Hacker News Reader

Comment by tetris11 | Hacker News Reader

I have pihole in my local network, the router defaults to it as the only DNS server. Amazon FireStick still serves ads, even when I set the DNS on the stick to the pihole.

I think the ads are encrypted end-to-end from amazon-ad server to stick, using likely the same channels as the regular video content

View on HN

> I think the ads are encrypted end-to-end from amazon-ad server to stick, using likely the same channels as the regular video content

I don't think they even need to encrypt them. IIRC pihole is just a DNS blocker essentially. All they have to do is serve them up from the same domain and you can't separate the wheat from the chaff any longer with this method.

Some devices including ones from Google will go to 8.8.8.8 even if you've got adblocking DNS. You'd need to set a firewall rule to redirect all 53/udp traffic to your pihole.

With DNS-over-HTTPS, that workaround will likely soon be history anyway.

DNS over HTTPS (DoH) is the encrypted unblockable future. One of the reasons I hate security and privacy engineering culture is because it's always used as an excuse to remove user control

DoH does nothing but standardise what shit software was already doing. The lack of user control is the result of malicious behaviour of the applications you run. If those applications choose to bypass your DNS settings, be it to opt into or out out of DoH, they're the bad actors, not the people helping you encrypt (and, with the right setup, anonymize) your DNS requests.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com