We’ve discussed home-network-wide ad-blocking a few times before. Every few weeks I’ll remember that I have have had a Raspberry Pi attached with twine to my home router, running pi-hole silently, for a few years now. I’ll login to the web interface and dwell on how well it does the one job it was created for. This is one such time.
It tells me that over the last 24 hours, a typical day, one in every seven requests was to an ad network or tracker. And that the numbers really add up.
I also see that it replies to 16% of queries from its cache, and a little over 8% are queries from itself – the pi also does some file syncing for me. That means 14 + 16 + 8 = over 38% of queries don’t need to be resolved by the public internet. It’s a rough measure of how much more efficient the Internet feels at home.
Finally, it reminds me just how many devices we have at home that connect to the internet. Two phones, two iPads, a PC and at least one Mac, the Pi itself. That just ten years ago most of us had no tablet and used either a dumbphone or a smartphone that had no meaningful wireless syncing. Everything was on one laptop we carried around everywhere. That today we are firmly in a multi-device world.