memes @lemmy.world

1w ago

meme_pihole_smartTV_transparent_logo_png.jpeg

It's Pi Hole. Everything's computer.

102 comments

- 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.
  
  Block the MAC on the router.
  
  Welp, time to set up a MAC address whitelist.
  
  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.
  
  literally happened to me

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.
- I've got my pc and steamdeck on my tv.
  The settings menu still asks me if i want to connect for "corpo reason".

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?!
  
  Thankfully not in Europe.

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! 🥰

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
  
  Firewall redirect and masquerade.
  removed you thought
  
  DoH, DoT, dnscrypt, whatever else
  
  I do that with my mikrotik router. It is amazing for Google devices. Too bad I got rid of my last Google home device a year ago
  
  DoH, DoT, dnscrypt, whatever else

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?
  
  ? 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?
- 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

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

'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

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."

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

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
- You should be able to go into your router and block internet access for your tv, no additional hardware necessary. And it's more reliable than pi-hole since it'll block all internet access, even static ips, and no chance of a dns leak.
- https://youtu.be/KBXTnrD_Zs4
- https://letmegooglethat.com/?q=pi+hole
  Basicly a Raspberrypi that you plug infront of your device that applies a filterlist similiar to the one used by uBlock to filter out ip that you don't want (Tracking or adds for example)

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.
  
  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.

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.
  
  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.
  
  I set up my Samsung give it its initial update, and then blocked it from internet at my firewall. If I need it to do something I unblock it for a few minutes and then block it again when I'm done. I use streaming sticks for all my other work and they're just pie holed regularly.
  
  That's what I did with my brand new whatever-inch big fucking flatscreen. Like 80% of the buttons on the remote make a little notification come up saying the feature's missing since the TV wasn't set up "properly", but it works fine.

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

By the way, https://remove.bg/ removes backgrounds
- Helped me get a job, after the incident....
  
  SUBSCRIBE
  
  The… the incident????
- 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.

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

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 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?

Open in gimp, lasso tool, delete. It's not that hard.
- It's even easier to just pretend it's transparent though
- It’s because it got saved as JPEG in the title. Idk some kind of weird Lemmy bug or something , this totally was legitimate PNG I swear on me mum
- In GIMP, mark the layer as having transparancy

Can someone please ELI5 why I should get a pihole and not just set up Surfshark or similar VPN on my router?

102 comments