How important may an Ad blocker be?
I know you will think it’s completely obvious, but just let me say it:
Spam, spam everywhere.
Nowadays we all are invaded by a lot of ads when surfing on the net. Before showing you some simple tricks to turn this annoying facet around (including smart TV solutions), let me explain what risks you may run.
Spam can be used to disseminate computer viruses, trojan horses or other malicious software. The objective may be identity theft, or worse (e.g., advance fee fraud). Some spam attempts to capitalize on human greed, while some attempts to take advantage of the victims’ inexperience with computer technology to trick them (e.g., phishing).
Just to make a sort of link with a past article of mine, thinking about socials they’re not immune to spam. Actually they’ve become one of the main source to spread ads on large scale. Indeed, since people are so addicted to socials by now, the several techniques used in order to propagate spam don’t have to astonish us. Have you wondered about what is hiding behind a simple image or link posted or sent via chat? If not, that’s the moment to be aware of some fascinating things.
I’m going to show you a simple and smart solution aimed to avoid and contrast spam. Whether you are thinking there are many Ad blockers for your PCs, tablets and smartphones, perhaps a smart TV solution might not be known. Indeed, I’m showing you a valid way to figure it out on TV browsers, by simple setting DNS.
Since most people have no idea of what DNS stands for, just let me introduce it: Domain Name System. Anyway, without turn of phrase, a DNS is a sort of phone book, in which a list of domain names is mainteined and translated to IP addresses. Since humans are not familiar on dealing with any stuff such as 59.138.144.23, but we naturally prefer something like, e.g., facebook.com. Up to now, maybe you’re wondering how the above mentioned solution could actually help in our aim. Well, just to clarify things, imagine you have some bad numbers you don’t want them to be reached. So you have two chances: to delete those bad numbers from your phone book or to replace them with a default value, which might simple be a non-acceptable number such as 0000000 or whatever. In our case, we consider the latter. By easy modifying DNS, the most malicious spam websites will be blocked and you will be redirect to a default page in which nothing happens expect a “Malicious page blocked” message shows. However, you’ll sure wondering which DNS to set in order to reach our wished aim, so I introduce you AdGuard.
Obviously there will be hundreds of similar services, but this is one of most reliable in circulation. So what are you waiting for? Unfortunately the path to set up this magic DNS varies from model to model but as these devices haven’t so much range of customization, you can just go opening your smart TV settings and search for something like “network settings”. Then you will be able to see a field for DNS: that’s were to put AdGuard’s addresses. They should be 176.103.130.130 and 176.103.130.131. At this point, you are done!
To sum it up, I hope you’ve learned something you didn’t know about DNS and I hope this guide will help you contrasting the plague of spam. So, in conclusion, I recommend you to add AdGuard in your browsers, too. It also offers a family protection blocking adult contents spam, it’s very useful whether your children are surfing the internet without your presence. To activate this further protection just set the following 176.103.130.132 and 176.103.130.134.
