Comment by kmeade | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kmeade | Hacker News Reader

We are recent "cord-cutters" with a brand new Sony 4K, Android-enabled TV. On our other TVs, we have a Roku and an Amazon Firestick. We use the builtin Sony apps because they were (essentially) free and are the only way we currently have to get 4K content.

I noticed the Samba nonsense when I set up the TV and have declined to participate -- but guess what? The TV still regularly connects to the domain flingo.tv, which is Samba's old name. It also connects to other strange things, like playstation-related domains. (and what is ndmdhs.com?)

I've set our WAN router to block samba/flingo and few other things, but my wife is (rightfully) concerned that I'll disrupt the Android update process, so I'm being careful.

It would be useful for someone with the skill, time and tools to investigate what places these Internet TVs are contacting, aside from the actual video content providers. If someone is doing that, I'd love to hear what they find.

If you could provide some packet captures from the TV, analysis is pretty straightforward...

My WAN router only offers a short snapshot logging capability. I suppose I could look at using Wireshark or something, but I'm not too experienced in this area.

If I decide to go "deep techie" on this, I'd probably pursue an alternative DNS approach. "Pi-hole" looks very interesting in this regard. I wish I hadn't just gotten rid of my old laptop. (smile)

tcpdump is a cli program that can output a file that Wireshark can read. It's a matter of copying an invocation from somewhere and having room to store the dump (external storage recommended, it might be a lot of data).

Thanks, I'll look into that. I would like to have a longer snapshot of what the Sony TV is doing.

Something I forgot to mention in my original comment -- that darn TV is accessing the Internet even when it is (supposedly) turned off. It's hard not be cynical about this stuff.

Get a 4K Apple TV and disable internet on your tv.

Yes, but that's just trading one "surveillance capitalist" for another.

Is it? Apple’s privacy story has been pretty strong since forever (considerable the architecture of their thumbprint/secure enclave system, even when they customers didn’t see the value and when it inconveniences a customer who has their screen replaced).

This could of course just be propaganda, but my friends who work at Apple seem to believe it too.

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