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Comment by eertami | Hacker News Reader

Maybe I'm missing the forest for the trees but... what possible reason would you have for taking a Chromecast to a coffee shop?

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The problem here is you are falling in the same trap as the Google engineers here.

Why would ______ want to do _______ with their ______ device?

You can make a locked down device that only does a very limited subset of functions, but you really should make that known to the user before hand. "This device requires access to $X servers to function".

If you have secret requirements that go far beyond user expectations, expect that your users might get pissy about it.

The fact that we got six years into the chromecast world before anybody complained is a pretty good indicator that, no, in fact, most people who want to watch youtube on their TVs don't configure their firewalls to block 8.8.8.8.

It has actually been a common issue for many years, including for myself, but the rest of us don't have the social clout for it to make it to HN front page.

These days you have no chance of getting any form of tech support or even issue acknowledgement unless you have a large follower count online.

Perhaps the hordes of previous complainers, unlike Paul Vixie, complained to the black hole that is Google support, so we never heard of it :)

Google isn't exactly secret about the fact that Chromecast connects to Google's data centers.

Especially if you're using it to, say, watch YouTube, as Paul Vixie was.

Chromecast connecting to Google is not a "secret requirements that go far beyond user expectations." Expecting a cloud-connected product to continue to work when you've randomly blacklisted IPs that belong to that company is, however, an unreasonable expectation.

We expect that Chromecast connects to Google's servers when you are using Google services. By forcing you to use their DNS service, they can track every non-Google DNS query you make as well, which is all tied to your IP address. It is a form of surveillance of everything that you do on your Chromecast, for which there is no explicit consent.

https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/62273/can-dns-s...

It is similar in some ways to Facebook tracking users across the internet through Facebook "Like" and "Connect" buttons across the internet, even when the user's aren't on the Facebook site and did not opt-in to having their browsing tracked by Facebook outside of Facebook.

> By forcing you to use their DNS service, they can track every non-Google DNS query you make as well, which is all tied to your IP address.

It's a Chromecast. You literally can't make non-Google queries on it at all in the first place.

So what, exactly, is the privacy concern here? What specific flow of events does the Chromecast using 8.8.8.8 impact your privacy?

Chromecast allows casting any tab, with any URL, not just Google properties.

Which is a video stream. The Chromecast itself isn't doing squat but playing a video.

"cloud-connected" Hacker News is not the best* place for nebulous cumulonimbus commentary.

If you want a general purpose computer to serve as your set top box, buy a general purpose computer.

It was a stretch. I've taken Roku to a local bar to stream live events. The generic "take my device to a network I do not manage" isn't outrageous though.

Which is all well and good until you need to authenticate with a captive WiFi network....

For that I use this

https://www.amazon.com/TP-LINK-TL-WR810N-Wireless-Adapter-Re...

It lets me connect to one WiFi network and bridge and create a second private network. You can then connect and authenticate from another device and the Roku worked.

Campuses also have this kind of security. I can't use a Chromecast or a Google Home on my college campus because my school's IT team blocks all DNS servers except their own.

I used to travel with a Chromecast so I could cast in my hotel room. I finally gave up, since it never worked in any hotel I stayed in.

I did the same thing and gave up too, but that's because every hotel TV used composite video.

People bring all kinds of crazy things to coffee shops. I saw someone set up a full-on painting kit, with a big palette, tubes of paint, and a full-sized easel.

I believe at one time TPUG members (https://www.tpug.ca) would bring their PETs to Starbucks for meetings. I know I've banged out work on a TRS-80 Model 100 at Coffee Bean.

Not a coffee shop, but certainly a hotel room, to cast some entertainment on the TV rather than rely on a laptop.

The hotel thing can be a pain if there is some sort of per device login portal.

Roku and Amazon Fire TV works fine with captive portals though (Roku elegantly asks you to connect to a custom WiFi AP that just forwards the captive portal to your phone). So this is another case of Google making assumptions that limit their devices' usability.

I’ve thrown parties at many public venues, schools, bars, restaurants and want to put up a slide show. Etc. so many use cases.

What about a presentation? What if it's not a coffee shop, but a conference?

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