I’ve been running PiHole for awhile, in short it’s your own DNS server that’s configured to block DNS requests to known advertising domains. So when you load a website and it sends a DNS request to PopularAdvertisingCompany.com to load an ad, PiHole blocks the request so the ad can’t be loaded. It’s useful for devices that you can’t put an ad blocker on, like iPhones and smart TVs and such, but can’t block stuff like YouTube ads cause they come from the same domain as the videos themselves.

It also has bonus features like DNS caching which can speed up web browsing.

Any router from a mainstream brand is likely fine, just don’t enable any of their “cloud” BS and don’t use their smartphone app. I’ve had good luck with Asus, they have an app but you don’t have to use it at all.

For security, try to enable WPA3 on your Wi-Fi networks, otherwise WPA2 is probably fine unless you’re being targeted by a government-sponsored hacking operation. Choose a long password for your network.

Once you get it up and running, then worry about DNS and PiHole and VPNs and all that. Don’t get in over your head.

This is such an incredibly dumb idea. If this “storage method” was to gain any traction, Google would figure out how to shut it down, either by banning accounts (removing all your data) or worse, instituting a policy of removing videos that don’t reach a certain view threshold. Not to mention, encoding data this way is inefficient as hell.

Just pay a few dollars for reliable storage, whether from Google or Proton or whoever you like.

It’s pretty hard though. Without mass, everything travels at the speed of light and doesn’t experience the flow of time, which don’t really mesh well with classical physics (or quantum mechanics, and definitely not relativity).

Yup. It was funny how during the 2020 election cycle they briefly had to change all their merch to say “keep America great” despite continuing to use the MAGA slogan throughout most of Trump’s administration. By their logic, America was only “great” during the first part of 2020, which is… questionable, to say the least, since almost nothing was “great” during that time.

Wow, military spending went up when a major world power invaded a sovereign nation? I’m sure this is all Biden’s fault.

Even then, anyone can use inspect element to make it look like it says whatever you want.

Funny enough, a number of years ago a giant 4chan archive surfaced which included a lot of the very first SCP posts that had been lost. It actually confirmed that 173 was posted after Blink aired, meaning it was almost certainly inspired by the episode. Not that it makes the SCP worse, but it’s some interesting lore.

Yes, they allow certain “non-obtrusive” ads by default. Some people might be fine with this, but it should absolutely be opt-in, and their deal with an ad company is the only reason it’s the default.