Ask HN: How to self-censor our news | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How to self-censor our news

4 pointsalibarber5 comments

Given the COVID-19 situation, my fiance and I will be working from home for the forseable (minus a few days here and there). We are informed of current affairs and recognise that we must play our part despite not being at risk physically. However, our mental health will likely be suffering - mainly thanks to the constant news updates and habits of checking it that we've formed, and the fact that we won't have an office full of people and meetings scheduled to keep us focussed on actual work.

What's the cleanest way to block a list of websites of our choosing from our home wifi? I don't want to tunnel all our traffic through a VPS or anything as there will be a lot, and I understand that it won't help when I'm using work's VPN. Perhaps setting up a DNS server on an instance and getting DHCP to tell the clients to use it? We're using MacBooks and iPhones mainly.

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It’s simple. Just stop going to the sites. I stopped fb years ago and since the last election stopped reading/going to news sites (nytimes, FT etc). Somebody wisely said fast news is not news. And I tried that and it works brilliantly. I read or check economist once a week and that tells me what’s going on. You could do the same with weekend edition of various papers to. It’s great. It automatically removes the crap and you are still informed of the large things you need to know. And if there is anything that is truly urgent that you need to know it I have seen it will surface and get to you automatically through employer, friends, Neighbour’s etc. try it for a couple weeks and you won’t regret it. Plus you have nothing to lose. You can always go back to your old ways.

>It’s simple. Just stop going to the sites.

That's true for me too.

>Pi-Hole...

That's a good suggestion. I set up a Pi-Hole just to try it out and it works pretty good right out of the box.

You probably have a feature in your cable modem to block sites.

As far as "News" goes, I have AP, Reuters, and HN bookmarked and I scan them in the morning with my cup of coffee and when taking a break. None of those have much hyperbole screaming at you.

I'll offer that you make it a point to spend your web time exploring and learning.

I guess what I'm offering is you can block sites with a Pi-Hole but you may need to think about how you use the internet and focus on more positive ways to use it with the time you'll have hunkering down.

I've been working from home for over 25 years now. Most of them on web apps. I almost never go to CNN, MSNBC, FOX News, etc. I spend my own time on the web learning and exploring things I'm curious about. Last week I learned how to change the sump pump in the crawl space below my house :D

Pi-Hole is a DNS resolver that blocks whole domains and sub-domains.

You just need a raspberry pi.

I run my pi-hole instances on Arch Linux thanks to the folks who maintain the packages in AUR. One of my instances is indeed a Raspberry Pi (2B+) but the other is an older Intel NUC (with a number of other services running). RPi is probably one of the cheapest options, though.

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