[aldousd666]

The web is the enemy. I have an ad blocking VPN and I use GroundNews to filter out sites that have paywalls. Between those two things, I lead a relatively sane life. But I tried looking at some of the same places on an unflitered device and man, I can't even imagine living like that. It now costs me $100/year in ad blocking/circumvention just so I don't want to kill the browser.

[doubled112]

Is the adblocking VPN doing anything some DNS block lists on your router or device wouldn’t do?

You can’t do MITM on HTTPS anyway, so I can’t imagine they would do anything more than a $20 Pi Zero and PiHole, except for the fact that somebody else is managing it.

[aldousd666]

I could do that, but then I'd have to maintain it. I used to hostfile hack my devices. but the vpn is just easier.

[doubled112]

Fair enough. Sometimes a VPN is also easier than forcing each device to use a specific DNS server too. I get it.