People like you help to make the internet a better place — which matters a lot to me, because one of my most desperately held beliefs is that it is possible to take the hopefulness of the early internet and combine it with the wisdom of the last few decades to produce a more robust kind of hope

attempts to query 8.8.8.8, regardless of your DNS settings.

Streaming box / stream app makers have been working around local DNS for a long time. Sometimes of course they're assholes that want to do shitty things and do this to make interdiction harder. But sometimes there are legitimate reasons. Ones I remember... users who don't really understand what they're doing can be overly aggressive with blocking and block things that are necessary for a particular service (causing support problems). Sometimes the ISPs DNS servers have shit performance, and using a well known commercial provider like cloudflare or google can improve performance at scale. It's not always evil.

I fear the day these fucks figure out DOH or something. Not sure there's any way to suppress or intercept that, short of just blocking all external traffic to the TV.

For other readers here is a tutorial to do DNS capture into a pihole server or other DNS

https://youtu.be/EdzDCkFaskc

Thank you for this. I will check later today on my own tv to see what its pulling in the background.