The Beauty of Having a Pi-Hole

Summary

So, check this little idea that I have - I want to browse the internet without all sorts of unscrupulous actors collecting every little bit of metadata on me and my family they can possibly get their hands on. Radical, I know. Who would’ve thought that I don’t wont every single website I visit syphon metadata about my computer, my browser, and other signals that can help them build a profile without my consent. Unfortunately, the experience of browsing the web or using software in 2024 boils down to fielding a barrage of ads, malicious scripts, analytics widgets, chatbot widgets, massive “take over your page” banners asking you to consent to cookies, software that won’t shut up and just phones home with every click, and other things that you probably didn’t want to have to deal with. Not that any of these things didn’t exist in some capacity in 2004 (or even 1994), but the sheer amount of privacy-abusing techniques was much smaller. The whole concept of “ad tech” became “figure out how to abuse the living hell out of every visitor” which is, let’s say, suboptimal. I even alluded to it in some of my previous writing. Which brings me to my main point - you should absolutely use a Pi-hole in your home network. It’s not exactly news that this project exists - folks like Jeff Atwood, Troy Hunt, Scott Hanselman, and Scott Helme talked about it for years. I am just adding another datapoint to the camp of “Get this on your network ASAP.” If you’ve never heard about it, Pi-hole is software that runs on a Raspberry Pi (can technically run even outside a Pi) that acts as the Domain Name Service (DNS) proxy within your own network. That is, if you go to https://example.com, it first hits the Pi-hole before going out and asking authoritative DNS servers for domain information. Its main purpose is blocking requests to domains that you don’t want to hit from your network. Those can be trackers, ad-serving content delivery networks (CDNs), or just any domain that you deem not worth...