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72% of smart TVs and 46% of game consoles hardcode DNS settings
161–170 of 673 posts
Re: 72% of smart TVs and 46% of game consoles hardcode DNS settings
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just don’t ever connect it to your network.
Sure, till they start adding cellphone-tower enabled connectivity. Your move, consumer.
Though at least if they did this, it's not using my network/affecting my data limits/able to be used by a hacker to exploit my network. Plus there would probably be a physical cell antenna somewhere that could be... altered.
Re: 72% of smart TVs and 46% of game consoles hardcode DNS settings
#163Just 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.
Is it? I’m still holding onto my TV from 2014 because it doesn’t have “smart” functionality. Every time I look at new ones I can’t find good dumb ones.
> connect that to a machine you own.
This is also becoming increasingly problematic.
Re: 72% of smart TVs and 46% of game consoles hardcode DNS settings
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you don't need any "TV" features such as a tuner or speakers, you might consider using a monitor. I use a 32" 4k monitor as my "TV". In my case, anything with a TV tuner requires an expensive license, so that's another motivating factor, but whenever I use someone else's "smart TV", I'm always relieved that I don't have to deal with glacial UIs and injected ads.
And I use a 55" 4K TV as my "monitor", because sub-$1,000 >>30" monitors with internal 3D LUT-based color calibration aren't a thing. And, while I don't use the speakers, the TV's S/PDIF output is nevertheless handy for routing the audio output of whichever of the four HDMI inputs is active to the single S/PDIF input on my audio interface. Finally, the TV has an RS-232 port that allows control of essentially all of t…
What is said TV response time? If it's bigger than 2 ms then that's a no go for me.
Re: 72% of smart TVs and 46% of game consoles hardcode DNS settings
#165They 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…
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.
Re: 72% of smart TVs and 46% of game consoles hardcode DNS settings
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
The root evil here is that you can't change the root certificates in such devices. Even if you controlled its DNS, the device could still just be programmed to fail if it doesn't reach its analytics/ad/whatever server.
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.
Re: 72% of smart TVs and 46% of game consoles hardcode DNS settings
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
>I'm lucky enough to be able to direct ALL DNS through my router first Even DNS over HTTPS? Do you do packet inspection? Just blocking ports doesn't do much any more. I run an IDS/IPS and it blocks lots of DoH to Google. Apple devices are even worse.
Would you mind sharing a bit more detail on your setup?
I'm not sure what the commenter's setup is, but I have one that (at least mostly) achieves the same thing. It is a combination of a few things:
1. Redirect all outbound DNS traffic to your own local DNS server (as described in the link in this post) 2. Return NXDOMAIN for well-known DoH domains [1] (as well as "use-application-dns.net" for well-behaving software like Firefox [2]) 3. Block traffic to well-known DoH providers by destination IP address [1]
[1] https://github.com/bambenek/block-doh [2] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/configuring-networks-di...
Re: 72% of smart TVs and 46% of game consoles hardcode DNS settings
#168Another step in the silly device manufacturer / device owner arms-race. As long as people keep rewarding device manufacturers who treat owners as tenants it will progress. I wish people would just stop buying this garbage. They won't, though-- they see the features but not the down-side. The next step will be hard-coded DoH server IPs. Sly owners will NAT those to a transparent MiTM proxy. Then device manufacturers w…
I think that "privacy" is being used as a trojan-horse in this regard. Technical-minded people are especially reactionary to any criticism of HTTPs and the other related things that will inevitably arise from giving entities effectively an end-to-end untamperable and non-user-controlled pipe straight into your TV/Monitor from their server. In an alternate universe, "ability to control/mitm data going through your net…
if the software running in all this IoT crap was free software users could control the data that goes thru their network, right?
Re: 72% of smart TVs and 46% of game consoles hardcode DNS settings
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
The root evil here is that you can't change the root certificates in such devices. Even if you controlled its DNS, the device could still just be programmed to fail if it doesn't reach its analytics/ad/whatever server.
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…
When I installed PiHole a few years back I blocked my tradfri gateway from connecting to Ikea's servers and everything kept working! I wonder if something has changed since then? Ikea devices are kind of nice because they don't actually rely on the internet at all and work completely locally (at least, they did a few years back).
Re: 72% of smart TVs and 46% of game consoles hardcode DNS settings
#170They 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.