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The workaround is already in use for ad hosting - serve all the content from one domain (or an IP) with services natted behind that, so if you block it, nothing works.
The ideal solution is custom clients for every service. Why use their proprietary software? We should make our own software we can use to connect to their servers. That way we can make it do whatever we want.
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.
No premium required. Just set your TV's with a static IP address and block outbound access to that address at your firewall.
I also blackhole the DNS entries of specific hosts that the TV attempts to contact. Blocking the IP address is sufficient, but I choose to nuke it from orbit. It's the only way to be sure. ;)
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
Yes; PiHoles are used for far more than just blocking smart TVs. The difference between browsing the web at my house and browsing away from home is so stark that it's almost not worth browsing most sites if I'm not behind it.
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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.
DoH/DoT are just the camel's nose under the tent. Just wait (perhaps it's already happening) until TV manufacturers install 4g/5g modems in their devices.
At which point, there will be a market for TV-shaped faraday cages. Or not, as that will make actually watching the TV difficult/impossible.
This stuff really ticks me off. Grrr!
For those who are still looking for dumb tvs these are the best ones available as far as I'm aware. Bought one last year and works as expected. https://www.sceptre.com/TV/4K-UHD-TV-category1category73.htm...
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Are the number of people who do this numerous enough for them to make the effort? (edited to add) I feel like the real problem will be when they start adding wireless connectivity that you can't disable. I can keep my LG off the network today by refusing to configure networking for it. I can't do that if it doesn't use/require my network...
I was bored a few months ago and opened up my samsung tv to see if I could unhook the wifi antennas. Turns out there wasn't actually any in there but I was able to desolder the wifi chip. It was a small separate board mounted by 8 or so pins off the motherboard that I had to use low temp solder on. TV still works (minus the streaming services). If you try to open the network settings the screen just shows a loading i…
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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...
Then you have to contend with DNS over HTTP, Thanks Firefox and Google.... DNS over HTTP has got to be the most ill thought out "privacy" feature that has done more to HARM privacy then it could ever help
Whose privacy? DoH helps to protect billions in revenue for the ad network that funds Chrome, Firefox, Safari and web standards.
A better web will need a different revenue model.
In the meantime, here's a maintained guide to blocking DoH with pfsense, https://github.com/jpgpi250/piholemanual/blob/master/doc/Blo...
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They would need to have a fallback in case people block DoH. I think this is way further out than people may realize. I've done pentesting in a lot of different office networks and 53/UDP is open for all, but not 443/TCP unless you're a known device.
>They would need to have a fallback in case people block DoH. How do you block DoH?
Technically, the provider could use something else, but are they so worried about ad blocking that they’ll run BGP anycast themselves?
For those who are still looking for dumb tvs these are the best ones available as far as I'm aware. Bought one last year and works as expected. https://www.sceptre.com/TV/4K-UHD-TV-category1category73.htm...
Is there something wrong with just buying a normal TV and not giving it your wifi password?
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.
I think the LG OLEDs are the best available option, but they’re not perfect either.
NextDNS is also great for something a little easier to manage than PiHole (plus also easy to use outside of your home network and on mobile).