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Smart-TV blocklist for Pi-Hole

perflyst.github.io

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Re: Smart-TV blocklist for Pi-Hole

#31

Post by dsr_ »

confident_inept wrote: post #2

Praise be the folks that curate these lists. Even without a pi-hole you can plug these into any firewall for your brand(s). More annoying is the 15 second "home menu" that pops up on my OLED every time it is turned on. I almost always forget to manually dismiss it before I set the remote down and there's no option I can find to disable it. I would pay a premium for a TV with no internet connection.

You could pay a very small amount for a used house router and convince the TV that the house router is The Internet... and The Internet is down today. Best is if the TV doesn't try wifi when an ethernet cable is plugged in. Second best is if it has credentials to the wifi running on the used router.

Note that the router should not actually be connected to any other network.

Re: Smart-TV blocklist for Pi-Hole

#33

Post by assttoasstmgr »

confident_inept wrote: post #2

Praise be the folks that curate these lists. Even without a pi-hole you can plug these into any firewall for your brand(s). More annoying is the 15 second "home menu" that pops up on my OLED every time it is turned on. I almost always forget to manually dismiss it before I set the remote down and there's no option I can find to disable it. I would pay a premium for a TV with no internet connection.

I can't be the only one that thinks this (DNS blocking) is an exceptionally poor solution to this problem. It's essentially whack-a-mole. You either A) don't allow your smart TV ip address to egress traffic to the internet or B) don't connect it at all. There are some domains in that list like the *.cloudfront.net that might change over time.

Re: Smart-TV blocklist for Pi-Hole

#34

Post by u2077 »

I was just thinking about how much I hate our TV blasting random shows every time I turn it on. Who on earth wants more “recommendations by ai”? AI is short for advertising industry at this point.

Re: Smart-TV blocklist for Pi-Hole

#35

Post by heavyset_go »

assttoasstmgr wrote: post #33
confident_inept wrote: post #2

Praise be the folks that curate these lists. Even without a pi-hole you can plug these into any firewall for your brand(s). More annoying is the 15 second "home menu" that pops up on my OLED every time it is turned on. I almost always forget to manually dismiss it before I set the remote down and there's no option I can find to disable it. I would pay a premium for a TV with no internet connection.

I can't be the only one that thinks this (DNS blocking) is an exceptionally poor solution to this problem. It's essentially whack-a-mole. You either A) don't allow your smart TV ip address to egress traffic to the internet or B) don't connect it at all. There are some domains in that list like the *.cloudfront.net that might change over time.

I agree despite using DNS blocking myself. DNS blocking can easily be mitigated against with DoH or DoT at the application level. It's only a matter of time before advertisers start using either to bypass DNS blocking and serve ads.

Re: Smart-TV blocklist for Pi-Hole

#37

Post by dec0dedab0de »

e2le wrote: post #36

Is the Pi-Hole even reasonably effective these days? > Nearly 70% of smart TVs and 46% of game consoles were found to contain hardcoded DNS settings - allowing them to simply ignore your local network’s DNS server entirely. https://labzilla.io/blog/force-dns-pihole

Sounds like we also need a list of IPs to null route

Re: Smart-TV blocklist for Pi-Hole

#38

Post by brynx97 »

e2le wrote: post #36

Is the Pi-Hole even reasonably effective these days? > Nearly 70% of smart TVs and 46% of game consoles were found to contain hardcoded DNS settings - allowing them to simply ignore your local network’s DNS server entirely. https://labzilla.io/blog/force-dns-pihole

You can create port forward firewall rules to redirect any outbound DNS port 53 traffic. This will not work for DNS over HTTPS, which is going to be increasingly common for IoT I'd imagine.

edit: method for this on pfSense: https://docs.netgate.com/pfsense/en/latest/recipes/dns-redir...

Re: Smart-TV blocklist for Pi-Hole

#39

Post by simcop2387 »

e2le wrote: post #36

Is the Pi-Hole even reasonably effective these days? > Nearly 70% of smart TVs and 46% of game consoles were found to contain hardcoded DNS settings - allowing them to simply ignore your local network’s DNS server entirely. https://labzilla.io/blog/force-dns-pihole

I've setup firewall rules to redirect traffic from some devices to avoid that, but some are starting to use dns over https which is more difficult to deal with

Re: Smart-TV blocklist for Pi-Hole

#40

Post by woodruffw »

e2le wrote: post #36

Is the Pi-Hole even reasonably effective these days? > Nearly 70% of smart TVs and 46% of game consoles were found to contain hardcoded DNS settings - allowing them to simply ignore your local network’s DNS server entirely. https://labzilla.io/blog/force-dns-pihole

It probably depends on your use patterns. I have a console and a TV in my apartment, but I spend much more time on personal computers than I do on either. My Pi-hole instance is still reasonably effective for that, and I'm sure I could (eventually) be motivated to do the workaround described in the post you linked.
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