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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

#251

Post by ufmace »

xurukefi wrote: post #212

I always found it puzzling that DNS blacklisting for adblocking purposes works at all . I mean I'm not a webdev or anything like that, so what I'm saying might be a bit native, but couldn't you simply serve your ads using the same domain you use for your content? This immediately defeats things like PiHole completely.

It's related to how the internet ad market has evolved. Initially, sites would run their advertising side kind of like newspapers do - have in-house departments to sell ads directly to the companies that want to advertise, then place the ads on their pages manually and serve them from the same servers. It works, but it's a ton of overhead to have all those ad sales people and find companies one at a time willing to set up a direct relationship with your site and deal with direct billing etc.

It was kind of a revolution to set up these advertising middlemen. Site owners just sign up to show ads and set up their site to load an ad from the ad company's server. Advertisers buy their ad time from the middlemen too. Nobody has to maintain those high-overhead direct relationships. Huge boon for the little-guy sites on both sides. That's the good part. There's plenty of bad parts too, including monopolization of the market, abuse, poor behavior of anti-abuse mechanisms, etc. It's what we've got though, until somebody comes up with something better.

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

#252

Post by loraa »

swiley wrote: post #235

At this point I don't want things with nonfree firmware in my house.

You have that choice,but probably not for the price you want.

People want the cheapest things and then wonder why they're not the most feature packed with 24/7 American tech support.

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

#253

Post by kevingadd »

zeta0134 wrote: post #249
ecf wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps companies should hire more talented customer service representatives who have a technical background instead of continuing to make their products shittier.

Having worked in this kind of customer support, the issue isn't that technician doesn't understand DNS, but rather that the end user frequently hadn't even heard of it. It's a massive pain to troubleshoot something like that remotely when the caller is non-technical. Not impossible of course, but frustrating and requiring a great deal of patience on both ends.

Also, if their ISP-provided router got owned by a virus and is now part of a botnet, how is the end user going to fix that? Many of those devices are locked down. It may not be a problem they can solve without manually configuring every device to use 8.8.8.8, so now every device needs to have a full flow for configuring its DNS servers. I'm personally in favor of every device having that option but it's also the case that the vast majority of people will not benefit from their TVs and lightbulbs having customizable DNS.

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

#255

Post by loraa »

ecf wrote: post #247
supertrope wrote: post #237

Hard coding DNS removes a troubleshooting variable and decreases customer support load and return rates. Some ISPs hijack DNS to serve up search ads (when it’s not down or slow). Some routers are part of botnets so DNS is not to be trusted.

Perhaps companies should hire more talented customer service representatives who have a technical background instead of continuing to make their products shittier.

It's hard when you buy the cheapest product you can get and wonder why it can't compare to the most expensive products from the best brands.

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

#256

Post by tguvot »

_abox wrote: post #34
t0astbread wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The root evil here is that you can't change the root certificates in such devices. Even if you controlled its DNS, the device could still just be programmed to fail if it doesn't reach its analytics/ad/whatever server.

The Amazon Fire TV does this already :( If it doesn't see internet it just blocks itself and goes to a screen "Oops I have no internet". So you can forget about watching movies from your local server using the VLC app as well. Ridiculous.

You can go to settings > installed application and lunch VLC or anything else directly from there

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

#257

Post by mindslight »

acdha wrote: post #172
syshum wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> At this point Mozilla is just the Non-profit Arm of Google, They do what google tells them You can just say you don’t follow this closely. Mozilla is not perfect but they do push for privacy, with an increasingly limited amount of negotiating power. > DoH is absolutely designed to get around network based security and filtering, both for Ad's and other reasons. This is similarly reflecting a poor understanding of t…

Your technical description doesn't really respond to the meat of the critique of DoH, which is that it prevents the technique described in this article - transparent proxying for all traffic of a certain service, in this case DNS.

The problem is that your relationship with your network devices is logically the same as a totalitarian country's/company's relationship with their citizens/users. So any protocol that prevents censorship/surveillance by ISPs also impinges upon bona fide network administrators. Corporate networks have the same dynamic, although there are few tears shed when it becomes harder for them to tamper with users' traffic.

The right answer is to make sure devices that have any Internet access run code you control. The root of the problem here is buying a "smart" TV, hooking it up to the network, and then expecting to tame all of its user-hostile anti-features by policing its communication. The only way to use black box IoT devices is to remove all general Internet access from them, allowing communication only with hosts you do control. For instance I've got a network of tp-link bulbs that are all controlled from a Home Assistant instance, and they never have and never will get a packet out to the larger Internet.

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

#260

Post by everdrive »

supertrope wrote: post #237

Hard coding DNS removes a troubleshooting variable and decreases customer support load and return rates. Some ISPs hijack DNS to serve up search ads (when it’s not down or slow). Some routers are part of botnets so DNS is not to be trusted.

There are definitely good reasons why manufacturers do this, but in a perfect world it would be possible for the user to control this feature. (on the device itself, I know you can usually control this if you have a nice router)
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