Blocked-now

With all the distrust of big tech giants collecting data on each and every one of us.  I started to think does it matter.  Sure I was seeing ads on stuff I was just searching for on Amazon.  But so what.  It wasn't going to get me to buy it.  Then the data collected on WhatsApp (owned by FB) was going to be sold.  But still who cares about the idiotic banter on chats, being sold?  I didn't care, it was worthless to me.  But still I installed yet another messaging app (Signal - open sourced and owned by no one) to msg those those who followed the herd of sheep over.  However, I do use it a bit and it's come in handy to remove unwanted noise.

But the one aspect of data collection was who was collecting it.  Where it was going and how it could potentially be used against me, was my concern.

One of my buds told me about this Raspberry Pi project called Pi-Hole.   I was on chat boards with friends that were talking about VPNs like (Surfshark, VPNord, Windscribe, you get it.)

But I didn't know if I needed a VPN.  Now I'm not going to explain what it is.  That's what Google is for.  So go do it yourself, right now if you have no clue.   Then once you know what it does, its up to you if it's something you need. But the Pi-Hole really intrigued me.  For one, it's a 1 time cost for setup, and then it's set it and forget it.   And two, it's a Raspberry Pi.  I have an arduino board, but these Pi projects were really popular.  In any case I woke up really early and couldn't sleep so I went online and bought one.  It arrived a few days later.

I knew it was small.  But this is postage stamp tiny.

Things you will need once you have the Pi.  (This one is the Pi-Zero-W).  You will need 1 micro-USB cable, and charging block, and a smallish sdhc card.  (I am using a 16GB card I had kicking around).  And a case.  My buddy is making me one so, I didn't buy one.  It saved me 10 bucks.  I'll buy him something from LCBO.

Setting it up.

1. Image the sdcard with OS lite Linux using the Raspberry Pi imaging tool.  It's quick and easy and takes about 30mins.
2. Enable SSH on the OS before you take it out. Headless Pi-W  Headless Pi-Ethernet
3. And configure the WiFi access on it.  
4. Then you can eject it and install into the Pi and wait a few minutes for it to boot up.  Once you see it on the network, at this point you can from your router make it's IP address static.
5. Install pi-hole on the OS.  Accept all the defaults, the only thing I changed was the DNS servers.  I used OpenDNS instead of Google.  Follow all the instructions to change the user access to the Pi.
6. Here's where it becomes a bit tricky.  You need to make the Pi the DNS Server and the DHCP server.  It's how devices know to route requests through the Pi and it's Pi-Hole service.  Otherwise it will still go out through the modem/router and you will still see ads.
7. Once you do this configuration, everything on the network with an dynamic IP will eventually get new ip info from the Pi.  Or you can force it by telling the device to renew it's lease.  Google that too on how to do it on your iOS devices.  On our Android devices I couldn't figure out where Samsung hid it.  So I just reconnected the devices and hoped it got the info from the Pi.  And it was smart enough to do just that.

Now when you go to sites with many ads, you may start to see empty white boxes.  Go to MSN or Yahoo! and you'll see the page littered with ads.  The browser will seem faster, but it's only because it's not having to load the ad images.  So your network will not be any faster, but your browsing will be, as there's no ads to load.

When I first set it up, I didn't configure things like the way I listed above, so I was still seeing ads.  It was late, so I left it and I continued debugging it later today.  And after some help from my buddy we figured it out.  And that's how I arrived at the process steps above.

After getting it working on my iMac, I moved on to all the other devices in our home.  One by one, we could see the ads being blocked on sites.  Those are the empty white boxes you see there.  It was so neat!  Even if you click on a site that had an ad, because it was in cache, the site gets blocked.  Cool beans!

I was so tired of browsing and accidentally hitting an ad because the page hadn't loaded fully and i thought I was clicking NEXT but that coordinate on the page was an ad.  POPUP! @$@!!@$#$.  I was ignoring the ads, but when they start to interfere with routine things.  It's hard to ignore.  They were becoming intrusive.

So this is why I decided to do this, after several weeks of questions and reading. 

It's only limited to our home network.  But this is something that would be so handy to have on any device to improve performance while on outside networks.  Maybe that's what VPN paid services also do.  Might be worth a look.

But being stuck at home.  During this COVID pandemic.  This is good enough for now.