Spoofing the Samsung Smart TV Internet Check
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There are no exceptions.
By your logic the cellphones should not be smart too, they should only call people, nothing else.
That's why it's great for a cellphone to run a full modern OS, and why it's NOT great for a TV to do so. TVs last across multiple tech generations. They should contain the bare minimum of software needed to display whatever content you pump into them. Nothing else.
Add in the fact that good TVs are basically always made by the companies who are the Very Worst at software (Samsung most prominently), and you have a recipe for digital heartburn.
No thanks. Dumb TVs forever.
Also, to respond to another comment, there's no correlation between a TV being "smart" and achieving a simple A/V setup with a single remote and a minimum of hassles. Unless you mean a negative correlation. It's very simple to achieve single-remote nirvana with a dumb TV. Plus you're not stuck with a dumb company's remote and software; you can pick your own, because a dumb TV will work with anything and not get in your way.
Singled out for especially thorough beatings are those TV makers who put actual physical buttons on their remotes for websites that might be gone next week. Seriously? No.
Dumb TVs forever.
I don't think the problem is with Smart TVs, I think it's just the current execution of the idea.
Each of these statements could equally apply to TVs (except, possibly, portability) and the fact that they haven't is merely circumstantial.
Yes, for the first 50 years of television's existence people tended to keep the same TV around for half a decade or more. But that's because fundamental changes happened between fifteen and thirty years apart - the switch from black and white to color, then the switch from broadcast to cable and satellite. The rate of innovation, and thus the turnover rate of individual devices, is increasing - just like with the telephone, which remained basically the same for the first several decades of its existence as well, until modern computer technology was invented.
Come to think of it the same thing is possibly true of desktop computers. My family was on the same computer between 1984/85 and 1993 - a Mac 512k. Then in 1994 or 95 we got a Performa 475. That lasted for about 5 years until I got a Mac clone - a Motorola Starmax 3000, which had a PowerPC processor. This laster about 2 -3 years. Then I built my first PC - that lasted for about two years. And each year since then I've used the same computer for 1 to 2 years at a time. The turnover period halved exponentially as computers got more and more sophisticated.
Imagine if your Samsung phone couldn't do anything that required an internet connection because Samsung's site was down. This is pretty much the same thing, IMHO.
Samsung's site being down or unreachable should have no bearing on the performance of the Netflix app whatsoever.
www.isg-apple.com.akadns.net 571 requests in the last day
us-courier.push-apple.com.akadns.net 558 requests in the last day
.akamai.net 709 requests in the last day
and
.akamaiedge.net 1967 requests in the last day
--
I believe Google just uses *.l.google.com (my open dns says 1202 requests in the last day)
Safari on iOS did not tell me "you don't have internet connectivity", but it did say that servers were unreachable (not surprising) and it let me use local servers without issue. iOS seems to prefer WiFi to cellular when it's available as it didn't fall back during my limited test.
This is the behaviour that I'd expect from the Smart TV. Just because it can't get to Samsung doesn't mean it can't get to Netflix.
I imagine if Apple's DNS settings got screwed up or their server was throwing up something other than "Success" due to an error, iOS devices around the world would claim their Wifi needed a login and wasn't working.
edit: another comment further down linked this article that says that exactly the same thing happened to iOS http://www.zdnet.com/what-went-wrong-with-ios-6-wi-fi-700000...
The results might have been different if I had ran the test longer or turned WiFi off and back on or something.
Smart TVs that exposed ubiquitous hardware - like i386 did for desktops and laptops - where you can choose to run Windows/Linux/BSD would be ideal.. I'd choose a mix of Plex and XBMC given the choice... They provide real value atop the TV platform. Samsung and friends have a huge amount of catch-up to do before they are real contenders when it comes to having the best software (and even then .. Plex/XBMC need to double down on their "Mom" useability..)
(I have a Samsung TV, and recommend them, but always tell people to avoid the SmartTV gimmick. Plex and a Chromecast give a 1000x better experience for those who download, and Netflix etc + Chromecast cover those who don't)
I happen to disagree. Post installation Plex is literally a pleasure to use if you use your smartphone/tablet as a remote and just beam content to your TV.
I've yet to see any semi-open system as powerful, functional, yet user friendly.
Speaking as someone who is often forced to use Samsung software (particularly wrt/their Android phones), that would be a bad bet to make.
Thats one ABC1 viewr you have lost right there guys I gave up on whitechappel as your crappy catchup service was totaly unusable.
Not only is the software that comes with it really useless, it phones home the first time you do connect it and installs a sh*tload of crapware, depending on your region. In my case lots of useless stuff around sports and tabloids. These apps are then prominently featured in the TV's menu.
No, you cannot diaable or remove them, nor reclaim that screen estate and put something else there. You install a couple things and have to scroll to find those, while the absolutely insane garbage sits in the middle of the screen. Only way back: Factory reset, never connect it again. Smart..
https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140308200904-1...
As for lessons for driving, I see only two ways - either do actually train drivers like they should be, just like pilots are trained, or automate them out completely. Current level of training required for getting a driver's licence is a complete joke, and the attitude of most of the people who took or are taking the exam is just plain scary.
But if the OP article is correct, you can prevent the TV from phoning home in the first place by spoofing the other way -- say, configuring the DNS that the TV sees to automatically return "no answer" for www.samsung.com. The question is, will the TV still see your local network? If so, you can stream to it from a DLNA server, as someone else upthread pointed out.
My current best bet would be [1]. But so far I'm using a Pi, with xbmc. There's no way the TV stuff can improve on that.
Old writeup: [link redacted]
At work, we have five of these Samsung Smart TVs and if I want to get a video signal from my control room on to one of them, I have to send it via HD-SDI into the main video router, then run coax from the router to the tv, then use an SDI to HDMI adapter (the cheapest of which is the monoprice $100 one). The picture ends up looking great, but it doesn't exactly feel like 2014.
No DLNA?
I spent the afternoon trying various different approaches with my Sony Blu-Ray player that has DLNA support. It appears to only want to play files, not live streams. That said, I haven't exhausted all options yet and will have more tools to test with at the office. And from a video engineering perspective, RTSP/RTMP or even HLS as native formats would be way easier.
Also, I'm sorry guys, but most of you don't really get advanced networking concepts. Just like I don't get many advanced software architecture topics. It's a matter of specialisation.
Wow, well I guess the issue is closed. I wish they had contacted you from the start, otherwise this multinational, multi-billion dollar corporation could've avoided the entire market. /s
I mean are you intentionally being dense? It has been a LONG time coming to supplant the multiple devices I have to keep around my TV just to use cable, streaming services, etc. Now I don't need to fire up the Wii if I want to watch Hulu or Netflix, movies off a media drive or USB. If only I could integrate the cable box into the TV, then it would really be a game changer.
I don't know about you, but I consider myself an above-average tech consumer and I value simplicity and if companies can manage to keep my TV functional for the next 5-7 years with all of my services, then it is money well spent.
That may or may not be the case depending on the company and/or the strategy the person in charge at the time is pursuing. One CEO might completely agree with your strategy and make sure all old models are supported, another might just care about how many new TVs sold he can tell the shareholders. Then there are companies going out of business or being acquired and the acquiring company not caring about supporting any models made by the acquired company.
4 year old Sony TVs have internet services that still work fine, I like not turning on the PS3 with fan noise and power consumption, I like not buying an extra box and needing to manage an extra remote and interface. I record TV on a MythTV box and I like watching it over DLNA using the TV's decoder and scaler which are better than those provided out of the box by MythFrontend. Yes it may fail at some time in the future but for the $13 or so added to the BOM (for Wifi which I don't actually use) it is a definite win for me even if it stops working tomorrow and I need to get an extra box or rely on the PS3.
However, I disagree that there is fundamental value in built-in TV software supplanting third-party devices. That is, unless a software company is making the software.
I have a Roku, and built-in software from Sony on a blu-ray player (on separate TVs). The Roku is so much better that it's painful to use the TV without it:
- The buffering is much worse on the Sony. When it switches between ads and the video it takes several seconds to rebuffer.
- The delay between menus is measured in seconds, while the Roku is almost instantaneous
- It's almost like Sony didn't even have one UX designer working on their project. It will do idiotic things like when Hulu opens, create a modal dialog that says "The internet content is ready" and I must click OK to proceed.
- The remote and other menus are slow and hard to decipher just like you'd expect from built-in software.
The point is that building the user experience of a video client is not trivial. I can't even blame Sony, really -- a non-software company will never do a good job at that kind of thing.
The Roku is a world of difference and until a company like that is building the built-in software, the mainstream of the market will be in third-party devices.
No, but "Sony" have done it before and it's been fine. PS3. (I've not tried the PS4's media player.)
>I can't even blame Sony, really -- a non-software company
Sony Vegas? ACID? Sound Forge? Sony is not short of software production, "Sony Creative Software" makes a few software products most people here would have heard of. Not to mention SCE, they've made quite a bit of software and no-doubt have some UI engineers.
It might even surprise you that Belkin and Dlink don't design or manufacture their own hardware or software.
They bought every single one of those, from Vegas and from Sonic Foundry, Sony was not responsible for their design or creation. The UIs were AFAIK fully in place before Sony ever owned them, though I am sure some changes have been made.
This really sounds like a design failure + rushed development. It sounds like the sort of thing that you would throw in during rapid development with the idea to replace it later, only it never ends up on a TODO list, and there is no one looking at the 'big picture' to make sure that these things are caught.
For example, you can pair your TV with your phone or computer, and then use the device to navigate Youtube but the TV to display videos.
This is also what Netflix increasingly does (Hulu Plus and Pandora too).
If a smart TV or set top box has a good version of WebKit embedding in it and uses html5 rather than embedded versions of code, they can stay up to date much better. Samsung's newest TVs are designed this way, but there might be a provision check for the Samsung website as was the case in this thread, which is just bs.
The problem was the first two generations of "smart TV"software were highly proprietary embedded systems with custom apps from a service. It took 7 years, but most have moved to html5.
You do still run into hybrid solutions. Even the Roku3 and TiVo Roamio have html5 for some apps and custom old-ass shit for others.
For the fire TV, Amazon uses html5 for its own apps but android apps for other services (except YouTube, who doesn't offer its app outside of google play, so it's the html5 version Roku and some of the TVs use). In that case, I wish for companies with great html5 solutions for those with them (pandora, Netflix, Hulu Plus)
(Shrug) They could always focus on making the best TV display they possibly can, and see how that works out for them. Nobody asked them to build the next-generation WebTV.
The problem with "smart TV" is that it's inherently a conflict of interest. It would be great if Samsung sold a TV with SamsungOS on it and if I don't like it or they stop supporting it I could easily replace it with Android or Ubuntu, but they don't sell that. Because they want to spam your TV with ads and force you to buy a new one on their schedule.
It's obvious why they want to sell it that way. It's not obvious why anyone should want to buy it that way.
The same is true of AppleTV, playstation, xbox and every game console in existence. Some of this is obviously hardware based, but a lot of it is about differentiation. CableCard has existed for at least a decade now, but good luck trying to get your cable company to admit it. Every single one of these guys wants you to stay in their particular ecosystem, and "smart" TV is just another ecosystem Samsung wants you to buy into with the associated limitations -- either introduced by Samsung or the other vendors (lockout).
What people really need is better integration between all the devices they hook to their TV. It's bizarre (but like I said, not totally unexpected) that a consumer electronics device is so hard to use that way compared to a radically more complex personal computer (plug most usb devices from a big box store into a mac or pc and it'll just work for its intended purposes without a hassle nowadays).
One way to accomplish that is to shove all the functionality into one device, but as I mentioned above, it doesn't actually work except for a few limited cases. Honestly, the closest you get to a true "smart" experience is a top-end harmony remote -- and that's obviously not that close at all.
My basic objection to smart tv is that I have the same experience using a harmony remote, it adds nothing. And the smart features are virtually guaranteed to whither away long before the actual tv outlives its usefulness. It's like the digital channel tuner on the same set -- useful in odd circumstances, but practically useless having long been long surpassed by cable tv.
If Samsung/Sony/etc thought that they had chops to make a good device to connect a TV to the Internet, then maybe they wouldn't feel the need to package it with the display device, and just release it stand-alone.
The fact that Samsung haven't gotten things quite right with their Smart TVs doesn't mean I'm going to buy an Apple TV or some other box.
[0] http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/11/smart-tv-from-lg-pho...
https://www.samsung.com/us/video/tvs-accessories/SEK-1000/ZA
Regulations (esp in the EU) get into the game as well.
Life is better as a component that attaches with a cable. You can't really put a gaming console in a TV, not yet (not one you'd want to actually use, anyway).
TV ports are digital now, they could power and give control to another device. Just stick a port on the back for the box . I actually love the stick form-factor that's growing now, let's you hide the device and get the sleek appearance of a smart TV without the cruft.
Smart TVs actually have many nice features many people don't know about, dlna being the most prominent. Universal remote being another of them, with my TV I just say I have device x on hdmi2 and the TV remote will then be able to do almost anything I need to control on that device.
The built in apps are usually crap but I do see the value in having the ability to install them, why should I have to buy yet another device if I just want to watch Netflix, the TV already has the processing power to do so. Although arguably a chromecast is practically free compared to the price of a TV.
What I do is fire up the XBox. It's a brain-dead app there too+, but at least I can rewind a few seconds if I missed a word or two.
+ Titles truncated too much; no comments viewer; unresponsive UI.
Wrong. I've upgraded my TV twice in the past 5 years, and the average TV replacement cycle has decreased to 4 years[1].
They don't need to have software in them, and shouldn't.
Yes they do. How else do I watch Youtube and Plex on it? Plug another box in, with another remote?
Leave that to people and companies who actually know how to produce software.
I agree that would be nice. Fortunately Samsung has a completely inadequately documented but reasonably open API for building SmartTV apps.
TVs should display an image.
That would be called a monitor.
There are no exceptions.
I'm one.
Does the fact that I use the Youtube, Vimeo, iView and Plex apps on my Samsung TV more than I watch broadcast TV not apply for some reason?
Frankly, that other box should be the one handling the TV tuning too.
The only useful exception to the above that I've seen is for Wi-Fi hotspot detection (e.g., checking a known response from Microsoft NCSI). The key difference here is that if the NCSI server is down or not responding, the user is not blocked from trying to connect.
Giving the 95% a good experience should always be prioritised above giving 100% of users a mediocre experience.
Also, this is not the first time this happens.. I mean their data center was on fire (www.engadget.com/2014/04/20/samsung-com-outage-sds-fire/), but isn't there some failover?
When iOS or Mac connects to wifi, it hits a similar URL to Apple to check if the device is stuck behind a captive wifi network. If the check failed, it attempts to throw up the networks login page.
But Apple's check server went down, and therefore peoples iPod touches, Macs and iPads got stuck in a nasty cycle of trying to throw up a non-existant login page.
Welcome to HN, where answering a question gets downvoted.
Edit: I'm making a distinction between what my browser does vs the OS and wifi. In any case, your home TV doesn't really have to deal with captive portals.
http://blog.erratasec.com/2010/09/apples-secret-wispr-reques...
Apple broke the page once and everybody's wifi broke in response. Single point of failure.
How did they manage to ensure that this didn't work if there wasn't such a portal or if you did it manually?
The resulting UI looks like a plain window with no UI elements except a close button and a browser frame so you can auth with the captive portal system, and goes away once connectivity is "restored".
At least with devices running iOS, if you let the charge drop to zero, and it loses its cached network settings, and then when you try to reconnect to your home wifi router, it will look for a file called
library/test/success.html at www.apple.com
which contains one line: Success.
If that file is missing, you will not be allowed to connect to your own home LAN, because Apple thinks you are behind a "captive portal". I redirect *.apple.com to stop iAd, ntp and other Apple crap even when I'm connected to the internet, so unlike the OP, this is a problem even when www.apple.com is not down for maintenance.
One solution is to redirect www.apple.com to your own httpd serving a local copy of /library/test/success.html.
In short, you are wrong. Redirect apple.com comains to your own httpd and read your logs.
There is lots of dialing home coming from iOS and indeed some of it will affect your ability to read content.
Annoying, but not a showstopper.
Also, the answer is wrong. It does not just check connectivity, but downloads an XML file containing information on services that it is supposed to show.
I was thrilled to switch from my Samsung Galaxy S3 to my Nexus 4. The S3 had horrible Samsung-equivalent apps for everything: email, chat, a browser, and a lot of system services that I couldn't uninstall. It also had some specially built update mechanism, separate from Google Play, that would drain my battery, until it was fixed.
I like Samsung though, as long as they stick to producing hardware. My ARM Chromebook is a lovely device: Samsung hardware with Google software on it.
icq.com (not kidding)
yahoo.com
samsung.com
google.com
Some other domain I can't rememberAs long as we have the power to root these devices and install our own software on it, we will be fine. But for how long is that going to keep up?
Reminds me of this story from a year or two ago, where LG continued collecting data even after the feature had been disabled on their TVs.
Who's doing the watching now? That sounds ridiculously Orwellian...
> As long as we have the power to root these devices and install our own software on it, we will be fine. But for how long is that going to keep up?
The most interesting part of this is that "rooting" often relies on finding and exploiting a vulnerability, something that would be considered detrimental to security and normally thought of as a bug. In other words, this power is coming from having not-so-secure devices. Imagine if this TV was more secure; it used DNSSEC and HTTPS to authenticate/encrypt communications, and was designed to be resistant to tampering via hardware (secure processor, encrypted memory, etc.) -- ostensibly for things like DRM. Do suggestions like "all Internet traffic should be encrypted" start to look less appealing now? To say it plainly, in this case "insecurity is freedom."
The problem is that you can't tell this until it fails. You can see a scratched screen or fuzzy display, but you can't detect garbage software until it goes sideways.
But now we have another good data point to support the generalization that the firmware on TVs that doesn't do actual core TV funtionality, like video-related stuff, is pretty bad, and consumers should avoid these features.
But it's still cravenly bad design. I'll bet twenty dollars that people are going to be doing regular DDOS attacks against that Samsung server now, and that Samsung will have a ton of trouble keeping their TVs functional. You're correct that data centers don't catch on fire very often (cable cuts are lots more frequent), but that's not the interesting failure mode now. Bored script kiddies and blackmail are going to be next.
A week of schedule slip (if that) is going to translate into a bunch of bad publicity and upset customers because of expedience. This may not be pretty.
[I'm wondering what the firmware update story for these TVs is. Is it secure? Is it reliable? Is it a crappy user experience? Can you update the firmware at all?]
If a construction engineer built an apartment building that he knew was going to fall over, his PE license could be suspended or revoked. It doesn't matter who told him to do it.
In most companies, engineers don't control what gets shipped. There is no way to say "No, you can't ship this," and the product is going out with crappy quality because of a ship date. It comes down to how companies determine software quality, and how much they care.
In really bad cases, nobody can tell that the software is terrible.
In truly horrible cases, everyone knows the software is crap, but they ship it anyway because they don't care.
In any case, "getting professional" in some companies would mean losing your job.
Then I turned it off. Internet on TV is silly, as far as I can tell.
My girlfriend's wonderful Panasonic has tons of internet features -- web, youtube. Web is nearly useless because of lack of keyboard; youtube is awkward; vimeo isn't bad. Using an Android app, selecting your youtube video, then doing "send to TV" is great when we bother to do it.
The "smart" Panasonic is a dumb screen in front of Roku. The only other non-dumb features we use is the "play videos from SD card" feature, and the "play from DLNA (my laptop)" feature -- both get used quite often, and work well.
drop all the extra work and let code fail gracefully while in action.
This is a cool hack for now but if I had to make a prediction I'd bet there's a future coming where this isn't possible, where the two are even more intertwined -- even though most of us know they don't need to be and wouldn't design our own systems that way.
We have samsung smart tvs at home, which Plex runs on top of... looks like I'm going to have to implement something like this with openWRT in future..
Consequently, it makes no sense to make "Internet access" a binary variable that a software system uses to determine whether it has access to all Internet sites.
One would think the YouTube app would have a built-in mechanism for handling a failure when connecting to youtube.com. It's entirely possible that samsung.com could be up, but youtube.com down. I assume the YouTube app gracefully handles this, and this would render Samsung's binary state "Internet present?" variable useless at best.
TL;DR: Having a system-wide "Internet available?" variable is meaningless because individual apps need to be able to handle not being able to connect to a particular host anyway (eg. youtube.com, netflix.com).
If youtube.com happens to be down for whatever reason, there isn't much the user can do about it except wait, so there isn't much for the YouTube to do besides display a standard error message and call it a day.
But in the more common case where the user's internet connection is unavailable or misconfigured, there are troubleshooting steps the user can take (make sure it's plugged in, try turning the router off and on again, check network settings, etc...).
I suspect the design was to help users get their TVs connected to the internet by providing more useful diagnostics when they are offline. To do that, you need some kind of system-level check for connectivity. Now, there are certainly better ways they could have implemented the feature, ways that didn't involve a single point of failure where a fire at one building means that millions of TVs can't access Netflix or YouTube for no good reason, but the intent wasn't completely meaningless.
Is there an easy way to spoof that on your local home network?