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 blocks telemetry for Firefox and Thunderbird.

  • Signal uses Google servers. I thought that they were Amazon servers, but looking at the history of Signal hosting I learned that they went back to Google.

  • 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.

  • lemmyvore@feddit.nlEnglish
    0·
    5 months ago

    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
      0·
      5 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
      0·
      5 months ago

      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.nlEnglish
        0·
        5 months ago

        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.