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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

#371

Post by imtringued »

toast0 wrote: post #297
CraneWorm wrote: post #22

Just 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…

>I'm not adverse to buying commercial displays for home use, but it's hard to find places that carry them and list prices.

I just spent 3 minutes googling for dumb tvs and found lots of them instantly. Why bother with commercial displays if you can buy cheap dumb TVs at Walmart? Here's a review for one [0].

[0] https://youtu.be/394sDSOI9dU

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

#373

Post by oh_sigh »

ThePhysicist wrote: post #360

I haven't been able to verify this yet but I think my (2015) Samsung SmartTV tries to ping a specific Samsung domain to determine whether the device is connected to the Internet. Last weekend something must've happend to that domain because the TV told me it wasn't connected to the Internet and refused to start any app. The Internet connection (as well as the local Wifi connection), however, was perfectly fine. So I…

The worst part is that there isn't just a couple super popular models of TVs that people could develop custom firmwares for, there are thousands of skus for televisions and each of them may behave in a different manner meaning that at their end of life it is unlikely that any group is going to go through the effort to free them from death.

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

#374

Post by shawnz »

fiddlerwoaroof wrote: post #345
shawnz wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What’s user-hostile is every consumer device insisting on pushing its defaults and ignoring any network policies I’ve configured.

Yes, I agree that is also user-hostile, since it should be configurable. The problem is not about network policies though, since DHCP is explicitly not designed to be a policy and is purposely meant to be optional for the client.

For this reason I wouldn't recommend buying a device like the Chromecast, in which the user can't configure the network settings. Instead maybe consider something like the Amazon Fire Stick which is not as user-hostile.

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

#375

Post by delecti »

roboyoshi wrote: post #262
post_break wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren’t all tv dumb TVs if you don’t connect them to the internet?

they still run a bloated operating system that occasionally crashes. The TV can still be smart and at some point I expect them to nag you constantly about not being connected.

That's my problem with them. The smart TVs I've used are slower to startup than the dumb ones, even when not using the "smart" features. Just changing the inputs is often painfully slow.

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

#377

Post by mrmanner »

shawnz wrote: post #295
LanternLight83 wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I read that as LanternLight83 is both the network operator and the user in this case, and if so it’s not really a problem.

I would also love to MitM myself in some cases, mostly because it’d be interesting to see what’s going on.

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

#378

Post by drewbug01 »

jsnell wrote: post #144
willis936 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 se…

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

I understand the point you're trying to make here - but long-lived products are still shut down by Google, fairly often. Here's a list of some Google products that have been / were around for 10 years or more before being killed (or are slated to be killed soon):

- Chrome Apps

- Cloud Print

- Fusion Tables

- Youtube Video Annotations

- Google Search Appliance (17 years old!!)

- Google Showtimes

- Google Code

- Picasa

- Orkut

- Postini

That's not even close to the full list of things that were more than 10 years old when Google shut them down. I left a bunch off for brevity's sake - but browsing https://killedbygoogle.com is a really eye-opening experience. They really have shut down a lot of stuff - and if you loosen the requirement to ">= 7 years" the list gets very, very long.

Again - I understand what you're trying to say. But it's just not simply a "zero effort joke". Google has killed a lot of things, and a lot of the things they killed were well used, long lived, and popular.

They'll keep Google DNS running as long as it provides business value to them, and that's it.

(Edit: I'm bad at list formatting, sorry)

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

#379

Post by IshKebab »

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…

Yeah it's not worth the effort - smart TVs don't run on standardised hardware and every manufacturer has their own software so you'd have to do an absolute mountain of reverse engineering for a ton of different TVs. Plus they almost certainly require signed firmware so you also have to find an exploit to allow loading your custom firmware.

Far easier just to not connect the TV to the internet and use a third party solution like nVidia Shield instead. Fortunately pretty much no TVs will try to connect via open WiFi or 4G at the moment, though it is definitely coming.

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

#380

Post by sp332 »

pickledcods wrote: post #192
EvanAnderson wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right to be suspicious. The DNS-over-HTTPS model favors those who run the servers (because they get exclusive access to monetizable end user name resolution data) and those who control the resolvers. You might control the resolver on your personal computer (for now). You probably don't control it on your phone. You most likely won't control it on your embedded devices.

I believe that Google pushed DoH to track your cross-site browsing. TLS hides your URL, and blockers can break adsense tracking and/or any other call-home backlinks. Using DoH, especially one served by an advert company is just signing up to be their open book.

Chrome didn't change the resolver, though. It just enables DoH if it's on a whitelist of known DoH-capable resolvers. It doesn't send your data to Google unless you already used Google's DNS.
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