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Comment by Sean-Der | Hacker News Reader

You can do lots of suprising things with ICE in the browser. I was really excited to find[0]. Go to this[1] JSFiddle and type in `$hostname.local` or a device on your network. I have a `WDMyCloud.local` for example.

I think you could make something really interesting. A web page could make a pretty unique fingerprint of you by all the IoT/Printers/$X devices on your network.

[0] https://github.com/rtcweb-wg/mdns-ice-candidates/issues/121

[1] https://jsfiddle.net/10eq2rzh/

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So, I guess webrtc should be disabled by default and a site that tries to use it should trigger a permission prompt (like camera and microphone access).

I personally use Firefox and have WebRtc disabled (about:config => media.peerconnection.enabled: false).

If I really need it I switch to Chromium.

uBlock Origin has an option to prevent local IP leak:

"Prevent WebRTC from leaking local IP addresses"

https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Prevent-WebRTC-from-l...

offtopic: what's the non-routable TLD we're all supposed to be using now instead of .local? was it .lan? I tried googling with ddg:) but it's a noisy search

This was just discussed [0] last week, actually! The tl;dr is that there’s no great alternative to registering an actual domain name and using it (or a subdomain of it) for your network. The only viable TLD otherwise is .arpa

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28192247

.Home.arpa not just .arpa

Thanks for the correction.

Isn’t it a double address like .home.lan or some such?

.home.arpa

Yup! If you want something that just works (no need to prefix with http[s] in your browser’s omnibar, works with Apple devices, etc), `.home.arpa`[0] is the canonical option.

A somewhat on topic tangent:

I did a fair amount of tinkering with this after finding my manually defined `.local` dns entries wouldn’t work with Apple devices. Apple devices see such addresses as reserved for mDNS and will only look them up via mDNS.

To get everything working on my network, I ended up going down the rabbit hole of local DNS naming schemes. In the end I found I prefer the look and feel of `.lan`, so I live on the edge and make my custom DNS entries using that.

Some browsers think I’m searching for stuff when I type “hostname.lan”, but prefixing with http:// fixes that. Wherever I can I try to set up mDNS, though, since it just works and doesn’t require any central administration. Sadly, not all devices are customizable enough for me to use mDNS everywhere.

[0]: https://serverfault.com/a/1041148

see: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc6761

And .local. is specified in multicast-dns: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc6762

What's wrong with .local?

It is reserved for use with Multicast DNS specifically.

It's .home.arpa, but I'd be very surprised if IANA ever let anyone register .home, .lan, or .localdomain.

Is it true that using WebRTC relies on Javascripts

Yes. It's a JS API.

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