Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

My Chromecast Ultra would not start until I began answering 8.8.8.8

mailarchive.ietf.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 519 posts

Re: My Chromecast Ultra would not start until I began answering 8.8.8.8

#171

Post by Bartweiss »

shawnz wrote: post #25
zamazingo wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you want your own dns server used at all times.

But why would you care about that? You're already connecting to Google's service, YouTube, so what does it change to use Google's DNS to resolve it? What is the circumstance where you'd care about not using Google's DNS but then connect to a Google service anyway? If Chromecasts allowed arbitrary web browsing, I would maybe see your point -- but they don't.

Perhaps you live in Turkey and Google Public DNS is blocked?

I agree that on a privacy level, hiding DNS requests from Google when your Google Chromecast is calling Youtube seems like closing the stable door after the horse is gone. But there are reasons other than privacy that relying on Google's DNS might go wrong; it can be blocked (or trigger suspicion) by a government, ISPs have occasionally broken their routing to 8.8.8.8 specifically, and Google DNS itself has even had (very rare) outages.

None of those issues are enormously common, except perhaps Turkey's censorship, but they're all totally avoidable. Using 8.8.8.8 as a default and failing over to the user's DNS if necessary seems to be strictly better than this approach from a consumer viewpoint.

Re: My Chromecast Ultra would not start until I began answering 8.8.8.8

#172

Post by scrollaway »

mburns wrote: post #165
scrollaway wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

shrugs I wasn't referring specifically to HN, nor was I trying to suggest I know the exact ratio. What I know is it's extremely unlikely that this story is being upvoted because of that given that 1. A lot of people upvote on title alone (I'll die on that hill); 2. Not many people know who Paul Vixie is; 3. Those that do might not notice the name in the UI/email (I certainly didn't).

That’s something you believe. Die on whatever hill you choose. The top comment on HN explains who Paul Vickie is. I believe people tend to read comments before reading the article or voting.

The current top comment was not written at the time I wrote mine, and was not top comment until less than an hour ago.

If you want a spot on my hill, I have room to rent.

Re: My Chromecast Ultra would not start until I began answering 8.8.8.8

#173

Post by FakeComments »

SmellyGeekBoy wrote: post #112
FakeComments wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> would rather fail completely than not be able to serve you ads. Google is an ad company; if you don’t watch the ads, you’re not a useful product. It doesn’t matter you “bought a product”, this behavior is their corporate DNA. It’s the Office to their Microsoft. Time and time again, we see a clear behavior from Google: that everything feeds the ad machine — or else!

As always, don't let facts get in the way of a good rant.

There is a continual and persistent trend in Google’s behavior, across a broad range of products. While any lone action might be explainable, as a pattern, they’re poor conduct.

Re: My Chromecast Ultra would not start until I began answering 8.8.8.8

#174

Post by jackfraser »

matz1 wrote: post #156
joekrill wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK but if that "known good" DNS server goes down or isn't available, you still have others you can fall back to. The device shouldn't just become completely useless. But that's what Google is doing here. It's their DNS servers or none, it seems.

To me its a reasonable trade off, the probability the google DNS server goes down is low and the amount of people who purposely block google dns is also low.

Sure, but don't we reserve the right to run our own split-horizon DNS servers and point fqdn's our devices want to resolve to anything we desire?

Don't like it? Use TLS and verify certificates.

Re: My Chromecast Ultra would not start until I began answering 8.8.8.8

#175

Post by scrollaway »

disiplus wrote: post #153
scrollaway wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't really entertain the suggestion that pi-holes are considered by Google as a serious-enough threat that they'd go through this trouble just to fuck with it. Seriously, think about the venn diagram of Chromecast users and pi-hole users. It looks a lot like a tennis ball being dropped into the sun.

i don't think its totally unreasonable. the same thing could be said about the people who used adblock back in the day, but im sure google knowing what they know now would never let it thru. im pretty sure they are actively thinking about it now and how to ensure that they can deliver what they want directly to our eyes no matter what. from the position of google everything else would be stupid, im pretty sure they l…

Google would certainly be aware of pi-holes and the potential of the threat, but to put things back in context we're talking about a mass-market device which has to deal with bad network config, bad isps, bad routers, etc. What's more likely?

Re: My Chromecast Ultra would not start until I began answering 8.8.8.8

#176

Post by alias_neo »

jrockway wrote: post #154
alias_neo wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is how I solved it. Someone above says an update prevented this somehow, though.

It seems unlikely to me that the DNS client has the sophistication to know that it's not Google's 8.8.8.8 that it's talking to. That would be a nightmare to maintain; the 8.8.8.8 team changes some implementation detail, and then all Google clients stop working (and are now unable to update because they refuse to resolve DNS names)? I doubt they implemented that because it's crazy.

I also don't see a way they could do it, but then I only know just enough to be dangerous, as they say.

Re: My Chromecast Ultra would not start until I began answering 8.8.8.8

#177

Post by becauseiam »

richardwhiuk wrote: post #13

I've seen this been done before, and IME it's reasonable behavior. I've seen so many instances of computers configured with DNS servers which are extremely slow, or provide garbage results, that adding a known good DNS server to the list, and then parallel resolving across all of them is a perfectly legitimate thing to do.

Good behaviour really is honoring the resolvers provided in a DHCP answer.

Re: My Chromecast Ultra would not start until I began answering 8.8.8.8

#178

Post by toast0 »

ajross wrote: post #168

Yeah. I know we'd all want to believe that the response and reaction here would be the same if it was pointed to 1.1.1.1, but... yeah, we know better. Everyone would point out that consumer ISPs server polluted data and that Cloudflare clearly provides better service, and relying on that instead of the local garbage is quite obviously a benefit to the device user. But this is Google, and people here have iPhones, so…

It's not unreasonable to attempt to use DHCP provided DNS servers. It's not unreasonable to use fallback DNS servers when the DHCP provided servers don't work. It would be a bit strange, but maybe not altogether unreasonable to run a fully recursive DNS client with root.hints and what not.

I guess you could argue over reasonableness of favoring the fallback DNS over DHCP. It's not reasonable to ignore DHCP when the fallback DNS doesn't work though. It doesn't matter what fallback DNS you're using.

Re: My Chromecast Ultra would not start until I began answering 8.8.8.8

#179

Post by [deleted] »

richardwhiuk wrote: post #13

I've seen this been done before, and IME it's reasonable behavior. I've seen so many instances of computers configured with DNS servers which are extremely slow, or provide garbage results, that adding a known good DNS server to the list, and then parallel resolving across all of them is a perfectly legitimate thing to do.

[deleted]

Re: My Chromecast Ultra would not start until I began answering 8.8.8.8

#180

Post by heavenlyblue »

vetinari wrote: post #87
thecatspaw wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google doesnt care about a piHole or similar, its such a tiny tiny part of their customers its not worth fighting it at this point

Still, Google is tightening the screws: moving DNS resolver into the browser, instead of using the system one; moving DNS over to https+ESNI to hide among other traffic; forcing their own DNS servers instead of user configured. That's all together means, that they do not trust not only the ISPs, but neither the user, and that they want to have a unobstructed communication channel out of their software to the mothersh…

Nah. I use 8.8.8.8 at home simply because it was a long time since providers in the UK didn’t try to intercept the failed DNS queries.

On top of that, Virgin Media resolver managed to go offline particularly regularly.

So here we are: what user sees is that a particular device doesn’t work, while others do. So they obviously blame the ones adhering to standards.

Post reply on HN