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My Chromecast Ultra would not start until I began answering 8.8.8.8

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

#281

Post by cwkoss »

scrollaway wrote: post #182
kilroy123 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, I think they kind of _are_. I now no longer point to or use Google's DNS because of this. Call me paranoid.

For what it's worth I don't think that's paranoid at all. You don't want to deal with Google, so you don't introduce them to your network, that's reasonable. What is paranoid IMO is some commenters' (as well as seemingly Paul Vixie's) implication that Google does this trick with the Chromecast to better spy on people , which completely goes against Occam's Razor.

I mean, spying on people is the foundation of their entire ad market. They have means and motive, the only question is whether they've followed through.

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

#282

Post by pixl97 »

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.

>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.

DNS over TLS and DNS over HTTPS will change that. Google has pushed encryption in all their other products, and is pushing these implementations so do not be surprised when their end user devices use it by default.

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

#283

Post by JohnFen »

Arnt wrote: post #148
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.

I too have written code that asks 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4, because the DNS server I get from DHCP frequently is so brain-damaged. (SRV records, what's that?) I asked both in parallel. On one hand it feels wrong to not ask in parallel. On the other, $%#@%#$%!$@# the %$#%#$%^$#@%#$! packet filters that block DNS packets to everyone except the local brain-damaged resolver. Or even redirect. If Google will fight that fight I…

> On the other, $%#@%#$%!$@# the %$#%#$%^$#@%#$! packet filters that block DNS packets to everyone except the local brain-damaged resolver.

Curse it all you want, but forcing all DNS lookups to be resolved by a particular server is often an important security measure.

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

#284

Post by pixl97 »

scrollaway wrote: post #40
dictum wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is unduly paternalistic: a story is whatever the HN community decides to pay attention to, even if that leaves out important stories or puts a spotlight on minor trivia. > You know what would be an actual story though? If Google used Google DNS to spy on people. If anyone has concrete evidence that they're doing that, that is a big fucking deal. I'm an optimist, but I'm also cynical enough to foresee the same co…

> This is unduly paternalistic You're right, I'm sorry. I edited my post a bit to soften it. > I'm an optimist, but I'm also cynical enough to foresee the same complaints Well, maybe. I would hope not, specifically because Google has made previous guarantees that they do not use that data for spying. It's different when it's your ISP, which already does tons of shady shit and buried somewhere in your TOS that they do…

You do realize your ISP can spy on any DNS records passing its routers with deep packet inspection right? Only DNS(HTTPS/TLS) can fix that.

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

#285

Post by pmontra »

Rapzid wrote: post #238
darpa_escapee wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an incredibly generous reading of the situation that, as far as I can tell, has no basis in reality. Google is circumventing how the internet works at pretty basic level by not respecting users' DNS preferences in favor of their own.

The consumer of the DNS is the Chromecast. Its preference is 8.8.8.8 .

The owner of the Chromecast decides which DNS to use, unless we decide that Google keeps owning it and the sale is not a sale.

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

#286

Post by JohnFen »

creeble wrote: post #162
jon-wood wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We hardcode known good DNS servers in IoT devices that we ship from work because a significant proportion of issues being reported by customers were caused by ISP resolvers doing things they shouldn't - mostly either redirecting all domains to a splash screen telling people about bandwidth quotas/other things, or not respecting the TTL returned by our resolvers, which could cause data to get directed to the wrong pla…

Been there too, sad to say. We haven't gone so far as to hard-code DNS servers yet, but it's shocking how bad some ISPs' DNS support can be. There should be a better way to fight it, but I fear Google may win here because I haven't been able to find anything wrong with the way their servers work. I.e., 8.8.8.8 isn't doing anything evil afaict... Yet.

Doing that can be (barely) acceptable, provided that you also do two other things: make it clear to users that you're doing that, and allow a way for the user to change that behavior if they desire.

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

#287

Post by apostacy »

pexaizix wrote: post #62
apostacy wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't a case of an IOT device though. My Chromecast went through massive amount of trouble to use Google's DNS servers, to serve ads behind my pi-hole. It would respect all of my DHCP parameters, but silently ignore DNS settings. It was clearly intentional to serve ads. I had to set up a firewall to force it to use my DNS server. And eventually even that stopped working with an update (which themselves are reall…

>My Chromecast went through massive amount of trouble to use Google's DNS servers No it didn't, it just queried 8.8.8.8 instead of whatever DNS server your DHCP configuration told it to use. Putting "nameserver 8.8.8.8" in /etc/resolv.conf and marking it read-only would have the same effect. Doesn't look like much trouble does it?

Is it reasonable to fail if you can't access a specific DNS server? This is unexpected behavior.

And I don't have access to the /etc/resolv.conf on my Chromecast, that's the problem! Anyway, there's a new thread on this specific phenomenon. I'm glad I'm not the only one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19170671

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

#288

Post by sowbug »

Topgamer7 wrote: post #253
toast0 wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

I think the difference is that the chromecast would not function without 8.8.8.8. Thus requiring you use googles services to use a google product. That is not cool.

Isn't using a company's product exactly when you'd expect a dependency on that company's service?

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

#289

Post by apostacy »

Legogris wrote: post #120
apostacy wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't a case of an IOT device though. My Chromecast went through massive amount of trouble to use Google's DNS servers, to serve ads behind my pi-hole. It would respect all of my DHCP parameters, but silently ignore DNS settings. It was clearly intentional to serve ads. I had to set up a firewall to force it to use my DNS server. And eventually even that stopped working with an update (which themselves are reall…

Could you solve this by just routing 8.8.8.8 to your own DNS inside your network?

How is that simple? I know a lot of developers that couldn't easily do that.

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

#290

Post by hendersoon »

I redirect all outbound DNS queries from my untrusted/IoT and guest VLANs to an internal caching DNS server for this reason. I use Pihole [1] which also blocks ads in mobile apps and such, very convenient.

Providing a DNS server via DHCP is insufficient as many IoT devices ignore it for tracking purposes. Similar deal with blocking port 53 outbound, they just refuse to work.

[1]: https://pi-hole.net/

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