<story><title>Pi-hole: Network-wide ad blocking</title><url>https://github.com/pi-hole/pi-hole</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mafuyu</author><text>What finally got me to setup pi-hole on an old Raspberry Pi was getting an LG OLED TV. The webOS apps for YouTube and Plex are pretty convenient, but the TV was absolutely packed with ads via the home screen and pop-up toasts. To add insult to injury, the home screen would lag for several seconds at boot while it pulled down all those ads. And then I discovered that even after opting out of all the telemetry options, it was making DNS queries for _several_ data mining services that analyze what&amp;#x27;s being shown on the TV. I didn&amp;#x27;t Wireshark it to see what API calls it was making, but clearly opting out in the menu wasn&amp;#x27;t enough. After some passes of scanning the pi-hole logs and adding to the blacklist, my TV is snappier and ad-free. :) Definitely will not be going with LG for my next TV, though. It&amp;#x27;s mind blowing to me that this is the user experience on a TV that costs over $1k.&lt;p&gt;As for the pi-hole setup itself, it&amp;#x27;s working great. It&amp;#x27;s a great backup to locally installed adblockers, and I have my EdgeRouter as the primary DHCP DNS server, which makes requests to pi-hole. Both the router and pi-hole have caching, and my DNS query latencies are good. Pi-hole also has a nice interface for pointing `.local` domains to local IP addresses, which is much easier than messing with dnsmasq settings on the EdgeRouter.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>labster</author><text>Wait, you want a telescreen that doesn’t watch you back? Citizen, this is ungood crimethink. &lt;i&gt;Plus&lt;/i&gt;ungood crimethink!&lt;p&gt;Thankfully, it’s almost unpossible to buy a telescreen without telemetry (and always has been), so Big Brother will know what you are doing. But you should still stop by the local MiniLuv for reeducation, just in case.</text></comment>
<story><title>Pi-hole: Network-wide ad blocking</title><url>https://github.com/pi-hole/pi-hole</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mafuyu</author><text>What finally got me to setup pi-hole on an old Raspberry Pi was getting an LG OLED TV. The webOS apps for YouTube and Plex are pretty convenient, but the TV was absolutely packed with ads via the home screen and pop-up toasts. To add insult to injury, the home screen would lag for several seconds at boot while it pulled down all those ads. And then I discovered that even after opting out of all the telemetry options, it was making DNS queries for _several_ data mining services that analyze what&amp;#x27;s being shown on the TV. I didn&amp;#x27;t Wireshark it to see what API calls it was making, but clearly opting out in the menu wasn&amp;#x27;t enough. After some passes of scanning the pi-hole logs and adding to the blacklist, my TV is snappier and ad-free. :) Definitely will not be going with LG for my next TV, though. It&amp;#x27;s mind blowing to me that this is the user experience on a TV that costs over $1k.&lt;p&gt;As for the pi-hole setup itself, it&amp;#x27;s working great. It&amp;#x27;s a great backup to locally installed adblockers, and I have my EdgeRouter as the primary DHCP DNS server, which makes requests to pi-hole. Both the router and pi-hole have caching, and my DNS query latencies are good. Pi-hole also has a nice interface for pointing `.local` domains to local IP addresses, which is much easier than messing with dnsmasq settings on the EdgeRouter.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>thrwawy74</author><text>I emailed the LG CEO and some of the executive board and said (in colorful language) that the only reason I bought this TV was because the quality was unmatched.  For the moment LG is the only vendor where I can get an OLED TV like this.  But as soon as there are competitors I will remember never to buy LG again for the terrible ad and tv menu experience.  I also said how annoying it was that you commit to a particular smart assistant (google or alexa), and the TV will nag you to set up Alexa.  I made my choice leave me alone.&lt;p&gt;The analogy is Tesla is the only one making good electric cars.  When there&amp;#x27;s competition, I will never buy Tesla because of the shitty experience.&lt;p&gt;Also for &amp;gt;$1k it should let you use the TV as an HDMI multiviewer.  It has 4 HDMI ports on the back, let me view plug in my personal laptop on the port 1, work laptop on port 2, and divide the screen to give each laptop a &amp;quot;2nd monitor&amp;quot;.  Or even 2 monitors each.</text></comment>