It’s Pi Hole. Everything’s computer.
Can someone please ELI5 why I should get a pihole and not just set up Surfshark or similar VPN on my router?
Wow the PNG is so transparent I am impressed. I think I have never seen anything so transparent before. You guys really know how to make stuff transparent. The most transparent in the world. Every expert knows this is the most transparent transparency transpering.
At this point just use the TV as screen for a Raspberry and be done with it. Pi hole is good but it cant catch everything, and i would expect smart tv’s by now try to smuggle out data on things that can get around the pihole. Every Smart TV has to be assumed a compromised device, with advanced data exfiltration options.
They also take fingerprints of what your watching every few frames and get it out on corpo shadow mesh nets
Anybody got an in to those corpo mesh nets BTW?
Why does it feel like I fell into some Shadowrun Decker forum?!
I live in fear that someone in my house will connect the tv to the WiFi and an update will just absolutely fuck it up.
By the way, https://remove.bg/ removes backgrounds
Helped me get a job, after the incident…
SUBSCRIBE
Nope, sponsorblocked.
Buying old TV (as long as LED) or 2K resolution TV is still worth it for me because i don’t like Android TV, Smart TV, or other crap and shits. For me a TV doesn’t need to have that kind of features, if you want android just buy android tv box like NVIDIA Shield or Minix
Couldn’t you just buy a new, awesome TV and then not hook it up to the internet?
I set up my Samsung give it its initial update, and then blocked it from internet at my firewall. If I need it to do something I unblock it for a few minutes and then block it again when I’m done. I use streaming sticks for all my other work and they’re just pie holed regularly.
It takes ages to boot, might have integrated offline ads, draws power when on standby for features you don’t want like remote controllability via network, and it’ll probably nag you forever to let it online. No thanks, a display will always just be that in this household. Separate concerns please, also easier to upgrade or replace.
That’s what I did with my brand new whatever-inch big fucking flatscreen. Like 80% of the buttons on the remote make a little notification come up saying the feature’s missing since the TV wasn’t set up “properly”, but it works fine.
Many newer smart TVs will literally not boot up past a certain point until you connect them to the internet to “activate” them. It’s actual madness.
Can confirm. Returned as defective.
Block it by MAC address at the router. That’s the only way to know for sure.
Randomized MAC addresses: Bonjour
I thought government regulation would prevent that? I thought the whole point of a Mac address was a unique id for hardware
Unique IDs are a privacy concern. Best you can tell by randomized MAC addresses is who the manufacturer of the device is and the type of device if you’re lucky (like when the manufacturer’s departments are internally split into separate companies), but that’s not guaranteed.
New TVs will connect to other smart TVs that have been connected to the Internet.
You straight up have to pull their chips now if you really want to be sure.
This is the first I’ve heard of such a thing. Like TVs connecting to one another through Wifi Direct or BTLE and tethering their internet connection? Can you link to anything discussing this?
Hmm, I recall reading a couple articles about it a year or so ago but nothing is coming up in searches.
I’m not sure if that means it was vaporware, misinformation, or coming soon to a Google TV near you. Anyone that’s more familiar with network capabilities is free to correct me, but as far as I’m aware if your TV even has Bluetooth it’s already capable of doing this at some level.
Either way you’ll catch a smart appliance in my house when I’m dead.
Mine ignores it and does its own DNS.
Not even connecting these devices to the Internet.
Time to do the ol’ firewall redirect for port 53
Who cares? I use mine only as a (huge) screen for my laptop (soon to be replaced by a steam deck)
No idea why this is getting down voted, this is the only real option for such TVs.
We do a lot of streaming in my house unfortunately, mostly using Kodi to pirate anime. So it needs Wifi in our case. If I had some old (working) laptops and router around, I’d do a Pihole and VPN but alas.
Slap one of these under or behind your tv. Put pop-os Linux on it it. You can run pihole/Jellyfin/kodi off it at the same time. It will host your anime and index it with jellyfin, filter your entire network for ads, and give you kodi’s excellent interface.
Jellyfin can grab metadata/subtitles/autoskip intros/on and on and has native kodi integration. It will run better on a beefer PC than the one above, but if youre just using it on 1 tv with kodi, you should be fine.
Oh, I’ve really wanted to self-host and do something like that, but I didn’t wanna spend too much more money than I have (recently bought drives and a bay) and figured I’d use old/outdated/broken laptops to save money and be environmental, but I’ve been thwarted by proprietary chargers (an old Acer) and screens not turning on (a broken Mac). I’m a college student so I don’t wanna drop my money too much in a month (gotta learn to budget somehow right?). Might ask my college IT if they’ve got old shit around instead.
Using castoff hardware is a classic first homelab setup. You dont need an actual server to setup a homelab either. Old desktops do the job well enough. I personally run a cluster of 3 of the small desktops i recommend in my last comment, if slightly beefer models. They work great. This site keeps a comprehensive list.
If you’re looling for next steps, this is a great general guide. Id personally recommend proxmox of the options he lists. Its a hypervisor that will let you slice up your physical server into virtual machines, letting you split out services like a pihole/*arr stack/jellyfin/kodi in a very sane way.
Linuxserver.io has a huge list of services that you can host with containers inside those virtual machines.
