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folelbo2
Newbie

Roku home screen video ads getting around pihole?

For the last year or so after Roku rolled out home screen video ads, my pihole has worked at keeping them away.

Today however I noticed home screen video ads popping up. Does anyone know if they've figured out a way to skirt pihole by adding the ads on one of their main top level domains

I'm so sick of buying products and having to dance around stupid ads. I'll probably get rid of all my Roku devices if I can't get rid of these. What's everyone using now for streaming devices?

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InsertNameHere
Reel Rookie

Re: Roku home screen video ads getting around pihole?

Remember that the magic of the Pi-Hole is that you arrange for all DNS requests on your network to go to the Pi-Hole.  It has lists of domains that serve ads, and DNS requests for those places are quietly dropped (somehow), and all the other DNS requests work properly.  Then you see the Internet, but not the ads.

All you need to do to defeat it is to be able to provide your own DNS resolver that ignores the Pi-Hole.  However, if someone had a firewall set up on their network, which ONLY allowed DNS traffic from the Pi-Hole (alternatively, only allowed communication between the domain name servers the Pi-Hole is using), then any additional name server running on Roku would probably no longer work.  The question is:  would all the channels disappear along with the ads?

I have not tested this out, yet, but as you might be able to guess, I am seriously thinking about it.

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