has set the house up with a Pi-Hole. It’s a raspberry pi running Ad blocking on the whole house’s network.
We’re a few hours in and we’re seeing effects, as well as some teething problems.
First, we’ve discovered that about a quarter of all the internet connection in or out of the house were ad related. In a few hours, that’s about 10,000 out of 40,000 processed.
We also discovered that every link on Twitter was blocked.
This was solved by whitelisting the t.co domain.
Once out browsing the Web, everything is loading pretty much instantly. It turns out most of that Page Loading malarkey we’ve been accustomed to is related to sites running auctions to sell Ad space to show you before the page loads.
All gone now.
We then found that the Samsung TV (which I really like) is very fond of yapping all about itself to Samsung HQ. All stopped now. No sign of any breakages in its function, so I’m happy enough with that.
The primary source of distress came from the habitual Lemmings player in the house, who found they could no longer watch ads to build up their in-app gold.
A workaround is being considered for this.
The next ambition is to advance the Ad blocking so that it seamlessly removed YouTube Ads.
This is the subject of ongoing research, and tinkering continues.
All in all, a very successful experiment.
Certainly this exceeds my equivalent childhood project of disassembling and assembling our rotary dial telephone.
A project whose only utility was finding out how to make the phone ring when nobody was calling.
For you can do it too!
Update: All4 on the telly appears not to have any ads any more. Goodbye Arnold Clarke!
They show your your stats on a neat little dashboard. 
Can confirm, after small tests, that RTÉ Player ads are now gone and the player on the phone is now just delivering swift, ad free streams at first click.
Some queries along the lines of “Are you not stealing the internet?”
Firstly, this is my network, so I may set it up as I please (or, you know, my son can do it and I can give him a stupid thumbs up in response).
But there is a wider question, based on the ads=internet model.
I’m afraid I passed the You Wouldn’t Download A Car point back when I first installed ad-blocking plug-ins on a browser.
But consider my chatty TV. Individual consumer choice is not the method of addressing pervasive commercial surveillance.
Should I feel morally obliged not to mute the TV when the ads come on?
No, this is a standing tension- a clash of interests.
But I think my interest in my family not being under intrusive or covert surveillance at home is superior to the ad company’s wish to profile them.
There’s a handy explanatory video from Dr. Johnny Ryan which sets out how we could end up with Just So Much ads.
Each webpage load can potentially run an auction (with you as the prize pig on the block) sending data to loads of different brokers. https://twitter.com/johnnyryan/status/1501134048739184641
Privacy International has a short and clear guide to what hardware you can use for setting up a Pi-Hole as well as some setup instructions.
Ad-blocking (home surveillance thwarting) is a human rights issue too!
Aside: 24 hours of Pi Hole stats suggests that Samsung TVs are very chatty. 14,170 chats a day. 
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