Reddit users thevincentasteroid and MMD3_ posted about an auto-playing video ad (with sound) on the home screen. The ad is for Chicken Tender Wraps from Carl’s Jr. When it begins auto-playing, it pushes all the other UI elements out of focus and goes almost full-screen, returning to the home screen after it has played through once.
If you have a pi-hole or other way to block access to your network, I’ve found these useful to block:
androidtvwatsonfe-pa.googleapis.com
androidtvchannels-pa.googleapis.com
androidtvlauncherxfe-pa.googleapis.com
Amazing that blocking DNS is still a thing for gadgets like this.
Dns resolution is integral to load balancing and regional content delivery. There is no universe where a single server, even a specially designed asic, could handle proxy routing if there was a DNS outage and every iPhone or android device or whatever failed to a single IP. Thank God the Internet works this way tbh, dns-based content blocking will probably be the only thing we can do eventually
I know but check this comment that is what I meant.
I can’t say I’ve ever seen that, but it wouldn’t be hard for an iptables rule at the egress to just block outgoing traffic to 8.8.8.8. it’s not a great workaround for content providers. Especially because there’s definitely a universe where Google kills their DNS offering and a bad actor sets up a DNS server on the same static IP. Not that this isn’t an issue for domains too, it’s just another immutable and this one costs more than a subdomain to maintain.
There are apps that circumvent DNS blocking. They hard code the DNS server into the app, so instead of making requests to your set DNS, they make them directly to, say, Google’s DNS (8.8.8.8)
Yeah, that is why I find it amazing that it works for some apps.
Honestly, I’m surprised it works too, especially for apps like the launcher. I guess we can thank the engineers for taking the easy route
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Rerouting DNS requests to your Pi Hole is the solution to this, unfortunately not every router supports this. My Netgear router, for example, doesn’t have the option, and of course I ended up getting a model that doesn’t work with custom firmware. I’m considering setting up a Raspberry Pi as the gateway for my network so I can do stuff like this.