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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

#461

Post by cle »

colejohnson66 wrote: post #359
mattnewton wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Commercial signage tvs tend to be much more expensive and never really go on sale though. I can't even find out the price of this product without calling them to talk to a salesperson?

They’re more expensive because they need to make up the lost revenue from advertising and the likes. Or something like that. Of course, there’s also the simple thing of “enterprise stuff costs more for no reason.”

Or because they don’t want to give you a reasonable choice but to send all your viewing data to them. Comparing prices of dumb TVs a few years ago to these “enterprise” ones, it seems unlikely that the premium is to make up for lost ad revenue.

Another possible factor is that enterprises are willing (or even required) to spend more money to keep their data private and secure.

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

#462

Post by twblalock »

Spivak wrote: post #200
mikeryan wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s going to be really difficult to not get a smart tv pretty soon. You can, of course not hook it up to the internet. But pretty much all of the current TVs (particularly the good ones with nice displays) are going to be “Smart”. One reason for the recent huge price drops on TVs is the ability to subsidize the price by selling viewing data. It’s the new normal in the CE world.

Yeah the only thing that can stop this trend at this point is regulation unfortunately. Unless you make it a rule that TV manufacturers can’t do this putting them all on a level playing field the ones that do will always be ahead on price.

This is all a result of consumer preference -- dumb TVs were once the majority of the market. Smart TVs have taken over because people prefer them.

Regulation should not be used to override clearly demonstrated consumer preferences or to force companies to produce products that few people want.

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

#463

Post by scrollaway »

cmroanirgo wrote: post #428
scrollaway wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Get them an nvidia shield to attach to the dumb tv. Best of both worlds.

> Google Assistant built in https://www.nvidia.com/en-au/shield/ Being internet connected is one thing (which it looks good for), but having an active mic in the room is a whole other level of "no thanks" from me.

So disable/don't use it? It doesn't even actively listen for "ok google", it only listens if you hit the assistant key.

If you ever have an android phone in your home, it's exactly the same thing (except the phone actively listens by default).

Edit: Also, for fucks sake, context. The person I'm replying to is talking about getting his parents a SmartTV (way worse privacy-wise than Google), for the convenience factor.

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

#464

Post by lozaning »

bsagdiyev wrote: post #180
jlgaddis wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ... and the response to that is hardcoding a set of known good DNS servers which we can rely on. Netgear, at one point, also decided that hard-coding an IP address (for NTP, not DNS) was the best solution [0]. -- [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTP_server_misuse_and_abuse#Ne...

Sony did the same thing with a Blu-Ray player for NTP, effectively DDoSed that particular box because they also didn’t think to stagger the polling so like clockwork millions of consumer devices would check in at the same time nightly. From what I gathered from the electronics guys a few floors down they eventually resolved that in later revisions, or so I was told.

I worked on an IoT platform for a while that struggled with this. Our workaround was to tell support to tell people to not set automations to run on the quarter, half, 3 quarters or hour mark. Something set to run at 7:14 or 7:16 PM would run every night, something set to run at 7:15 was a crapshoot.

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

#465

Post by ArchOversight »

fiddlerwoaroof wrote: post #338
gnu8 wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My question here is how are you going to install your root certificate on a $300 smart TV? Or, if that is not required because the TV does not verify DoH certificates, how bad is that for security (which we already know is awful on these devices)?

Well, it’d just block internet access there. I wonder if it’s possible to push a root to an Apple TV

I know that you can install iOS profiles onto the Apple TV, I have done this for 802.1x support, which included a CA root for the 802.1x controller.

I would imagine you can use this to push any certificate that you can also push to an iOS/iPadOS/macOS device.

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

#466

Post by sneak »

throwaway09223 wrote: post #398
smileysteve wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disagree. My 75 yo parents still have a dumb tv. They have different remotes for cable, sound, blue ray player ( some smart apps), fire tv, and apple tv. Their life is not easier because of this, they don't watch what they want when they want because it takes minutes to get to a different source. I know what I'm getting them for Christmas

The right way to fix this is one single smart device, which is the only device connected to the dumb TV. The best of these types don't have a remote. They're controlled by a phone. If the intelligence is built into the TV then it cannot be updated or replaced -- so either there will again be multiple devices, or the TV will need to be replaced on a frequent basis. A smart TV makes the problem you describe even worse

> If the intelligence is built into the TV then it cannot be updated or replaced

Wait until a decade from now, when all computers are like this, too.

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

#467

Post by the8472 »

carstenhag wrote: post #442
the8472 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

In Germany, Telekom used to hijack nxdomain. A court actually found them guilty and since a half year or so they are no longer doing that.

I think that actually supports my point. A customer has a relationship with the ISP and can actually sue them. If people start putting google or cloudflare DNS into lots of devices and apps and those start doing something questionable then you have no recourse and even if they did they'd have to go after dozens of different vendors to change their behavior instead of the single ISP.

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

#468

Post by jeffbee »

mlyle wrote: post #446
kgwxd wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At some point, most of those things are going to stop working but the screen will still be perfectly fine. What are you going to do with it then?

I don't know-- plug a $30 Chromecast or Roku into the back and keep going?

Seriously this thing has four hdmi ports and even a composite video input. It is the superset of dumb TVs.

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

#469

Post by zxcvbn4038 »

I bought a new TV for the first time in fourty years and never considered the “smart” TV aspects - I was just focused on image quality and number of inputs. In the end I picked out an LG tv which had a great picture - but it’s app support really sucks if you want something more then Netflix and Hulu.

I ended up getting a Fire stick and an Apple TV to go with it so I can access content. If I did it all again I wouldn’t even bother setting up the networking for the TV - it’s just one more vector for advertising - and just plan on having the other devices day one. They are updated much more frequently and get the streaming apps that nobody bothers to develop for the TV itself.

Downloading firmware updates for the TV takes hours. I’m pretty sure the server is under somebody’s desk and every LG tv in the world hits it at once so the throughput is bytes per second - they should use an S3 bucket or something instead.

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

#470

Post by m463 »

benttoothpaste wrote: post #166
mstade wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The IKEA Tradfri "smart" lighting gateway will stop responding to commands if it can't phone home to some IKEA server. I noticed this when I changed my router to use NextDNS, which blocked the IKEA lookups. I was ready to return the device as broken until I realized this. I've also had issues with Bang & Olufsen speakers in the past, and inclined to believe it's for the same reasons. I think it's insane that devices…

> I was ready to return the device as broken until I realized this. Actually you probably should return such devices as broken.

I did just that with a DJI Mavic.

It was kind of hard to send back a really nice device that I had just opened up and was ready to fly.

Thing is, some companies just use it as a way to fire their customers.

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