I read this and yeah, pretty much. Its nice though because I can black hole their DNS lookups in my Pi-Hole and keep my TV from reporting on what it does. The only tricky part was having the 'firmware update page' (which was an HTTP! request) to return 200 OK so it won't complain about firmware.
72% of smart TVs and 46% of game consoles hardcode DNS settings
291–300 of 673 posts
Re: 72% of smart TVs and 46% of game consoles hardcode DNS settings
#292This 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.
That would essentially force people to buy two devices - one for receiving content to display and a second to display it. All your solution does is shift the problem on to the receiving device. It wouldn't fix anything, and at the same time it'd increase the cost and complexity for the user (by a very small amount admittedly).
Re: 72% of smart TVs and 46% of game consoles hardcode DNS settings
#293Earlier quoted context omitted.
Given what I see driving around on US roads, there is epsilon-squared chance this would be found let alone fined here. (I’m also not nearly convinced that it’s even illegal in my state and likely not so in any of them, especially given that my car had a dealer service to remove the SIM card as a recall item.)
It definitely wouldn't be illegal to remove a vehicle's cell modem from your own car in the US. The US is very friendly to vehicle modifications compared to much of the world. At a federal level, pretty much the only thing you cannot do to your own vehicle is remove emission equipment. The US does not even have universal requirements for insurance or safety inspections. And even in the states that do have safety insp…
Yep. My state has no inspections of any kind. No safety, no emissions, nothing. Insurance is mandatory, but not really verified in any reliable way.
Re: 72% of smart TVs and 46% of game consoles hardcode DNS settings
#294This 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.
The one exception... it is really convenient to be able to use my phone to control the tv, even if it is only to change inputs.
And that's how they get you.
Re: 72% of smart TVs and 46% of game consoles hardcode DNS settings
#295Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I think that is a pretty user-hostile attitude and I suspect you probably wouldn't really love it if every network operator was doing that kind of thing.
Re: 72% of smart TVs and 46% of game consoles hardcode DNS settings
#296This 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 use streaming apps on the TV all the time. I don't see any real justification for this luddite mindset. If you don't like data collection that makes the TV cheaper that's a separate issue.
Re: 72% of smart TVs and 46% of game consoles hardcode DNS settings
#297Just 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.
I'm not adverse to buying commercial displays for home use, but it's hard to find places that carry them and list prices. Those I have seen prices for were usually much more expensive than TV branded displays.
Then comes the other big thing. How am I supposed to spend so much when I can't see the thing before I buy it, and there's not much in the way of reviews?
I'm just hoping my next TV doesn't complain much when I don't connect it to the internet; not worried about it finding other networks to connect to, because of where I live.
Re: 72% of smart TVs and 46% of game consoles hardcode DNS settings
#298I’m kind of surprised there isn’t an OpenWRT style project out there to provide a replacement OS for common Smart TVs. At least I couldn’t find one. I’m obviously lacking in understanding the massive difficulties such a project would likely face. But it sure would be very nice to be able to replace my TVs firmware with something open source. I don’t want a dongle or extra box or extra remote. There’s a perfectly good…
No one’s going to target DRM-locked & proprietary (custom motherboard & SOC) Smart TVs when you can get everything you want here (except extra box) targeting an Amlogic s905 or similar box with HDMI CEC[1] that anyone can get for less than 50 USD and is 4K capable and works with absolutely any TV. See: LibreELEC.
Your “perfectly good computer” is in fact not yours (it has DRM so you are not the user, you are renting it), and it’s not perfectly good if it can’t run the software you want.
[1] This let’s you get away with just one remote including for powering on/off
Re: 72% of smart TVs and 46% of game consoles hardcode DNS settings
#299Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 prev…
My point was simply that DNS was never an effective measure. Corporate operators don’t need it since they can configure proxies and install endpoint monitoring, but the people building untrustworthy IoT devices or malware can’t be relied upon to cooperate.
I agree that the core problem here is blocking egress entirely – and that’d be a good area for home routers to add UI polish so you could easily allow your TV to hit Samsung.com if there’s an update you need before turning it back off. Unfortunately that’s going to be a losing game for many devices and that really hits at the root cause: we need strong regulation controlling privacy because trying to stop a well-funded company with purely technical measures is almost always a losing game.
Re: 72% of smart TVs and 46% of game consoles hardcode DNS settings
#300If I use a pihole then Samsung TVs will use 8.8.8.8 as backup (even if not configured) I had to firewall all dns requests as well... I assume in the future they will put DNS over https and it will be harder to block - at which point a Linux media player and tv disconnected will make sense... Doing this because of their crappy spying - sending frames of video to identify what you are playing.
FYI - This article was linked in another HN post about smart TVs ignoring PiHole. See the original article about how to make sure the TV follows your PiHole.
“Your Smart TV is probably ignoring your PiHole” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25313776