We have a family Samsung smart TV that is configured to use my Pihole instance as its DNS. When it was first set up, it looked up a blocked Samsung domain every few seconds whenever it was on (this is with ACR tracking “disabled” in the settings). Now it doesn’t anymore, but I still get activity from its IP address looking domains for NTP and looking up Samsung domains not blocked by my blocklists, but much less often now. Weirdly, it isn’t looking up domains for YouTube anymore despite us watching videos on the included app. Could it have found a way to bypass my DNS server (maybe a hard coded Samsung DNS?)
(The TV is my parents’ and they want to keep using the smart features. If it were up to me, it’d be barred from my Wi-Fi by now.)
lots of stuff is using its own DNS now days unfortunately. its still viable for ad blocking in a browser that respects your DNS settings, but not for embedded devices
This is a reason why you should buy a monitor with HDMI port and plug it to your own custom HTPC with open source OS and software.
HTPC
I haven’t bought a monitor / TV in probably 8 years but was recently thinking about it… however really disliked that pretty much all TVs today are Smart TVs which actually made me wonder:
When selecting the monitor, what do you need to check when you want one that will work well for sports / soccer?
however really disliked that pretty much all TVs today are Smart TVs
I think you should be fine if you never connect it to the internet. We’re not at the stage where TVs have their own independent data connection (yet). Keep in mind that the TV might just store the analytics data indefinitely while waiting for internet.
Though you can still get dumb consumer TVs if you look hard enough, but I agree that they’re becoming rarer.
LCD (NOT OLED) and high refresh rate. That is all you need to care about.
Essential extras would be anti glare (get a 3M film if glossy) and white balance. And go for a reliable QC brand (like LG, BenQ or Dell).
Very good, thanks!
Do you know any good products for Europe?
Another possibility is to keep that TV and plug a RPi to the internet instead. I do that with a rpi4 running LibreElec and it’s very nice :)
I live in India, so not probably. All I can tell is that a monitor may sound expensive, but it is colour accurate and made of very high grade materials compared to a subsidised consumer smart TV, and you can use that without any backdoor worries for a decade or two.
I definitely would, but again, I don’t own the TV nor do I normally watch it (I mostly watch videos on my Degoogled phone or Linux PC).
Possibly realted: Your Smart TV is probably ignoring your PiHole https://labzilla.io/blog/force-dns-pihole
Fortunately, with a few simple firewall rules, you can intercept these hardcoded DNS queries and redirect them to your PiHole. These instructions are for pfSense, however you should be able to adapt them for Sophos XG, Ubiquiti EdgeRouter, etc
