An alternative to giving your money to one of the largest tax-dodgers on the planet is a $30 raspberry pi with "pi-hole" installed.

Browsing on my phone at home with all those ad networks blocked okay... until you go outside your home network and get all the ads again. It's almost made my stop using my phone outside of my home network.

Apple's effective tax rate is actually higher than many of its peers, and higher than the sector on average.

All multinationals need strong tax enforcement, but this isn't actually one where Apple is really any worse than others (and better than many).

https://finbox.com/NASDAQGS:AAPL/explorer/effect_tax_rate

Apple has also banned more Apps to protect a Chinese dictatorship than many of it's peers.

That's fine. There just seemed to be an unnecessarily large amount of tugging of Apple's dick in the top of the thread, and I wanted to suggest an alternative.

I used to run a Pi-Hole for a long time, but then I realized I was trading my day to day tech job, to screwing around with Pi-Hole (along with other RPi's in my house) on my personal time. And yes, I run a WireGuard VPN too and could/have turn on WG to tunnel back to my Pi-Hole.

Switched over to NextDNS, so that my ad blocking is on the macro network too. I'm satisfied. My wife is not, since her trashy "click here" links don't work half the time. :) Tells me it is working just fine.

https://nextdns.io

My NextDNS dashboard - https://i.imgur.com/bjJ9OZH.png (My garage door opener is a chatty bastard)

Isn't that just shifting the tracking to another site? Now nextdns.io knows everything that you're doing.

And the SDK in your device knows, the hardware manufacturer knows, your cell carrier knows, etc.... just trying to clean up my experience in lessening ads on in my UI.

Until an EMP takes us back to the Stone Age, it is really hard not to be tracked on the internet.

Source - I used to work for a company that does the tracking.

I set up Tailscale on Android to use my Pihole from anywhere. Works pretty well.

That is why I have an IPSEC connection back to my home from work, so I can use my internal DNS with DNSBL blocklist. (be careful, few employers will allow such a setup).

The top list seems like a reflection of market share: fls-eu.amazon.de, sessions.bugsnag.com, googleads.g.doubleclick.net, data.mistat.intl.xiaomi.com, app-measurement.com, in.treasuredata.com ..

For ad blocking outside the home, install WireGuard on the RPi and configure it to use pihole as its DNS server. Install script should prompt you to do this automatically if it detects pihole is installed.

Then just connect your WireGuard client on your phone to the endpoint

Use something like freedns.afraid.org for dynamic IP address support

If you already own a domain, you can also pretty trivially (<10 lines of bash) implement your own dynamic IP address support with your DNS providers (my solution uses Cloudflare).

In a nutshell: `update-dns get-my-current-external-ip-address $MY_DOMAIN_NAME`

You can have a subdomain like `vpn.yourwebsite.com` point to your residential IP. It may take a bit of fussing to get the ports and such right. But otherwise it's "just worked" for me, for the last 6 months.

Useful if you want to remove the dependency on yet-another-service-provider that can go out of business (the dynamic-dns people).

Don’t worry, DoH will fix that pi hole loophole

Yep. This is the problem - DoH (using Google or CloudFlare) is just privacy-washing even more intrusion. The aversion that companies have to merely being required to label their fuckery shows what a problem we have.

Or you can use nextdns and have DNS protection on any network you’re on.

They have a paid option that gives you a higher query quota.

> An alternative to giving your money to one of the largest tax-dodgers on the planet is a $30 raspberry pi with "pi-hole" installed.

Try to be more condescending, kid. It'll make your point so much more effective if you think I don't know what DNS filtering is.

Trying to spackle over social, economic, and political problems with technical hacks doesn't solve the underlying issue.

You can just use an adblocking DNS server I think?