The ad blocking system called pi-hole has now been integrated with the new web based user interface of Freedombone. This blocks ads at the DNS level on your home network. It's not perfect and doesn't block all ads, but it does help to improve the user experience and speed of browsing the web. One thing I notice in particular is that it doesn't block ads on YouTube, and that Google has been adopting devious ways to avoid ad blocking by using randomly generated subdomains to serve advertising content from.

For a long time I didn't really care about ads and the internet didn't depend highly upon them. Then I distinctly remember the occasion in 2007 when my web browsing experience went from having discreet banner ads which I didn't care about to having actually offensive ads shoved in my face in a highly disrespectful manner. From that time onwards I started using browser based ad blockers, and then eventually pi-hole.

Pi-hole has its own web based user interface, but I've made no attempt to integrate that into the Freedombone web UI. That's because it requires logging, and from both a security and a performance perspective I'd rather avoid any additional unnecessary logging. If you're running on a microSD card then writing the minimum amount of things to disk is important because I/O bandwidth is low and the disk itself wears out eventually.