Tech

Local adblocking dns network was a great addition to my home. Device like smart tv or an app on a smart phone that won’t work with a plug-in like ublock origin? Doesn’t matter, point the device to the dns server in the basement that filters ads.

Now if I use the browser on my smart tv I don’t get pages riddled with ads. If I open the home menu I don’t get all the stupid bullshit.

You may have to add some custom extra rules for smart tv home menu shit because these aren’t always in the ad block domain lists. Here’s the ones for lg/webos:

||snu.lge.com^ ||su.lge.com^ ||su-ssl.lge.com^ ||snu-dev.lge.com^ ||su-dev.lge.com^ ||nsu.lge.com^

This also blocks updates, which is handy if you’ve rooted your webos tv. I forget which specifically are the update servers but you can just turn it off when you want to check for updates or look in the access logs as you turn on the tv, it’s the first one (I’m pretty sure su.lge.com but I could be wrong, been ages since I’ve checked). If you root though there is an ad free YouTube app that still works perfectly on the webos homebrew store

For android tv it’s not as effective because google is really fucking good at serving ads and also I’m not as invested in the second tv I have that was $150 that I don’t watch as much as my fancy big tv but

||androidtvwatsonfe-pa.googleapis.com^ ||androidtvchannels-pa.googleapis.com^

Clear caches and reboot after you do this or they’ll keep showing up and some will keep showing up anyway, somehow. fuck google and fuck androidtv. runs like shit because they have it so bloated with ads on most hardware at this point, laggy and unresponsive unless you have one of those $2-300 set top boxes with much more powerful hardware than a smart tv typically has. And even then it’s often kind of shit because of the amount of shameless advertising they’ve tacked on