I’m just curious, what if I’d use my pi-hole to block all connections from/to China on my home network. I have a good bit of automation in place, but mostly western solutions, yet still I wouldn’t be surprised if they called China. Have any of you tried this kind of experiment? Is it even possible to block? What gone down?

5 points

Geoblocking is a pretty common practice in enterprise networking.

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3 points

I block all inbound connections from China and Russia via GeoIP blocking in Opnsense and no one in my household has ever complained. Considering setting it up to blocking outgoing as well, but any Chinese device I’m suspicious of is already isolated from the WAN.

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1 point

What’s more suspicious than Alexa or our phones? The "bad guys’ can do jack shit with our data but the “good guys” can fuck us up.

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1 point

Well, just blocking incoming connections doesn’t add much value. Besides if you also block already established connections, but then it would be easier saying blocking outgoing traffic.

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1 point

good to know this is an innate feature of opnsense

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2 points

It’s a common feature in a lot of threat management software / firewall systems. Ubiquiti and pfSense both offer it off the top of my head. I’ve used both with no noticeable issues on smart / IOT devices.

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2 points

I do this, the only problematic thing is the NTP request from my Philips Hue bridge.

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1 point

I block China and Russia on my router and haven’t noticed it one bit. I was most worried about my Tuya lights not working, but even those have been fine.

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1 point

I think tuya has US data centers. I remember picking something like that when I set up the developer portal.

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