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Own a Roku TV or streaming device? You're about to see a lot more ads on your home screen (www.techradar.com)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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Ugh. Roku was one of the platforms with fewer ads.

  • Roku will be adding more ads to the home screens of its devices and TVs in the near future.
  • The ads will be interactive and 'shoppable' and will cover a range of industries, including restaurants and cars.
  • Roku already has a significant amount of ads on its home screen, and it is unclear if users will be able to change their preferences for the new ads.
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[–] 51 points 2 years ago* (3 children)

And there it is, folks.

I added the Roku and Samsung TV servers to my blocklist months ago, (maybe even years ago, at this point?) My three smart TVs are the most blocked devices on my network, by far. It’s not even close. Here are today’s stats from my pihole:

For reference, my phone (my most used device) is number four on that list. My three smart TVs (two Rokus and a Samsung) are numbers 1, 2, and 3. I haven’t even watched TV today. These blocked requests are simply from the TVs idling. Smart TVs are hilariously, mind-bogglingly invasive, and you should block them ASAP.

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  • [–] 42 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Why did you black out your private IP addresses?

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  • [–] 26 points 2 years ago* (1 child)

    Old habits. Just as a general rule, I black out most IPs, even when private. I used to deal with a lot of horribly insecure devices at work, with default passwords that couldn’t be changed, no port security (so anyone who found the wrong Ethernet port could connect to the network,) etc…

    So anyone on the network could fuck things up if they were on the wrong wifi and tried to reconfigure something they shouldn’t be touching. It was only an issue a few times, since the vast majority of people using said network were other techs who knew what they were doing. But there were a few times that someone screenshotted something, it got passed around to all the managers, and someone who didn’t know what they were doing got curious and went digging when they saw the IPs.

    It was never anything catastrophic since the network wasn’t even connected to the internet, and we had backups of any important settings. But it was just a practice that we all eventually picked up, to prevent random employees from sniffing around. Because it always sucked to come into work the next morning, and discover that a particular piece of gear wasn’t working properly because someone decided to tick a stray checkbox or change a polling rate.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    What does it look like on your tv after blocking the ads

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago*

    Not the guy you replied to, but my LG webos TV worked just fine after I added a whole bunch of domains to my pihole blacklist. Got rid of A LOT of crap from the "homepage". Made it a hell of a lot cleaner and overall more usable. There are compiled lists of domains per brand and per region. Just find one that fits your bill.

    I use past tense because last week I finally created a kodi box and took the TV offline entirely. Now it's even better.

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