Comment on “Awful”: Roku tests autoplaying ads loading before the home screen
TrojanRoomCoffeePot@lemmy.world 5 weeks agoMy friend doesn’t understand this reference, could you elaborate, please?
Install a Pihole server on your network. It’s a DNS filter. When a client tries to access a domain that has been blacklisted (ie a known ad or tracker domain), it denies the lookup.
On my roku homescreen it just has an empty placeholder where it tried to put the ad, but my Pihole server denied it.
Is there risk of a sort of arms race wherein services will update and decline to render services to those who block said blacklisted ad domains, or has that already happened?
I can’t imagine that happening with today’s systems. Yes, it’s theoretically possible. It just seems unlikely that they’d go through the trouble of denying service to someone who didn’t fetch data from one specific domain but did get it from another.
That’s good to know, then. Here’s to hoping they don’t bother, the last thing we need is another opaque, dystopian tech feature.
bearboiblake@pawb.social 5 weeks ago
you can get a raspberry pi and install something called pihole on it, it’s a DNS server with ad-blocking. basically, it converts a domain name like example.com into an IP address, but rather than just faithfully supply DNS, it also effectively blocks some adverts by acting like the domain names don’t exist for servers that run ads
once it’s set up it’ll just work, and it should protect everyone on your network/wifi from some ads
alekwithak@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
Just gonna add that it can also be installed directly to any Linux PC or in a docker container. The raspberry pi isn’t necessarily necessary.
TrojanRoomCoffeePot@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
Beautiful, I like the sounds of that.