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

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

#141

Post by JMTQp8lwXL »

mlacks wrote: post #126
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.

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

I'm not an expert in this space, but professional displays (e.g., screens mounted in airports, and the like) do not seem notable for their cinematic visual quality-- usually they have a washed out appearance. They're reliable screens, but not made for watching movies.

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

#142

Post by dvfjsdhgfv »

jon-wood wrote: post #10

I’m responsible for a bunch of IoT hardware, and every firmware spec I write includes a note on not using the DNS servers provided via DHCP. While sure there are companies explicitly doing this to avoid filtering, at least in my case it’s because a significant proportion of DHCP servers are configured to send DNS to your ISP, and ISP provided DNS is almost universally terrible. They’ll ignore TTLs, rewrite NXDOMAIN r…

> and occasionally just highjack every single query to send you to a page saying you’re approaching your bandwidth quota

It boggles my mind it's still a problem in some countries. Last time I saw this kind of notice it was in the nineties, and on a web server, definitely not on a client endpoint. People have had unlimited bandwidth for at least a decade now.

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

#143

Post by vsskanth »

mlacks wrote: post #126
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.

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

Thanks for the tip. Is there a trade off ? Do they support 4k HDR and/or 120 Hz ?

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

#144

Post by jsnell »

willis936 wrote: post #54
willcipriano wrote: post #16

> Smart devices manufacturers often “hard-code” in a public DNS server, like Google’s 8.8.8.8, and their devices ignore whatever DNS server is assigned by your router - such as your PiHole. Going to be a sad day for those advertisers when the DNS project gets killed by Google. Hopefully they are smart enough to set a alternate as well.

I don’t understand the downvotes. Google has a long history of killing projects. Of all the public DNS to trust, why does anyone have confidence in Google? Because they’re big? Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me 1500 times...

Because you made a zero effort joke that has been worn to the absolute bone by people repeating it thousands of times per year in HN comments, rather than at least putting in a bit of thought as to what the risk is for this service. Here's a quick attempt:

Track record: 8888 has been running for more than ten years.

Popularity: It appears to be incredibly widely used; e.g. a research paper from 2013 claimed it was serving 7% of all end user DNS queries, and Wikipedia claims that in 2018 it answered a trillion DNS requests per day (i.e. 10M qps).

Business value: It is true that there is no direct revenue here. But I'm pretty sure that the original reason for launching it was defensive. A lot of Google's networking projects have clearly been driven by trying to ensure that users can connect straight and reliable to Google's services with no interference from middleboxes, since every request lost to interference is also lost ad revenue.

Crappy ISP DNS servers that serve spam pages instead of NXDOMAIN are a pretty big vector here.

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

#145

Post by newscracker »

Getting people to add another device like a Pihole or a separate router with better filtering capabilities isn’t going to be an option that most people can handle by themselves.

This solution would definitely not work for DNS Over HTTPS (DoH), which I’m guessing will soon become prevalent in many devices. It also seems like DNS Over TLS (DoT) isn’t going to get as much traction exactly because it’s easier to block.

As other comments have said, (for those who’re able to do it) not configuring any connection for the device sounds like a good start, but even that has caveats about the device connecting to nearby open networks. So the best thing to do instead is to connect it to a network but not allow any communications to the Internet.

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

#148

Post by syshum »

acdha wrote: post #76
the8472 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and ISP provided DNS is almost universally terrible. They’ll ignore TTLs, rewrite NXDOMAIN responses into the IP address of their ad-laced web search, and occasionally just highjack every single query to send you to a page saying you’re approaching your bandwidth quota Universally? Perhaps in the US? But IoT devices are sold worldwide. While I do run my own recursive resolver I checked my ISP's and they're behaving…

It’s not just the U.S. A problem report once lead me to discover that the Spanish company Telefónica cached DNS results for years longer than the TTL. My error monitoring also picked up content injection (prior to HTTPS) and DNS hijacking around the world. Before going with the conspiratorial take note that Mozilla shipped DoH early and both Microsoft and Apple implemented it. Untrustworthy ISPs are a real problem ev…

At this point Mozilla is just the Non-profit Arm of Google, They do what google tells them....

and DoH is absolutely designed to get around network based security and filtering, both for Ad's and other reasons.

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

#149

Post by pwg »

JMTQp8lwXL wrote: post #141
mlacks wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I'm not an expert in this space, but professional displays (e.g., screens mounted in airports, and the like) do not seem notable for their cinematic visual quality-- usually they have a washed out appearance. They're reliable screens, but not made for watching movies.

Can you be so sure it is the screens that are at fault.

When mounted in airports and the like, they are also mounted in environments where the lighting is usually such (i.e., much too bright) that nearly any screen (LCD or old CRT's) would generally appear "washed out". So the effect you see may not be the screens, but instead may be caused by the environments in which you generally see them operating.

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

#150

Post by guiambros »

atum47 wrote: post #147

I'm ditching my smart tv. I've disable it's wifi and put a raspberry pi with a external hard drive on it.

> I've disabled it's wifi and...

For now. Wait until Amazon Sidewalk takes off.

https://www.amazon.com/Amazon-Sidewalk/b?node=21328123011

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