2019-05-18 - Trying a pi-hole
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I've had a raspberrypi, model 1 B, sitting at home gathering dust
for a while. The kids and I used it before, mainly to play old dos
games in freedos, but continual issues with SD cards meant that it
fell out of favour.
As my concerns have grown over recent months regarding tracking and
invasive surveillance capitalism, I've become more concerned about
what this is all doing to my children and their mental health.
What's really motivated me lately, is the recent expansion of
fascism in the United States, and the increasing international
activity of american fascists in the global sense. In almost
every country, these fascist organisations are spreading their
hatred and their aggressively conservative worldview, be that
Catholic fundamentalists like C-Fam, or regressive fundamentalist
protestant organisations, we can see their filthy pawprints almost
everywhere. They have declared war on the progress we as a species
have achieved in the past century, they are emboldened by the Trump
administration, and they are empowered by the Free Speech Idiocracy
of the american tech-companies, exemplified by Eric Schmidt, Mark
Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey, people with practically no sense of
humanity, no view of tolerance beyond the tolerance of hatred that
drives their corporations profits.
On a personal level, my mental health, and the mental health of my
family, is critically endangered by these people. The final spur
to get this done was just this week, when my daughter received a
diagnosis of anorexia. While she's adamant that she isn't looking
at pro-ana-lifestyle sites, the fact remains that I would be
negligent as a parent of an ill child not to take immediate steps
to ensure that she can't access them.
It was a non-surprise to learn that most of the "ana" sites are
hosted either by Google on their blogger service, or by facebook.
So these all need to be blocked, immediately.
My home router is a Fritz-box, which does permit domain blocking,
but it is limited, both by number (100 sites) and by the fact that
it doesn't permit of regex matching to block blogger/blogspot
entirely. And now the pihole became an idea which I could no longer
avoid.
