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The fact that Web surfing has deteriorated lately is no news at all. We can thank the BigCorps for that because they’ve managed to gain so much control of that and that’s not all, they’ve f#cked up the way marketing is done as well.

How many times have you tried to peacefully read an article on an online newspaper without being disturbed by those pesky pop-ups to Sign-up to Newsletters or get a free ebook on non-sense? Well, this is breaking usability in many ways.

That’s not even the tip of the iceberg, if we go deeper, we see they’re tracking all our movement on the WWW (spelled dub-dub-dub) for marketing purposes but also selling that information to 3rd parties without even telling you what’s going to happend with your data.

Why Privacy matters? #

That’s a question with many edges. I think the real questions should be:

Would you
- give your home keys to a total stranger?
- give your banking credentials to a stranger?
- share all your medical/financial information publicly?

If the answer to the above questions is No then you know what privacy is about by this point.

Improving your Web surfing experience #

The simplest way we can improve our UX, and currently the only way we have full control, is to block ads, pop-ups and tracking.

Privacy redirect (browser extension) #

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Supported by

uBlock Origin (browser extension) #

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Supported by

Privacy Redirect for Safari (€ 1.99 browser extension) #

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Supported by

Newpipe (Android app) #

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Supported by

Freetube (Desktop app) #

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Supported by

Detox your home WiFi LAN #

Get yourself a Raspberry Pi 3. Why 3 and not 4? Because 4 requires a cooler and some also install a heatsink. There are many opinions on heatsink’s efficiency. To keep things simple, just get a RPI3 kit, it contains everything you need to boot your OS.

Flash raspbian on the MicroSD card and continue to install and setup PiHole.

Here are a few useful AdLists:

Not possible to block YouTube ads. Unfortunately they use a shitty strategy with a ton of domains and subdomains which is impossible to come up with a capture-all pattern. But the above browser extensions help you circumvent that – it’s currently the only solution.

Thus you’ll have no more ads on your whole WiFi LAN so you can peacefully read those news articles without any pesky attention grabbers.