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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

#471

Post by joshuamorton »

mthoms wrote: post #239
joshuamorton wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then they'd need to announce that to all of the users of their DNS service. You tell me how to do that.

They'd do it the same way every web service since the beginning of the internet has done it. "By using service X you are agreeing to be bound by the terms located at .... "

Changing privacy policies doesn't work that way. You have to inform users of the changes, or they can claim that they didn't know and aren't bound by it.

That's why whenever companies change their ToS you get email/notifications/actual mail informing you of the changes.

You can't do that for DNS.

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

#472

Post by calibas »

ehsankia wrote: post #470
calibas wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't create tools for censorship in China and support a free and open Internet. Those things are completely opposed to each other. Pointing out the actions of other companies, the good things Google has done, or the fact that they censor content in most countries doesn't negate that fact. Those are just mediocre argumentative tactics to try and downplay a public relations disaster. We're not even dealing with th…

> You can't create tools for censorship in China and support a free and open Internet What does following local laws of one specific country have to do with the open global internet? You do realize that Chinese internet is already behind a firewall, and is not open, right? > Google went out of it's way to protect Chinese dissidents And we have absolutely facts about what they were working on with Dragonfly, except le…

You're acting like your guesses are just as good as The Intercept's investigation, and all to defend Google!

Why are you doing PR for them?

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

#473

Post by muppetman »

I reject (not just drop, reject as in send back an ICMP message) 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 in my home network, and my Chromecast Ultra works just fine. I know it's talking to the PiHole too because I see it in my logs.

So I don't believe the OP, even though it's the living legend that is PV.

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

#474

Post by michaelmrose »

kllrnohj wrote: post #344
calibas wrote: post #170

This should bother people here more than it does. The last thing the Internet needs is even more dependence upon Google. They've made it quite clear through their actions that they're not supporters of a free and open Internet: https://theintercept.com/2018/09/14/google-china-prototype-l... If people don't push back against these kinds of things, Google will continue to abuse their power. There shouldn't be an army o…

> The last thing the Internet needs is even more dependence upon Google. This doesn't change that? It's a google streaming device that in order to function at all requires a connection to google's data centers. Why does it matter if that connection happens via 8.8.8.8 or some other IP resolved by a different DNS server? What is the actual, practical difference of that? It's still connecting to Google in order to prov…

Choosing to block 8.8.8.8 for devices in your own home is neither censorship nor breaking the free and open nature of the internet. It is baffling how you could imagine it is.

It is in fact strange that a device that facilitates streaming from a variety of servers needs to resolve a particular dns server to function. Its obvious that it should need to resolve SOME dns server to function but not a particular one.

Clearly it can't update if it can't talk to google but why shouldn't it be able to play local content or stream netflix without talking to a particular google IP?

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

#475

Post by sixothree »

ballenf wrote: post #404
rasz wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, except Chrome has very liberal definition of what it considers an error.

Is there any combination of settings in Chrome that will disable this behavior?

Uninstall chrome?

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

#476

Post by sowbug »

Bartweiss wrote: post #171
shawnz wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Chromecast isn't sold in Turkey. That fact doesn't invalidate your general point. But pragmatism easily wins when balancing all the real-world craziness of captive portals, ISP DNS hacks, and creative name-resolution optimizations against "but it could be grey-marketed in Turkey." This is especially true for a narrow-purpose consumer-entertainment appliance that already depends on other services provided by its manufacturer.

https://support.google.com/store/answer/2462844

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

#477

Post by smcl »

shawnz wrote: post #246
smcl wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well there are nearly infinite ways to route traffic to/from YouTube.com, that is how the internet works. However for this product there is a very hard dependency on this one specific IP address, which isn’t documented and is pretty unreasonable

> Well there are nearly infinite ways to route traffic to/from YouTube.com, that is how the internet works. I'm talking about the endpoint. YouTube.com resolves to a finite set of IP addresses, and accessing YouTube requires that outgoing traffic is allowed to all of them. All of this is entirely under the control of Google, so how does adding one small additional dependency on 8.8.8.8 affect the end user's control i…

Ah I see - well if your position is that it's not that much of a big deal to add one more IP address and that customers shouldn't mind that much ... then that's pretty subjective. However the reason we are here and talking about this is that one very prominent customer really DOES mind. Judging from the other responses, this person is not alone.

The bigger picture here is that Google has a lot of power and any time they do something like hard-coding their own DNS server in a product (which could be construed as saying "we ARE the internet") people get worried and annoyed, whether this was a benign oversight, innocent mistake or a deliberate act.

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

#478

Post by vetinari »

kazinator wrote: post #414
vetinari wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that's how we are going to get mandatory https proxies in networks... The arms race will continue, making the lives of everyone more difficult.

A HTTPS proxy can't rewrite the contents of your stream. If it redirects to the wrong host, the cert doesn't match.

That's fine, it is not about rewriting stream, but about not allowing to connect certain hosts.

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

#479

Post by justinclift »

jonny_eh wrote: post #459
pishpash wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everybody could foresee "don't be evil" would die with the IPO. Not only that, but the spirit of young Google, like 20% time or Google Labs and off-the-wall ideas that could bubble up, all eventually died.

Requiring a phone for setup now counts as evil?

Some people (like me) don't do phones. ;)

But then again, I de-Googled myself ages ago, so mostly not a problem.

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

#480

Post by sowbug »

scarface74 wrote: post #381
sowbug wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Just a random aside. You couldn’t download third party apps on the 3rd generation AppleTV, but without jailbreaking, the community made a Plex app, merely by running a Python script and redirecting DNS to your computer that intercepted calls to the Apple Trailers app. https://github.com/iBaa/PlexConnect I’m sure some inventive person could figure out a creative use for a ChromeCast. But overall, I agree with you.

You're being consistent with Richard Stallman's model of freedom for general-purpose PCs vs. appliances:

As for microwave ovens and other appliances, if updating software is not a normal part of use of the device, then it is not a computer. In that case, I think the user need not take cognizance of whether the device contains a processor and software, or is built some other way. However, if it has an "update firmware" button, that means installing different software is a normal part of use, so it is a computer.

Many of the objections in comments to this post are expressed in terms of standards compliance or interoperability. I think it makes more sense to analyze whether it's a general-purpose PC or not.

https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html

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