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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

#281

Post by toast0 »

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 suspect that if Level 3 wrote a decent contract, if Google shuts it down, Level 3 will either take it over, or lease the IPs to someone else who wants to run recursive DNS with lots of clients.

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

#282

Post by inetknght »

skinkestek wrote: post #211
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.... As someone who has used (and still use Firefox) continously since around 2005 it surely feels that way sometimes and some of the decisions I see would make much more sense to me if I knew top management was somehow in Googles pocket. (That said 1. for my workflows I still consider Firefox the best browser. 2. switching wo…

> some of the decisions I see would make much more sense to me if I knew top management was somehow in Googles pocket.

Consider.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation#Google

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/15/21370020/mozilla-google-f...

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

#284

Post by yeswecatan »

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.

Can you recommend a guide for setting it up on something like a mac?

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

#286

Post by LanternLight83 »

shawnz wrote: post #187
fiddlerwoaroof wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DoH absolutely can get network filtering: if I block port 53 outbound to control DNS queries within my network, DoH (and other tunneling technologies) is bypassing my network filtering of DNS.

By the same logic HTTPS is bypassing your network filtering of every service which happens to have an alternative available over HTTPS. So do you block HTTPS?

I would absolutely love to have control over HTTPS traffic on my network, specifically to enable my Squid proxy to cache HTTPS pages, but unfortunately not every device or even program supports custom CA's. I'd be the man-in-the-middle between the internet and every device I own.

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

#287

Post by bigbubba »

zbrozek wrote: post #267
swiley wrote: post #235

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

Nice sentiment, but hard to deliver. You have a dishwasher and a fridge, right? They've been running firmware you don't get to inspect for a couple of decades already. Luckily they don't have network access.

How many years is 'decades'? About 4 or 5 years ago I took apart a freezer that was about 10 years old. The compressor seemed to be switched by a thermostat; I found nothing that would have firmware.

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

#288

Post by verisimilidude »

brandonr49 wrote: post #208

Is there a reason no group has popped up to jailbreak the few major TV "OSes"? Given how prevalant this issue is it seems like a reasonable use of time akin to jailbreaking/rooting cell phones.

I imagine most people capable of rooting a TV would already have better alternatives at hand: an Apple TV, an Nvidia Shield, a PlayStation, etc. There’s not much daily incentive to tinker.

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

#289

Post by knubie »

dageshi wrote: post #273
Bud wrote: post #261

This isn't difficult: TVs should not be "smart". TVs should be incredibly dumb. They should be screens for displaying stuff. That's it. Nothing else. No network connection of any kind, no apps, no software beyond that necessary to do basic setup of how that screen works: brightness, input selection, etc.

I imagine if you want a tv like that you can find one. A lot of buyers quite like smart tv's I imagine.

It’s actually pretty difficult to find a TV like that. Most stores don’t even have “dumb” TVs.

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

#290

Post by supertrope »

unreal6 wrote: post #278
Bud wrote: post #261

This isn't difficult: TVs should not be "smart". TVs should be incredibly dumb. They should be screens for displaying stuff. That's it. Nothing else. No network connection of any kind, no apps, no software beyond that necessary to do basic setup of how that screen works: brightness, input selection, etc.

I agree, now all we need is a television company who’s business model isn’t tied to surveilling its customers through its "smart features." Quite honestly, by just airgapping your "smart" TV, you're effectively receiving a subsidy (as annoying as that may be)

It’s probably in the range of $1 to $10. For example Verizon asked for $1 or $2 per phone to preload an app. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/08/verizon-has-a-plan-t... Twitter makes about $4 per set of eyeballs per year.
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