I think we now have a need for a company to carve out that market sector:
Doesn’t matter, someone is always spying on you. If it is not the TV itself, it will be any app on the TV. Use pihole to block this tracking stuff. Netflix and Amazon FireTV apps are very aggressive trackers too.
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I’d like this, though I fear FW are overloaded presently, and I don’t want them over-stretching support (an error I think that Fairphone made).
I was going to get a Roku to make more of my Mubi subscription, but the tying of my watching history to my real-name account was too much for me. I have a media-centre PC instead, but it is ungainly to operate, and thus it doesn’t get much use.
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Which is why the real play is to just use a monitor. I use a 48” OLED monitor from LG. It has exactly zero smarts and lacks any kind of internet connectivity. Not from me not plugging in Ethernet or WiFi but it lacks any kind of network adapter to begin with. Honestly if it were 60” I’d be thrilled but I make do with 48” since that’s the biggest I was gonna get with OLED and HDMI 2.1 connectivity. I’m waiting for someone, anyone to make a bigger model for me.
Connect up a miniPC or AppleTV 4K and you’ll never worry about this again. I don’t think the PiHole route would be as effective as you think for the reasons outlined by Linus on LTT. Nor is not connecting to a network a viable strategy.
@Second_Coming Even if Framework created a “Smart” TV, presumably it would just run Linux since everyone else has their own OS which they likely wouldn’t license to Framework. Even if they did license that software to FW, what would make FW TV any different from an LG/Roku/Whomever at that point? If running Linux, good luck getting native apps from Netflix/whomever. And do you really want a TV with a built in TV tuner? Do you care that much for that functionality? Or do you really just want a big dumb monitor like me?
Honestly a dumb TV at this point is way more appealing than a smart TV. Just a really good panel, some inputs and a tuner for OTA. No networking, no microphones or cameras, just a display. Then you can bring your own inputs that you actually trust.
Word of caution though, expect any TV that isn’t exfiltrating large amounts of data and showing you ads to be much more expensive than you expect. At this point the price of TVs are being subsidized by all those alternative revenue streams.
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As a kid, we used to watch TV, now the TV watches us!
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I have bad news for you
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LTT is stating that the devices could use a different DNS server instead of the pihole. You have to block any DNS traffic in your router to prevent that and only allow piholes DNS traffic. This is working very well, since the Netflix app has 8.8.8,8 as backup DNS configured. I am using tracking/advertising pihole lists with 2.7 million blocked entries (updated daily). My devices are tracking and advertising free.
I use Linux so that does not apply. I’m well aware of that already.
Crumbs, is that not the very definition of enshittification! Doesn’t surprise me that it’s Microsoft behind the initiative. 
MS wasn’t behind it. They’re quite unhappy with LG using their infrastructure that way is my understanding.
Ah, interesting. However, it does sound like MS have built an auto-installer infrastructure that not only is opt-out, but they’ve not even added a GUI toggle to make it easy to opt out. Your link has some notes that show how to edit the Windows registry to do so.
I’m anti-Windows mostly for this reason - even without the crapware that most OEMs load in, the whole thing reeks of surveillance capitalism.
I don’t mind blaming LG too of course. These kinds of folks can’t seem to help themselves 
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And how would you go about blocking any other DNS traffic? If the device doesn’t pull the DNS server IP from your router and doesn’t expose to you the user what the IP address of the DNS server used, pings an ungodly number of IP addresses daily and has a DNS server IP hardcoded in at manufacturer…how to you intend to block that?
What about if Comcast/ATT sign some back alley deal with manufacturers to allow them to easily hop onto the Guest WiFi bypassing your equipment entirely? Keep in mind, while you and I are technically savvy enough to disable that “feature” and put the modem in pass through mode, my neighbors likely aren’t and the signal is certainly strong enough to reach my house.
Pretty confident you live in the EU so you have different ISPs and I haven’t a clue what they do. Perhaps they offer similar “features”, idk. But a PiHole, while useful, is not the end all, be all. I agree with Linus on that at least.
I am reminded of a thought I had recently. Not so long back, I bought an Epson inkjet printer, refurbished, at an excellent price. It has a good print quality, can print both sides of the paper, can print up to A3 in size, it has a scanner, and a very good touchscreen display. It is probably worth twice what I paid for it.
I recalled when I was installing it that the printer manufacturers make most of their money from ink subscriptions, and some of them are underhanded enough to stop the printer working if it detects the use of non-official cartridges. I read through the set-up manual, and I was intrigued to see that joining the printer to the Wi-Fi network was “recommended”, and I worked out why - it’s how the phone-home, ink-monitoring, and system-disablement features work.
So I shall set up a Raspberry Pi as a print server, and the internet-hungry firmware will have to make do with a USB connection. Sorry Epson… you’re nearly as bad as LG and Microsoft!
AUTOEXEC.BAT was Microsoft’s doing, and it was unspeakably insecure.
Silently installing adware at the behest of a dumb peripheral feels like AUTOEXEC again.
It is very easy with my router, I can block outbound DNS traffic for any device except for the pihole device. The pihole DNS IP is advertised via DHCP to any device in my LAN, so they can use it.
Sure, a company could try some countermeasures, but for what reason? Netflix as an example has over 200 million customers across the world. Do you really think they would spend money and effort to implement and maintain an alternative, to track 0.00001 percent of their customers that are using pihole? With the risk of countermeasures of the pihole users, making this alternative obsolete?
Such an alternative for DNS is not quite easy. You have to understand what DNS is capable of. Such a large company like Netflix has to use geolocation and load balancing. This means, when a DNS request is coming in for Netflix, they first select the server IPs that are closest to you. Let’s say you are currently in California, they might have 1000 servers there. Then they choose the server IP with the least load and this is your DNS response. This must be done within milliseconds. As you can imagine, their DNS backend is quite big as well. Besides that, they have to constantly spawn or shutdown cloud servers, depending on the load. You can imagine, this cannot be handled client side by hardcoding some server IP addresses.
Sicne you usually buy TVs 1-2 times in your life, it’s a weird market for Framework to enter with 2-3x the price.
you need a dumb tv? You have one! Buy a smart one and just… you know.. don’t connect it to the internet… I have an old laptop (or use old FW motherboard), install linux and connect over HDMI.
For good measure I connected it to a wifi that leads nowhere, so it doesn’t try some unlocked networks and set the date to 2002, so any of the SSL certs won’t work. So far date hasn’t changed, so I’m sure the TV has never seen the internet.
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How exactly? With DNS over HTTPS and TLS, you don’t know what the traffic is; only that it is encrypted. What you can block is IP addresses, great if what the IP address is for is known, less so if that IP address isn’t on a list of known DNS servers or ad serving IPs. Unless you implement a whitelist and methodically test each device whitelisting an IP at a time and testing for functionality?
Devices may ignore DHCP, no? In which case, you have nothing. Although I’m less certain of how plausible that is.
Why not make it the default instead of an alternative? Clearly Google thinks it’s worth trying to circumvent Ad block software on YouTube for example, so your hypothetical doesn’t even hold up. These companies actively try to prevent ad blocking.
And yes, I’m familiar with CDNs as well…I think you are far too confident in your counter measures but whatever. I’ll be using a PiHole shortly myself but I certainly don’t think it’s the end all be all. Security in layers. No IoT devices on my network, what devices I can shove on a VLAN I will, that kind of thing.
I am blocking the DNS port 53 for UDP and TCP. I could block the DoT port aswell, but it is not necessary. Besides that, not all traffic is encrypted with TLS. There is a big flaw during SSL handshake, since the SSL certificate has to be choosen, the domain of this certificate is transmitted in plain text. And even before you could not even start a connection to such servers without DNS requests in the first place.
I don’t know what you are meaning if devices ignore DHCP. If they would ignore, they would not get an IP address to join the network anyways. If they ignore the DNS IP, they would not be able to communicate with a DNS server.
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So.. what do you use on your TV? Sure you block google analytics, but if you block netflix, it will just not work. So if you use netflix, they have all the access to what TV provides to them (is there voice search? Then netflix has microphone in your room).
also you can just skip dns entirely and just use IP addresses.