Privacy

31981 readers

288 users here now

A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

Some Rules

Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
Don't promote proprietary software
Try to keep things on topic
If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
Be nice :)

Related communities

Chat rooms

[Matrix/Element]Dead
Discord

much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

120

My experiences with Pi-hole (scribe.disroot.org)

submitted 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) by duikbrilletje@scribe.disroot.org to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

57 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Pi-hole has helped improve my "relationship" with Firefox, or better phrased with Firefox forks like LibreWolf and Tor browser. Cool thing with Pi-hole is that you can watch the query log and see what happened in the background while you were surfing the Internet. I learned that :

After removing the sponsored shortcuts in Firefox and putting your own shortcuts there Firefox will make connections each time you start the browser. So, if you would have icons on your quick start page in Firefox for let's say EFF, Lemmy, Mastodon, HackerNews, with each Firefox start up, it would query these sites. which I didn't like so much. Since then I've gone back to a complete blank start page, removing search and all those quick start icons, using just toolbar folders with bookmarks.
Pi-hole defaults to blocking telemetry for Firefox and Thunderbird.
Signal uses Google servers I saw via Pi-hole. I thought that they were using Amazon servers, but looking at Wikipedia for the history of Signal hosting I learned that Signal went back to Google for hosting.
Firefox push notification services are hosted on Google servers. LibreWolf removes a lot of Google things that Firefox has by default, but not the push parts. With Pi-hole it is very easy to block that.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] lemmyvore@feddit.nl 4 points 7 months ago (2 children)

Yes but I think OP is referring to plain DNS requests to a preferred server.

You can hijack port 53 and redirect them to your preferred server. Also acts as a method of hardening DNS for devices and apps that do not support encrypted DNS.

[–] ZeDoTelhado@lemmy.world 3 points 7 months ago

Forgot to mention the port but that's it. Notorious devices like smart TVs and consoles like to use the hard coded DNS method

[–] Turun@feddit.de 1 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

Some devices will use a hard coded DNS instead of respecting the one on the network

Right, and I am pointing out that non-cooperative devices still won't be blocked by pihole if they so desire.

[–] lemmyvore@feddit.nl 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Only if they do encrypted DNS, and you can still block them, you just can't force them to use the DNS you want. Embedded devices tend to avoid encryption to cut down on hardware requirements, they typically even pull their updates over unencrypted connections. IoT is a crazy world. 😃

And may I point out that if you have embedded devices freely connecting to the Internet you have a lot bigger problems than the fact they use encrypted DNS. Hell you should be so lucky for them to use encrypted DNS, at least it would be secure.

[–] Chiro@lemm.ee 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

What would be an example of an embedded device?

[–] lemmyvore@feddit.nl 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Media players, TVs, IP cameras, lightbulbs... anything with wifi capability really.

[–] Chiro@lemm.ee 1 points 6 months ago

Is there a safe way to use these devices? I’m moderately tech savvy at best, and I do worry a lot about my tv. I also use some smart plugs to manage equipment on my aquarium, but that’s it. I’ve considered the implications of these devices, but didn’t know if there was anything I could do about it.