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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

#621

Post by harha »

twblalock wrote: post #544
kzrdude wrote: post #529

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regulation should intervene when smart tvs come with non-obvious downsides like data collection. Consumers don't get informed and have no possibility of making an informed choice here.

People know about data collection. They don't care. The first thing we need to do to have productive conversations about privacy with non-technical people is to stop pretending they are ignorant or unable to understand trade-offs. People know that their online activity is tracked. They know that their Alexa devices record their conversations. All of this has been on the news enough times that you'd need to be living…

I agree that people know about data collection and don't care to some extent, but I'd argue that they don't understand the consequences and the extent of this.

If they'd be presented a bill of what they're being overcharged through better targeting, ads, etc., the same way activity trackers show how many steps a user takes, things might change.

What I'd disagree is that people choose to purchase the device anyway, a non-tech-savy user will hardly get presented a non-smart device, wouldn't even know to search for this.

I think regulation should at least let you turn off features, e.g. it should be possible to use Airplay and turn off the app store the tv uses.

The article has convinced me to do exactly that and finally get a pfsense router to make the pihole more effective. I'll (try to) only allow each device to run the services I really want it to run. I doubt my partner, siblings, parents, etc. would be able to do that though, this needs a simple pfsense/pihole combo that runs well out of the box or regulation to protect consumers.

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

#622

Post by DavideNL »

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.

True, but unfortunately not a solution because it's not future-proof. Nobody will be using dumb tv's in 50+ years;

What we really need, are proper laws to control/limit/stop all the tracking.

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

#623

Post by lmns »

the8472 wrote: post #467
carstenhag wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Deutsche Telekom hijacked NXDOMAINs for over 10 years, though (maybe even longer). It's not like they did it for a few months and then got sued.

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

#624

Post by oAlbe »

idiot900 wrote: post #312
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 in luck. Buy a commercial TV, or a hospitality TV. For example: https://www.lg.com/us/business/commercial-tvs/lg-65ut640s0ua Other TV manufacturers make similar products.

I've asked this in other similar posts: how do you even buy one of those?

I went to the equivalent LG website for my country, and they don't even have a button for contacting them like in the link above.

So I did some searching for the model "LG UT640S" and I only found it sold on one website in my country, but listed as a smart TV (full number: "LG 43UT640S0ZA", parent ends in S0UA).

What gives? Do you need a company to be able to buy one of those? Maybe a sort of line of credit with LG? Buy in bulk? None of this makes sense honestly. I wanna buy a product that clearly exists in the world, but I can't even find someone, somewhere, that will sell it to me.

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

#625

Post by wasmitnetzen »

Yeri wrote: post #156
Dahoon wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That you know of.. Alexa auto-connects to other Alexa networks (like your neighbors). Some TVs have Alexa built-in. Bingo, telemetry.

That’s Alexa hardware using something like LORAWAN or zigbee or something. Bandwidth is low. I doubt that (at this stage) TVs have something similar builtin. When they come with Alexa/GHome/... it’s usually the software and not an actual Alexa device built in.

Amazon just announced Sidewalk, where their Echo/Ring devices share their internet connection. If it's not happening yet, it will be soon.

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

#626

Post by lazyjones »

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…

That's not really a consumer-friendly solution. It's also borderline illegal in the EU IMHO (if you hardcode DNS servers in the USA, for example).

The toxic ISP issue isn't so dramatic where I live, it used to be worse 15-20 years ago. But the solution has always been: if the ISP is messing with you, you just buy your own router and configure it for your network, with a VPN tunnel if necessary. Ignoring DHCP makes this unnecessarily harder.

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

#627

Post by hackerfromthefu »

acdha wrote: post #172
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 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…

Denial is not just a river in Egypt

Follow the money .. watch the actions not the words

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

#628

Post by JustSomeNobody »

mataug wrote: post #494

This is precisely the reason I do not connect my TV to my home network. I use a AppleTV for streaming content. Once in a while I check the manufacturer's page, and if there's a firmware update, I factory reset my TV to remove any cached info about my usage, and then update the firmware via ethernet, and immediately remove it from the network. A while ago I noticed that my old Insignia TV refused to use the pi-hole co…

Newer TVs will retain wifi settings after a reset. (Looking at you Samsung)

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

#629

Post by acdha »

hackerfromthefu wrote: post #627
acdha wrote: post #172

Earlier 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…

Denial is not just a river in Egypt Follow the money .. watch the actions not the words

You mean actions like the Mozilla engineers advocating for users in standards groups or industry coordinating teams? Or the ones building privacy-oriented features?

You’re going to have to make a more substantial argument to get anywhere with this.

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

#630

Post by mcovey »

jasonvorhe wrote: post #313
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…

Afaik OpenWRT still has no auto-updating functionality so I'd rather not see something in that poor state on even more Internet connected devices.

There are some userspace scripts that will dry-run updates and email you the results. Generally it's just new config files that differ from your current versions, usually it's just whitespace differences or settings that have changed manually.

https://github.com/tavinus/opkg-upgrade is one.

As it notes, the reasons you don't want updates on auto-pilot are those config differences, and limited space available on routers.

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