Salutations, readers! As some of you may know, Manifest V3, the new version of the Chromium extension platform creates significant issues with regards to ad-blockers. While yes, most companies were able to update their extensions to get around the issues posed by it, the precedent being set by Google is one which is extremely uncertain for these wonderful tools.
Even though I am an avid Safari user, these active steps made by Google towards eliminating all content blockers was scary. So, I looked elsewhere, and found Pi-Hole
As the name suggests, a Pi-Hole is designed to run on a Raspberry Pi, a very small computer the size of a fridge magnet. However, it can be installed on most Linux based operating systems or deployed in Docker. Seeing as I had a spare Raspberry Pi 3B+ lying around, I decided to give it a shot.
The way most ad-blockers work is by looking through the front-end code of the website, and comparing every script/element against a blacklist. If there’s a match, the element is blocked. However, this means that websites are able to detect these content blockers since they exist within the browser. In addition, basically every app that doesn’t support extensions will still have ads and trackers built in.
That’s where the Pi-Hole comes in. Instead of blocking the specific elements, it blocks entire domains with user-importable blacklists.
Setting up the Pi-Hole is very simple, but make sure you have admin access to your router. Just format a Micro-SD Card with the Pi-Hole image, plug it into your network (I used Gigabit Ethernet), and give it a static IP address. From there, go into your router settings and set the DNS server to the IP address of the Raspberry Pi. It’s so simple that I did it headless – I just used an SSH connection from my computer to set the entire thing up!
A huge advantage of something like this is that it is completely network-wide. So, now that Samsung have started dumping ads into Tizen, this blocks them from ever entering your network. And those crappy free mobile games? Zero ads
Since this only exists on your home network, the second you leave the house, you do not have access to these amazing features. I thought of this before installing and found PiVPN, a VPN server designed to run in tandem with Pi-Hole on a Raspberry Pi. Installation was again very simple, just SSH into your Pi and download the server. However, if on a school network, most UDP and TCP ports are blocked, so set up the configuration as TCP port 123, as that is usually left unblocked on most protected networks. I figured this out after I had configured the server, so I used port-forwarding on my router to get around that