RaisinCrazyFool

Damn, the market’s crazy. You could get a Pixel 7 brand new, unlocked, for less than $400 when it was still current, 3 years ago.

The only things Pixels have going for them are the aggressive sales and GrapheneOS.

What’s the best alternative? It’s been a while since I used any of them. I checked Tidal recently and it looked like they have an AI slop problem too.

Right. It only works for dedicated ad domains. In practice, that’s a LOT of ads.

On Android, it’ll block most ads, including full-screen ads, within apps.

In will NOT, however, work with sites like Netflix or Youtube, because those use the same domains for ads as for the actual videos.

Yes, everyone should set up DoH (DNS-over-HTTPS) or DoT (DNS-over-TLS). You can do this at the browser level, like you just did in Firefox, or at the OS level.

You can also block ads this way, by cutting off connections to known ad domains before they even start. Mullvad runs a free ad-blocking DoH server anyone can use. See https://mullvad.net/en/help/dns-over-https-and-dns-over-tls for instructions on how to set that up on your OS.

Firefox has also just announced a built-in VPN, which could help get around other types of ISP-level censorship. That’s probably the only free VPN I’d trust, personally. Mullvad and Proton are well-regarded paid VPNs if you want to go that route.

Generally not. Anything with authentication would be using HTTPS encryption. So there will be two layers of encryption: the VPN encryption and the web site’s HTTPS encryption. The VPN provider can’t replace the HTTPS encryption because your browser would identify it as being encrypted with the wrong certificate and it would block the connection.

Although…given that they control the browser, too, I suppose they could code it to remove those safeguards, but that would not go unnoticed for long.

When you use a VPN, it basically replaces your ISP as the intermediary who can snoop all your traffic, so the real question is who do you trust more: your ISP or Mozilla?