The web in 2018 is a mess. Sites wanting to send you desktop alerts, know your location, advert after advert, live chat on every site, GDPR inspired cookie notifications, ad block blocking blockers, Uggg! What happened to the web!
If we are honest with ourselves we should have seen this coming. You know the phrase, you get what you pay for? Well, we web users pay for very little. We have become the product. Well, I refuse to be the product being served ad’s in hopes I’ll buy now or click here or you wont last 5 minutes in this game… I played EVE Online for 4 years, your game has nothing on that experience.
So, I sat down and over the course of about 2 hours with the assistance of a friend we took a Raspberry Pi (rev.1 model B+) I had laying around and installed Pi Hole on it. Set the little machine as my networks DNS and let it do its thing.
Since then the amount of advertisements served on my home network has been reduced to a amount so low it felts like 1992 all over again. The only adverts displayed are those hosted on the domains being visited (though even that can be blocked using some RegEx magic).
A quick capture of how the last week has been:
…and that’s is just the domains, not the individual blocked ad count!
I could not be happier with Pi Hole, one of the true for the people projects. If you are tired of adverts everywhere, give Pi Hole a try. It is worth the savings in frustration and constant barrage of free trial to thing X taking up screen space.
