>First, We’ve Discovered That About A Quarter Of All The Internet Connection In Or Out Of The House

My son has set the house up with a Pi-Hole. It’s a raspberry pi running Ad blocking on the whole house’s network. 

We’re a few hours in and we’re seeing effects, as well as some teething problems.

— Simon McGarr (@Tupp_Ed) August 11, 2022

>First, we’ve discovered that about a quarter of all the internet connection in or out of the house were ad related. In a few hours, that’s about 10,000 out of 40,000 processed.

>We also discovered that every link on Twitter was blocked. This was solved by whitelisting the https://t.co domain.

>Once out browsing the Web, everything is loading pretty much instantly. It turns out most of that Page Loading malarkey we’ve been accustomed to is related to sites running auctions to sell Ad space to show you before the page loads. All gone now.

>We then found that the Samsung TV (which I really like) is very fond of yapping all about itself to Samsung HQ. All stopped now. No sign of any breakages in its function, so I’m happy enough with that.

>The primary source of distress came from the habitual Lemmings player in the house, who found they could no longer watch ads to build up their in-app gold. A workaround is being considered for this.

>The next ambition is to advance the Ad blocking so that it seamlessly removed YouTube Ads. This is the subject of ongoing research, and tinkering continues. All in all, a very successful experiment.

>Certainly this exceeds my equivalent childhood project of disassembling and assembling our rotary dial telephone. A project whose only utility was finding out how to make the phone ring when nobody was calling.

For you can do it too!https://t.co/l1SLzPrzp6

— Simon McGarr (@Tupp_Ed) August 11, 2022

>Update: All4 on the telly appears not to have any ads any more. Goodbye Arnold Clarke!

They show your your stats on a neat little dashboard. pic.twitter.com/RQB39IvnKD

— Simon McGarr (@Tupp_Ed) August 12, 2022

>Lemmings problem now solved.

>Can confirm, after small tests, that RTÉ Player ads are now gone and the player on the phone is now just delivering swift, ad free streams at first click.

>Some queries along the lines of “Are you not stealing the internet?” Firstly, this is my network, so I may set it up as I please (or, you know, my son can do it and I can give him a stupid thumbs up in response). But there is a wider question, based on the ads=internet model.

>I’m afraid I passed the You Wouldn’t Download A Car point back when I first installed ad-blocking plug-ins on a browser. But consider my chatty TV. Individual consumer choice is not the method of addressing pervasive commercial surveillance.

>Should I feel morally obliged not to mute the TV when the ads come on? No, this is a standing tension- a clash of interests. But I think my interest in my family not being under intrusive or covert surveillance at home is superior to the ad company’s wish to profile them.

There’s a handy explanatory video from Dr. Johnny Ryan which sets out how we could end up with Just So Much ads.

Each webpage load can potentially run an auction (with you as the prize pig on the block) sending data to loads of different brokers. https://t.co/wUosBLjM3f

— Simon McGarr (@Tupp_Ed) August 12, 2022
Privacy International has a short and clear guide to what hardware you can use for setting up a Pi-Hole as well as some setup instructions. 

Ad-blocking (home surveillance thwarting) is a human rights issue too!https://t.co/1vphCsaug1

— Simon McGarr (@Tupp_Ed) August 12, 2022

>Aside: 24 hours of Pi Hole stats suggests that Samsung TVs are very chatty. 14,170 chats a day.

>YouTube blocking seems difficult, as the ads usually come from the same domain as the videos. Haven’t tried it, but all of the content can also be delivered from a no-cookies version of the YouTube domain, which doesn’t have the ads. I have asked my son to poke at that idea.

This has proved a popular thread. I have no soundcloud, and the things I sell are not of general use. 

But you can always follow & support Digital Rights Ireland (who once knocked down a state surveillance law for half a billion people) @DRIalerts https://t.co/vrAPYsxjP4

— Simon McGarr (@Tupp_Ed) August 13, 2022

More Posts from Kingr321 and Others

2 months ago

This meme is inescapable on French insta so I'm posting it here for all to enjoy

1 year ago
kingr321 - Untitled

me as a writer: Oh no I can’t write that, somebody else already has

me as a reader: hell yes give me all the fics about this one scenario. The more the merrier

1 year ago
If You Change Your Mind 💕

If you change your mind 💕

1 year ago

I hate to give it to staff but they did snap with the booping thing. This is the "enrichment in my enclosure" thing we keep talking about, I feel like a bear that recieved a block of ice with pumpkins in it

4 months ago

I want you to remember:

The fascists hate you too and they just will pretend otherwise until after they've killed the rest of us, before they turn on you.

3 months ago

one thing ive always loved about fullmetal alchemist brotherhood is that it never begrudges a person their revenge. it never paints them as evil or worse than the object of their outrage. fullmetal alchemist will never tell a victim they have not earned their anger, or that it is not right. it does not speak against revenge because your anger is wrong. it only says that you must be careful - that vengeance may destroy you and the ones you care for if you let it consume you.

when mustang hears that scar is ishvalan, he says that, in many ways, his killing of state alchemists is justified, although he's still not keen to become a victim of it. when scar is faced with the daughter of the doctors he killed, he bows his head and tells her that justice is hers to deliver, and that he will not fight if she chooses to bestow it. roy is never told that he must forgive envy, or that hes wrong to want them dead; only that, should he choose to kill them, he will no longer be the kind of man he wants to be. the kind of man he can be. they all agree that envy must die - ed never says that roys anger or grief is unjustified, that his vengeance wouldnt be deserved. instead, he asks "is that the face you plan to wear when you lead this country?" he says your anger is earned, your violence is justified. if you burned them to death like you wanted to, no one would say they did not do it to themself. but is a man who burns a defeated enemy to death the kind of man you want to be?

when scar finally decides to stop killing state alchemists, he doesnt do it because he has learned to forgive, or because they do not deserve it. there is no forgiveness for the things amestris has done to his people, and arakawa never suggests that there could be. rather, he stops killing state alchemists because he cannot build a better world on top of more corpses. his anger is justified, but his violence will breed more violence, his hatred more hatred. it will kill him if he does not stop it first, and it will lead his people to even further ruin if he cannot escape it.

fullmetal alchemist never says that revenge is evil, or that your anger is not reasonable. it only asks, do you know the cost of taking that vengeance? is that the kind of man you want to be?

1 year ago

Things my extremely Italian physics professor has said:

“If you are walking in the woods nearby Chernobyl, you will probably be fine. But if you pick something up off the ground and eat it, you will die of radiation poisoning. Of course you may die if you eat things from the ground in other places, also, but likely not of radiation.”

“Unfortunately there is nothing I can teach you that will prevent you dying if there is on your house a hydrogen bomb. That is a politician problem. If any of you are president later, please do not hydrogen bomb my house.”

“Radioactivity could perhaps be used by terrorists, but it has not yet. Likely this is because terrorists do not study much physics.”

“Why is it that physics graduate students cannot make a nuclear bomb? It is not that they do not want to. They simply have not the money to buy the materials. Or anything else.”

1 year ago

AI Scraping Isn't Just Art And Fanfic

Something I haven't really seen mentioned and I think people may want to bear in mind is that while artists are the most heavily impacted by AI visual medium scraping, it's not like the machine knows or cares to differentiate between original art and a photograph of your child.

AI visual media scrapers take everything, and that includes screengrabs, photographs, and memes. Selfies, pictures of your pets and children, pictures of your home, screengrabs of images posted to other sites -- all of the comic book imagery I've posted that I screengrabbed from digital comics, images of tweets (including the icons of peoples' faces in those tweets) and instas and screengrabs from tiktoks. I've posted x-ray images of my teeth. All of that will go into the machine.

That's why, at least I think, Midjourney wants Tumblr -- after Instagram we are potentially the most image-heavy social media site, and like Instagram we tag our content, which is metadata that the scraper can use.

So even if you aren't an artist, unless you want to Glaze every image of any kind that you post, you probably want to opt out of being scraped. I'm gonna go ahead and say we've probably already been scraped anyway, so I don't think there's a ton of point in taking down your tumblr or locking down specific images, but I mean...especially if it's stuff like pictures of children or say, a fundraising photo that involves your medical data, it maybe can't hurt.

If you do want to officially opt out, which may help if there's a class-action lawsuit later, you're going to want to go to the gear in the upper-right corner on the Tumblr desktop site, select each of your blogs from the list on the right-hand side, and scroll down to "Visibility". Select "Prevent third party sharing for [username]" to flip that bad boy on.

(If someone wants to post a link in notes to instructions for doing it on the app, I haven't updated mine so the option doesn't appear and I don't know where to find it.)

10 months ago

One thing the analysts back in 2012 were right about is that they’d stop calling it “Obamacare” the second it started working and lo and behold anytime it was actually threatened under Trump it became The ACA and now Leftists who were in Kindergarten when the ACA was passed think Democrats have added nothing to this country.

1 year ago
Warhammer 40k But The K Stands For Kirby

warhammer 40k but the k stands for kirby

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kingr321 - Untitled
Untitled

He/Him

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