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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

#301

Post by c0nsumer »

the8472 wrote: post #61
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 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…

The absolute worst version I had of this was in China (and I think Korea as well).

I was troubleshooting an issue where a company's client computers which connected to the company VPN wouldn't have internet access post-connection.

The problem turned out to be that instead of sending a NXDOMAIN they'd return their ad server and then _always_ send back some JS to show ads.

The company network used PAC files (these are a piece of JS with a single FindProxyForURL() function) via an internal-only URI to steer most requests to our proxies, while keeping some internal.

The problem came about when clients would first start up the OS would attempt to access the internal-only URI before the VPN client finished connecting. In a normal network it'd get nothing and life would carry on. With this problematic ISP they'd get something that /should/ have been a PAC file, but because it was some other piece of JS without FindProxyForURL() it wouldn't work as a PAC file and thus the client wouldn't go to the proxy.

The expiration on this piece of JS was set to some absurd amount of time, so when the client would eventually try hitting our PAC file server again (happens every 20 minutes on Windows) it wouldn't get our file because it thought the garbage one from the ISP was newer. And the ISP updated their hijacking JS more frequently than we updated our PAC file.

There were two possible solutions to this. One, routinely touch the PAC file so it's date was newer than whatever the ISP put out. Or two, set up an external A record for the internal PAC server name to keep the hijacking from working. We went with the second.

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

#302

Post by 1123581321 »

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.

Why do you say it’s not difficult? You know people want TVs to have convenient apps and integrations on them. Convincing people to get that functionality from an additional device that they have to set up sounds very difficult.

Do you mean to say you have a simple opinion?

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

#303

Post by asdff »

scarface74 wrote: post #170
bitlevel wrote: post #89

They appear to not be trustworthy to be on our networks - so we should: 1. Not join them to our networks 2. Stop buying 'Smart TV's' 3. Get panels and a smart box that you can control I'm lucky enough to be able to direct ALL DNS through my router first. Nothing gets out without my say so. Not everyone has that capability, sadly, with home routers. The solution provided by the OP is a solid one - another would be to…

So which “smart box” would that be? Roku? Where the CEO outright said that they aren’t in the hardware business and they are trying to monetize via ads? Google? Need I say more Amazon Fire devices? See above with Google AppleTV? Sure I have a couple. They aren’t trying to monetize with advertising. But the HN crowd is anti-Apple.

My xbox has been reasonable

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

#304

Post by boardwaalk »

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.

You could get a smart TV and just not connect it to the internet. If you were really paranoid, you could disconnect/snip the wifi antenna.

At least my TV still allow firmware updates via USB, so you may not lose that. Not that it'd matter much if you weren't using any smart features, but they do still provide things like improving compatibility with devices (recently HDMI 2.1).

I have a bigger issue with VR headsets. They go a step farther in that you have to use their platform. There's no equivalent of "just use HDMI" in some cases.

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

#305

Post by dirtyid »

erentz wrote: post #191

I’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…

Wonder why there are no routers that offer built in ad blocking.

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

#306

Post by kstrauser »

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.

You’re exactly right.

Furthermore, an external box is easy to replace when it breaks or becomes obsolete. What are you going to do when the embedded OS in your sly TV is no longer supported?

No thanks. My TV is a monitor, only. It has never been, nor will ever be, connected to my home network after I first brought it home and updated its firmware to whatever was current at the time.

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

#308

Post by Codazoa »

scarface74 wrote: post #170
bitlevel wrote: post #89

They appear to not be trustworthy to be on our networks - so we should: 1. Not join them to our networks 2. Stop buying 'Smart TV's' 3. Get panels and a smart box that you can control I'm lucky enough to be able to direct ALL DNS through my router first. Nothing gets out without my say so. Not everyone has that capability, sadly, with home routers. The solution provided by the OP is a solid one - another would be to…

So which “smart box” would that be? Roku? Where the CEO outright said that they aren’t in the hardware business and they are trying to monetize via ads? Google? Need I say more Amazon Fire devices? See above with Google AppleTV? Sure I have a couple. They aren’t trying to monetize with advertising. But the HN crowd is anti-Apple.

KDE is working on a "smart box" software to run on raspberrypi. I believe it's called KDE Bigscreen and even has voice search features through mycroft if you are hosting an instance. The project is available in beta right now but it looks like it has potential

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

#309

Post by stingraycharles »

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 own several smart TVs but use none of the smart functionality. They don’t even have internet.

TV makers are horrible software developers, for the same reasons that mobile manufacturers were horrible mobile OS developers until Android came along.

We have similar solutions for televisions in the form of Apple TV and Chromecast.

I honestly feel I’m wasting my money when I’m buying a smart TV these days, but you just narrow your choice so much if you only look for dumb phones, you’re almost forced into buying one.

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

#310

Post by sgt »

kristofferR wrote: post #124
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

But that sounds like something that will eventually be stopped by YouTube.
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