72% of smart TVs and 46% of game consoles hardcode DNS settings • Hacker News Board

Re: 72% of smart TVs and 46% of game consoles hardcode DNS settings

#121

Post by jasomill » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 2:48 PM UTC

overscore wrote: post #46

mojo982 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it? I’m still holding onto my TV from 2014 because it doesn’t have “smart” functionality. Every time I look at new ones I can’t find good dumb ones.

If you don't need any "TV" features such as a tuner or speakers, you might consider using a monitor. I use a 32" 4k monitor as my "TV". In my case, anything with a TV tuner requires an expensive license, so that's another motivating factor, but whenever I use someone else's "smart TV", I'm always relieved that I don't have to deal with glacial UIs and injected ads.

And I use a 55" 4K TV as my "monitor", because sub-$1,000 >>30" monitors with internal 3D LUT-based color calibration aren't a thing.

And, while I don't use the speakers, the TV's S/PDIF output is nevertheless handy for routing the audio output of whichever of the four HDMI inputs is active to the single S/PDIF input on my audio interface.

Finally, the TV has an RS-232 port that allows control of essentially all of the basic "TV" functionality, which was handy for setting up keyboard shortcuts for input switching, power, and brightness control; IME, monitor controls for such things that don't involve diddling with buttons on the side of the device itself are few and far between.

Re: 72% of smart TVs and 46% of game consoles hardcode DNS settings

#122

Post by fulafel » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 2:48 PM UTC

willis936 wrote: post #83

fulafel wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Put a password on your wifi, it other security benefits as well.

Wardriving is a thing. Broadcast an unsecured SSID and talk to anyone who joins.

Excellent point, I wonder if there are published experiments about this kind of reverse wardriving against consumer IoT devices.

Re: 72% of smart TVs and 46% of game consoles hardcode DNS settings

#123

Post by zo1 » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 2:49 PM UTC

fred_is_fred wrote: post #32

CraneWorm wrote: post #22

Just don't buy smart TV, or any of that IoT crap. It is possible to buy 58 inch dumb TV, connect that to a machine you own.

Just don’t ever connect it to your network.

Sure, till they start adding cellphone-tower enabled connectivity. Your move, consumer.

Re: 72% of smart TVs and 46% of game consoles hardcode DNS settings

#124

Post by kristofferR » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 2:52 PM UTC

sgt wrote: post #63

Is there a way to avoid YouTube ads on a Smart TV with PiHole? Those ads are becoming more pervasive each month.

Not with pi-hole, but on Android TV you can install ad-free clients like SmartTubeNext at least:

https://github.com/yuliskov/SmartTubeNext

Re: 72% of smart TVs and 46% of game consoles hardcode DNS settings

#125

Post by hutzlibu » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 2:54 PM UTC

willis936 wrote: post #74

layoutIfNeeded wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>What happens when your hard coded DNS is not available? The same thing that happened each time when DRM servers went offline. Time to buy a new TV :^)

Sounds a like a lot of support calls to me.

But easy ones:

"Sorry, your product is out of warranty, I can redirect you to sales"

Re: 72% of smart TVs and 46% of game consoles hardcode DNS settings

#126

Post by mlacks » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 2:56 PM UTC

mojo982 wrote: post #30

CraneWorm wrote: post #22

Just don't buy smart TV, or any of that IoT crap. It is possible to buy 58 inch dumb TV, connect that to a machine you own.

Is it? I’m still holding onto my TV from 2014 because it doesn’t have “smart” functionality. Every time I look at new ones I can’t find good dumb ones.

The term you are looking for is “professional display”. NEC/sharp, Sony, and Samsung off the top of my head have a division for this.

I work in a classified military space where the security of our equipment has been verified; our 80 inchers are all NEC and work wonderfully

Re: 72% of smart TVs and 46% of game consoles hardcode DNS settings

#127

Post by zinekeller » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 2:56 PM UTC

dingaling wrote: post #120

jon-wood wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Currently, we don’t. The devices don’t support IPv6, so it’s not a problem we’ve had to deal with so far.

So you'll only start working on the problem when IPv6-aware devices start failing? Why wait?

Not the OP, but you should also be reminded that many of these limitations are brought out by cost-cutting measures that we didn't have control of and could be used to fire us immediately, and even when IPv6 is implemented most IoT backend servers only operate over IPv4 anyway. Another one that you might be angry about is only including 2.4GHz-band WiFi even though 5GHz WiFi is already ubiquitous (although only including 5GHz WiFi is much more questionable ;).

Re: 72% of smart TVs and 46% of game consoles hardcode DNS settings

#128

Post by Kiro » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 2:58 PM UTC

stiray wrote: post #17

[flagged]

> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Also, why are you not using the reply function?

Re: 72% of smart TVs and 46% of game consoles hardcode DNS settings

#129

Post by hutzlibu » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 2:59 PM UTC

caymanjim wrote: post #56

x87678r wrote: post #44

I'm not sure if its worth posting, but I just installed pihole and its great. You dont actually need a pi, you can run it in docker. its nice that you can see all the dns queries that are happening.

I think you meant to say that you don't actually need a Pi. It's unfortunate that they named it that way. Never name things after the technology involved in making them work, because if your thing is any good, it'll spread to other devices/languages/operating systems.

Maybe they found the name to be funny?

Re: 72% of smart TVs and 46% of game consoles hardcode DNS settings

#130

Post by zo1 » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 2:59 PM UTC

EvanAnderson wrote: post #18

Another step in the silly device manufacturer / device owner arms-race. As long as people keep rewarding device manufacturers who treat owners as tenants it will progress. I wish people would just stop buying this garbage. They won't, though-- they see the features but not the down-side. The next step will be hard-coded DoH server IPs. Sly owners will NAT those to a transparent MiTM proxy. Then device manufacturers w…

I think that "privacy" is being used as a trojan-horse in this regard. Technical-minded people are especially reactionary to any criticism of HTTPs and the other related things that will inevitably arise from giving entities effectively an end-to-end untamperable and non-user-controlled pipe straight into your TV/Monitor from their server.

In an alternate universe, "ability to control/mitm data going through your network" could have been argued to be a fundamental right such as "right to repair" and "right to be forgotten". Where is the EFF on this? Where is Stallman when you need him again? Why is Mozilla not fighting this instead of pushing DoH?! EU regulators? Anyone?