It’s Pi Hole. Everything’s computer.
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Best solution for these concerns in my opinion is
- TV for presentation in companies (often without smart apps)
- PiHole for blocking the most adds
- SHIELD for the apps, like YouTube without adds, stream apps, emulators, etc
Works like a charm for me, I did not see adds for month, maybe years. With the shield, I use SmartTube because I can login and don’t have any adds. None. I also use an app for streaming (moonlight or something like that) to play my PC games on my tv with controller.
How has SmartTube been for you? Is it an Android only or does it work on other platforms?
I’ve been a FreeTube user for years, but YouTube’s aggressive countermeasures has mostly rendered this program unusable (I use on Linux). Devs put out fixes but they work for a handful of days before YouTube breaks it again.
SmartTube is, afaik, only for the Shield Devices and similar ddevices - so not really for Smartphones. Most of the time, it is great but for some reason I often get a network error message and the videos stop. So sometimes it’s annoying. Haven’t found a good solution yet
For smartphones, you can still download ReVanced. When Vanced was closed, they started again with revanced and it works like a charm. It has all premium features (like background listening) and blocks adds, even sponsored or fillers. The problem is the download, if you ask me. Because there is an official webside, but the download starts after it redirected you to some suspicious add website…
Alternatively, you can download NewPipe. If you don’t care that you can’t login, it’s a perfect app. In my opinion, it’s not really needed because you can save your profile (backup) and restore. It also blocks all the adds. Best app so far (IMO). It can be downloaded in the F Droid store.
For YouTube music, a good alternative is Kreate. Also available in the FDroid store.
If you have any further questions, ask me anything. Would be glad if I can help
Edit: NouTube is also a good alternative to YouTube premium, but I’m not really happy with the app. My complains are about some details though, so generally speaking, it’s worth a try
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.
literally happened to me
Block the MAC on the router.
Luckily I caught my brother in the act of doing this when he came to stay, it was with good intentions but I had to explain the reasons why.
Welp, time to set up a MAC address whitelist.
Add a parental lock to the TV settings too.
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.
? If you’re going to block 1 Smart TV from the Internet. Why wouldn’t you do it to all the TVs on your LAN?
Because the range could include things like the apartment, condo, or even house next door.
In theory, as every smart TV might act as an access point, it’d be sufficient to be in the range of your neighbors smart TV.
Oh shit I didn’t think of that.
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.
I have a smart TV. It is connected to two things. The wall socket for power and HDMI #2 for my PC.
Edit: Also I have a PFSense router, I use PFBlockNG to also block the IPs behind the blocked DNS entries. My phone is GrapheneOS and all of my computers are GNU Linux. Any blocked incidents I get are usually from websites. If I surf the web a lot in a month, I maybe get 200 blocked incidents. If my normie friends stay over with, for example, a Windows PC and an iPhone, I get 2000 per day. It’s wild what’s going on with these devices.
I’ve got my pc and steamdeck on my tv.
The settings menu still asks me if i want to connect for “corpo reason”.This the way.
Can someone please ELI5 why I should get a pihole and not just set up Surfshark or similar VPN on my router?
I never plan on replacing my commercial display. when it breaks, i won’t care. don’t watch tv or movies anyways. it’s all garbage
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.
Probably because you should care about the fuckton of TVs being sold and in circulation with software that is just some of the worst privacy violations bundled together in a case behind a big LCD/OLED panel. There is no option to avoid it and probably no option to install something else on the hardware you bought and therefor should be yours to do whatever you want to with it. I even read that some connect to open wifi access points without passwords to reach the internet.
Probably because you should care about the fuckton of TVs being sold and in circulation with software that is just some of the worst privacy violations bundled together in a case behind a big LCD/OLED panel.
But that’s what I mean. I don’t use my TV as a smart TV, it’s plugged into a device where I can control the privacy settings via HDMI. No wifi, no apps being used, no connection to the outside world. That’s why I don’t care about DNS shenanigans with the TV, because I do them more comfortably on another device.
You not caring about the implications because you can avoid it in your own home could have come across as not helpful to the greater cause I guess.
I’m on a Crusade against people that won’t tet me watch TV without being part of a Crusade.
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.
Load Kodi and PiHole on the same Raspberry Pi 4 or 5.
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
DoH, DoT, dnscrypt, whatever else
Firewall redirect and masquerade.
Bitch you thought
DoH, DoT, dnscrypt, whatever else
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?!
Because it’s incredibly tacky cyberpunk that is simultaneously far too serious and incapable of taking itself remotely seriously, there’s latent transphobia everywhere, especially among people claiming to be magic, all the tech that does anything you actually want it to is pretty explicitly based on magic, and there is absolutely comprehensively verifiably zero hope.
(See meme downthread)
Thankfully not in Europe.
How do you know? Taken yours apart?
Several people have already tested and confirmed this and I believe them that even the big tech giants are somewhat afraid of the GDPR claws.
people have tested and confirned
That i believe. Fuck yeah; tech audits!
afraid of the gdpr
Im not as sure i believe that.
At this time I’d like to shill for Sceptre. They make tvs and monitors that don’t have all that stupid fucking “smart” features. I do not know of another brand that still makes dumb screens.
(sort of) unrelated, but I found a Sceptre CRT Monitor in the woods and it’s one of the best tube displays I own.
Unplug your TV from the internet and plug the HDMI into a machine running Kodi or similar.
If you’ve got the hardware capabilities, I just Read yesterday that Kodi supports CEC and can be used to control your DVD player or Set Top boxes that also support it IF you have it plugged into your CEC port.
This means turning a raspberry pi into the best media access client there is for a TV takes like 20-40 minutes (install librelec, profit?)
Lmao but the Nvidia shield also have bullshit ads
I love my PI hole but it’s needing a complete upgrade and a list rebuild. Damned thing is so reliable and solid I literally forget I’m running it. Things been up for over a year and not one issue.
I’m waiting for these smart devices to come with their own mobile modems.
And/or some weird legislation that mandates connecting them to your home network. Because you wouldn’t want them to not be able to phone home with the thousands of screenshots so their AI can verify that you are not stealing copyrighted content, right???!
“oops each one somehow malfunctioned and the registry id’s were corrupted.”
In fascist America, believe it or not, straight to jail.
it’s fine. I don’t have any smart appliances in my home.
I really hope that continues to be an option.
I worry it’ll end up like trying to buy a car that doesn’t constantly report your location (physically disconnecting the cellular antenna is still legal for now) or living without a cellphone and only paying with cash. With enough time, any semblance of privacy becomes weird, then illegal.
By the way, https://remove.bg/ removes backgrounds
Thank you! Noted for next time! Saves me the trouble of having to use lasso to clean up the edges and feather any aliasing problems
I got bamboozled when I was surfing the web at AltaVista and tried to download this transparent pi hole png logo. It was saved as PNG and had transparent in the name. Brought it into Krita and I chuckled, so figured I’d troll a few persons online and added the “pretend this is transparent” to the meme.
Helped me get a job, after the incident…
SUBSCRIBE
Nope, sponsorblocked.
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.
Thank you! I’m so touched by your recognition! I really appreciate your pretendering muchly for my meme! 🥰
