Using a PiHole

way above the level of activity I have time for.

I was going to say, though - what's so hard about using a pi hole. insert pi, chew, and swallow.

My parents had trouble with their computers getting overrun with malware. Once we got them cleaned up, I set a pi-hole up for them to help with future issues. They got a Raspberry Pi 3B+ starter kit to run it off of. ~$60 for the board, power supply, case, and a 64Gb memory card. Really the longest part of setting it up was downloading the latest image for the OS. Once that was downloaded, it only took a few minutes to set the system up.

I did have some trouble with their router.

The way this works the the Pi works as filtered DNS server. Any request for something off the internet gets checked against their database of known ad and hazardous sites and requests to problem sites get redirected to a garbage IP address. The difference between a Pi-Hole and a browser add blocker is that the Pi will block the add from ever connecting to it's server, whereas an in-browser add blocker will still download it, but filter it out when it is displayed. The practical upshot is that by not downloading those add, you speedup your apparent internet load times.

There are a couple things you need to do to make it work though. 1. You need to set your Pi on a static I address on your local network. 2. You then want to change your devices to use that as their DNS server. Ideal way is to set the DNS server at the router level so that everything on the local network will use it as a DNS server, filtering your whole network.

How easy that is to do depends on your router. I have a Linksys router at home so it's pretty strait forward to setup. My parents have a router that was provided by their DSL service. that is a modified version of a Netgear system and is not nearly as easy to edit settings on as mine is. It took some googling to figure out how to get it to setup everything that way I wanted, but the end result is it worked.

The Pi-Hole has a built in web browser so you can manage it from other computers on the network. It gives stats as well as the ability to white/black list various websites. My parents are the not most tech literate people and they and use it without much headache.

Pros:
1. Easy and cheap to setup. $60 and a couple hours all told. Once it's running, you don't have to do anything with it.
2. 10-12% increase in internet speeds.
3. Bypasses websites that block adblockers. You can safely uninstall AdBlock+ and get to sites like latimes.com or weatherchanel.com that won't work with the ad blocker, and still have ads blocked.

Cons:
1. Unlike AdBlock+ the place for the add is still maintained when you load a website, just no ad fills it. This leaves you with white blocks where the ads would go. This can be a bit distracting on some sites.

Overall, I think it's a good investment. I am thinking I'll setup one at my hose next with a Pi Zero that I have. I need to get a wired network adaptor for it though. So maybe in a week or two when I get a few minutes.

Stored locally. I have it set to update its blacklist once a month.