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?
This is only going to do so much. If a connection is trully malicious, it’ll probably route through a domestic or EU IP (azure, digital ocean, linode, aws, hetzner, etc)
That said it would be interesting to monitor and see who all your devices are talking too
I’ve had china geo-blocked for about 6 months now. No issues so far.
I have denied all then only white listed US, US outlying areas, and Canada. I don’t do business outside those. This is at the firewall/IP level. Blocking outgoing DNS would probably only affect maybe Alibaba. TikTok for instance runs domestic servers so you have to explicitly block Bytedance.
The number of random attacks per day from China, Russia, and Singapore is hundreds. That’s what firewalls are for.
It don’t matter a whole lot, either they are using some cloud computing platform that is us based, or a VPN to bypass your restrictions.
Someone will always be scanning your network, looking for targets. Don’t be surprised.
You could also go the extra step, and only have local automations in the home :) home assistant + choosing products well enables total local smarthome stuff. Although I don’t have a robot vacuum.
All my services are self hosted too. Obviously there are limitations: I don’t have fancy voice assistants like Alexa of the likes. But on the flip side I don’t have spies in the house (well, there are… The android phones, and the windows and Mac computers…)
