we live in hell

I don’t even understand the pitch? you have the disc playing, in your hands, your ownership, no buffering, no subscription required. and they’re saying…hey do you want a worse experience?

  • xyguy@startrek.website
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    9 months ago

    Connected a Samsung smart TV to my network when we first got it. The thing damn-near crashed my pi-hole asking for so many ad/tracking domains. Factory reset it later that same day. I think my % of requests blocked went from 15% to 68% in just the 3 hours or so the Smart TV was connected.

    • redcalcium@lemmy.institute
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      9 months ago

      They started to wisen up and hard-coded dns requests to 8.8.8.8 to bypass dns ad blockers now. Heck, some apps like Netflix already do it for years now. If your router can transparently redirect all dns requests to your pi-hole, you should use that feature.

      • SokathHisEyesOpen@lemmy.ml
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        9 months ago

        So they recognize that the owner of the product is trying to prevent them from collecting data, and actively try to circumvent the owner’s security measures? This shit should be illegal, and carry a huge fine. You paid for the device, and it’s connected to your network, which you control. I’m sick and tired of corporations thinking it’s totally okay to be straight-up spyware and adware. Some supposedly legitimate companies these days make old-school computer viruses look down right respectful.

        • Apathy Tree@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          9 months ago

          Not only that, I have the entire Roku domain blocked on my network, and even though there’s no reason for it, as evidenced by the fact that there’s no problem running it for a month, and it doesn’t happen to all TVs, depending when it was last handled, it breaks my Plex app every 30 days in such a way that it needs to be fully reinstalled, which requires unblocking Roku, allowing phone home of the prior month’s data. Old, but not obsolete, app versions should still work fine - have a kodi Plex app that hasn’t been updated in years and that works without issue. So this is absolutely an intentional choice to force users to at least cough up their viewing data, even if they can’t give you their ads. And they can collect a surprising amount of information through those apps.

          Took me a couple months to figure out what was happening (by waiting 2 months and doing the reinstall on the same day for all of them and checking the next time one broke, then staggering them the next time) but I’m no longer using the apps and will probably just factory reset all three of them, leave them off the network entirely.

          The amount of work they do as a company to make my private experience complete shit because I don’t want them invasively collecting my info and shoving ads down my throat… is absolutely disgusting.

        • MonkeMischief@lemmy.today
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          9 months ago

          Remember Bonzi Buddy? I bet lil’ purple monke sent less snoop data than big purple roku.

          It’s the MOST blocked thing in Pi-Hole on my entire network!

        • nsfw_alt_2023@lemmynsfw.com
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          9 months ago

          There’s always DNS over HTTPS. It’s really hard to nab that shit out if it’s going upstream to the same server that’s hosting the content.

      • bitwaba@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        That’s my next project now that I have my pihole set up. My basic ass router from my ISP does not support that though.

        Side question: do you know of any openWRT supported routers in the $100-150 range with external antennas? Everything I’ve taken a look at is either an internal antenna, or like $400.

      • Hamartiogonic@sopuli.xyz
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        9 months ago

        I recall having similar issues with Chrome. Instead of checking in with the pihole, it just went ahead and bypassed it by using a different DNS.

      • Stupidmanager@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        or use the blocking feature of your firewall. Here’s Roku being persistent and ignoring my pihole. Firewalla for the win.