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?
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.
I bought a Sceptre TV as my first big purchase after graduating college and it's still kicking nearly ten years later. Sure the speakers died a few years ago and several buttons on the remote no longer work, but it sure isn't spying on me. And the picture quality is honestly not bad for what I paid
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.
when did trump join lemmy
Thank you! I’m so touched by your recognition! I really appreciate your pretendering muchly for my meme! 🥰
Unplug your TV from the internet and plug the HDMI into a machine running Kodi or similar.
Lmao but the Nvidia shield also have bullshit ads
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?)
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.
This the way.
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.
What is pi hole? I would love to dumbify my smart tv if possible..
OK, so whenever any device (e.g. your computer) wants to connect to a website (say, "wikipedia.org"), it tells your router that it wants to go to that website. Your router then sends what is called a "DNS Query" to some server, such as Google or Cloudflare, which takes the string of characters "wikipedia.org" and looks it up in their own dictionary of websites. In that listing, "wikipedia.org" will be linked to a specific IP address, which Google or Cloudflare then pass back to the router. Your router then connects the original device to that IP address, allowing your computer to get data from wikipedia.
Now, modern devices make up to hundreds of these requests every second, so it's not like it's going to ask your permission for every single _one of them, right? Of course not. The problem, however, is that virtually every single proprietary app and piece of networked hardware nowadays is actively spying on you, by sending constant "telemetry", marketing, and ad-servicing requests to hundreds, or even thousands of different services every day.
Pihole is a program that runs on a device (traditionally a raspberry pi, but could also be as simple as an old always-on tower computer or as complex as a self-hosted server). This device is connected to your internet, and what you do is you tell your router that the only place it's allowed to ask for DNS queries is your pihole device, rather than google or Cloudflare. Then you add blocklists, en masse, to your pihole, which takes every single DNS Query and checks it against the blocklists. If a DNS request isn't on the blocklists, it passes the request on to an actual DNS server, like Cloudflare, then gives the response back to the router, and the router is none-the-wiser. You get to see wikipedia. HOWEVER, if your device has the temerity, the absolute gall, to connect to any server on your blocklists? The pihole just... Doesn't pass on the message, and you get to choose whether the pihole actually sends your device a refusal, like "no, we won't be connecting to google ad services today, thank you" or if it just stays silent, not letting the blacklisted requests through, and just shredding the request every time it gets one for that unwanted site. Also, the pihole can keep a log of every single request made, both blocked and allowed, and keep tallies of the most-requested servers. It does this by default, but can easily be told to stop whenever you want.
TooComplex;Didn'tUnderstand: imagine your local network is a medieval walled city. Whenever someone inside wants to communicate out, they send their letter to the post office, which sends a runner out of the city and returns with the response. A pihole acts as a guard at the city gate, taking every letter, checking the addressee to see if the city's magistrate is okay with sending information there. The guard has a long list of places letters aren't allowed to go, and they are very fast at their job. If the addressee isn't on their list, they send out their own soldier to take the letter themselves, rather than letting the post office runner go. If the addressee is on the blocklists, they either rip up the letter and send the runner back with their own, or they just rip up the letter and beat up the runner so they don't go crying back to the sender and narc. Its the magistrate's call how the guard handles it. Also, the guard keeps a list of every single letter that arrives at the gate, unless the magistrate tells them not to. The magistrate can peruse the list and tell the guard to allow or block any addressee on that list (or off of it) at any time.
Thanks for the comprehensive answer. I was hoping for something more like an alt-OS for the TV, so it doesn't ask for updates all the time or really do anything besides cast from a computer or console
Fun fact: all these smart TVs run Linux, which is supposed to facilitate that, but they're DRM'd to prevent it instead. There are active lawsuits going on about it.
Ah, yeah, for that, just factory reset it, don't connect it to the internet on setup and use HDMI.
An alternate less useful answer might be looking up TVs marked as "commercial displays". They are a less consumer marketed display.
'pretend this is transparent' is sending me. Bra-fucking-vo!
LOL thanks bro. I was browsing the internet at AltaVista and downloaded a pi holo logo image that said transparent PNG in the name. When I added the image in Krita I had a good laugh and decided I’d leave it as is here
Block it by MAC address at the router. That's the only way to know for sure.
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.
Best solution for these concerns in my opinion is
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.
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.
I have an old raspberry Pi (512 mB one...maybe? It's been a while since I hooked it up). Does anyone have a good guide to follow on setting up a pi hole?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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