buttmasterflex

I like Helium as a chromium based browser for PC

Yeah, I guess it’s pretty gneiss.

Geologist

Uh, always has been their message?

Hmm, sounds a little familiar…

I dug into it, and it appears to be a DDG flavor of a DNS blocker (e.g., pihole, Technitium, etc.). It uses a blocklist to block specific tracking data sent from your phoneby comparing those URLs against the blocklist, then preventing the connection if it matches.

You can get the same effect, plus ad blocking, by changing your phone’s DNS to a public DNS like AdGuard, NextDNS, or something similar. You can use a VPN with the same capabilities, or if you want self hosted, run something like pihole or Technitium.

DDG’s service doesn’t seem to be bad, but it is limited in scope.

Disclaimer, I am an amateur in these matters not any kind of expert. I run my own instance of Technitium at home for network wide blocking, but that’s about it.

Use Firefox or a fork and add this filter list to Ublock Origin

Netbird is a zero trust mesh VPN, very similar to Tailscale. My use would be accessing my Jellyfin and Navidrome servers remotely

Yes, I’m a geologist by education and career. I self-host a few different services but keep them all on my LAN. Setting up Netbird is on my to-do list, but I’m simply not confident enough in the network security aspects to expose anything outside of a VPN tunnel.