Concerning. Wouldn’t be surprised to see this occurring more in future if pihole stuff gets any more popular than it already is. You may think you’re being kind to your tech illiterate relatives setting it up for them and you are but after enough technical people do that for non-technical people and inevitably preconfigured versions start getting boosted around mainstream social media the ad and data companies will take notice and take viciously punitive steps to clamp down on and dissuade such behavior. Unfortunately trying to evade capitalism’s abusive practices on an individual and technical level is not feasible at any scale as it notices and adapts. The only solution is socialism and policy solutions at a broad level.
People who make Things are already onto pi hole/AdGuard Home. At least Amazon and Roku smart TVs will fall back to hardcoded Google DNS servers (8.8.8.8) if they fail to resolve a domain through whatever DHCP provided DNS server.
Unfortunately for them, it seems that all port 53 traffic originating from these smart TVs ends up getting routed to the AdGuard Home DNS server anyways! Weird how that happens. It does get rid of the home screen ads, but unfortunately streaming services have wised up and will wait for ads to load instead of displaying a “oh, that’s weird, our ads failed to load” screen.
Concerning. Wouldn’t be surprised to see this occurring more in future if pihole stuff gets any more popular than it already is. You may think you’re being kind to your tech illiterate relatives setting it up for them and you are but after enough technical people do that for non-technical people and inevitably preconfigured versions start getting boosted around mainstream social media the ad and data companies will take notice and take viciously punitive steps to clamp down on and dissuade such behavior. Unfortunately trying to evade capitalism’s abusive practices on an individual and technical level is not feasible at any scale as it notices and adapts. The only solution is socialism and policy solutions at a broad level.
People who make Things are already onto pi hole/AdGuard Home. At least Amazon and Roku smart TVs will fall back to hardcoded Google DNS servers (
8.8.8.8) if they fail to resolve a domain through whatever DHCP provided DNS server.Unfortunately for them, it seems that all port 53 traffic originating from these smart TVs ends up getting routed to the AdGuard Home DNS server anyways! Weird how that happens. It does get rid of the home screen ads, but unfortunately streaming services have wised up and will wait for ads to load instead of displaying a “oh, that’s weird, our ads failed to load” screen.