What you mean by black hole and filter? I blocked a bunch of tcl domains on my pihole and made my router drop everything in port 53 coming from every other device that wasn’t pihole. It seems to have worked for now… Is that a good solution?
No, it’s not robust. It may work for your TV, but it can be worked around.
DNS is like a phone directory for Internet: it translates domain name to IP addresses. If you block the DNS (what pihole does), it blocks the directory access.
But if the IP address of the servers are hard-coded in the firmware, the TV does not need a DNS, it can reach the server directly.
To trick the TV, you need to restrict the IPs it can reach. It might be delicate: it probably tries to ping some comme IPs to check it’s connected, then call the brand’s server for ads/updates/etc.
What you mean by black hole and filter? I blocked a bunch of tcl domains on my pihole and made my router drop everything in port 53 coming from every other device that wasn’t pihole. It seems to have worked for now… Is that a good solution?
No, it’s not robust. It may work for your TV, but it can be worked around.
DNS is like a phone directory for Internet: it translates domain name to IP addresses. If you block the DNS (what pihole does), it blocks the directory access. But if the IP address of the servers are hard-coded in the firmware, the TV does not need a DNS, it can reach the server directly.
To trick the TV, you need to restrict the IPs it can reach. It might be delicate: it probably tries to ping some comme IPs to check it’s connected, then call the brand’s server for ads/updates/etc.