2019-05-20 - Notes from the Frontline
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The pi-hole experiment, for now, is working quite well, and its
presence has showed just how much tracking we are all subjected to.
My eldest son asked for a computer for his birthday (still can't
believe he's 16! like, that's only five or six years younger
than me, right?) and after a little scrimping and some digging
around for refurbs we got him a pretty nice little computer with
that all-important GPU. All he wants is to play Sims, and this
should allow him to do that. Unfortunately this also means using
Microsoft's OS, Windows 10.
Thanks to the pihole, just getting the computer set up was a trial.
The boy wanted to use Google's Chrome browser, because his school
uses Google Docs for all assignments/reports. So he opened the
Edge browser, and searched for it. Thing is, though, that all
the `results` offered which were apparently web addresses, were
actually tracking and surveillance links, and these were now all
blocked by the pihole.
In the end, we got this to work by simply typing the search result
URL into the address bar, and it struck me that this is motivation
behind Google's stated intention to deprecate the url address bar!
They don't want you to simply type (e.g.) www.theguardian.com into
the browser, that doesn't aid them. They want you to search for
theguardian on their site, and click through to it using their
tracking link. Its the same with their version of the web for
publishers, AMP, which similarly doesn't take you to the actual
site, but to a spavined version hosted on their servers.
We've come a long, long way from "Do No Evil", and instead we're
fully into Big Brother territory. They control the horizontal, they
control the vertical, and we're all just pawns in their little
game.
Anyway, I know none of this is new or earth-shattering to many, but
this has really been hammered home to us all, even my kids, today.
We shouldn't have to fight with our devices to access the internet
in a safe way.
