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Comment by rinchik | Hacker News Reader

Pihole is great! Great revelation was that over 50% of the requests generated by devices in my network are "malicious", ad or tracking related.

The greatest offenders were phone apps and roku TV. Also roku tv scans your HDMI data stream (if you connect your laptop to the Roku TV) which is purely evil!

Also worth to note that to have pi-hole to recognize and block over 50% of the requests, constant gravity updates are required (i have over 3.5M unique domains in block-list)

Also get VPN for your phone. All traffic on my iPhone goes though pi-hole (check OpenVPN and DNS Override iPhone apps in store)

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I have 2 roku tvs and my live pi-hole blocking log is just a relentless spam from their servers.

Yeah I'm in the same boat even with just one roku

Note that the figures reported may be vastly inflated by poor code on your devices/apps that constantly retries the blocked connections.

Can you explain why what Roku TV does with the HDMI data stream is evil to those of us not in the know?

To quote the privacy policy at https://docs.roku.com/doc/userprivacypolicy/en-us:

"When you use a Roku TV with the Smart TV experience enabled, we also receive information about what you watch via the Roku’s TV’s antenna, and devices connected to your Roku TV, including cable and satellite set top boxes. Using technology such as Automatic Content Recognition (ACR) technology, we receive information such as the programs, commercials, and channels you view, the date, time and duration of the viewing, and how you use the on-screen TV guide. When you use a Roku TV with the Smart TV experience enabled, we use this information to personalize your TV viewing experience and advertisements. Please visit Settings > Privacy > Smart TV experience on your Roku TV to learn how you can enable or disable the Smart TV experience. To understand your choices, see Part IV, Section F below."

dnscloak is another good ios pihole solution, there are some public piholed +dns-over-https/dnssec dns servers listed one can use if you’re willing to

interesting, i haven't heard about dnscloak. On iPhone i had issues with DNS overrides, since there's no such option in settings. DNS override option only available for app devs which is why i needed and additional app for iPhone DNS settings besides OpenVPN.

yes, dnscloak acts as a local vpn that forwards dns traffic only, i believe. however i also just remembered it was removed from the app store for some technicality recently (apparently vpn apps must have a company as the dev and not an individual? i assume to crack down on shady vpns). hopefully it will be restored soon

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