Comment by kenrose | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kenrose | Hacker News Reader

Devices that infer that connectivity to one site implies connectivity to the Internet are flawed. Having connectivity to one site means only that a route exists between you and the remote host. That's it. It says nothing about any other site. It's generally not good to do "Internet connectivity" checks. Just check to see if the site you want to connect to is responding. In the case of Samsung, who cares if samsung.com is down if I want YouTube. Just connect to YouTube and if that's down, then tell me.

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.

Microsoft published a description of the communications, too: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc766017(v=ws.10)...

It's quite useful, so implemented it in bash: https://github.com/threedaymonk/ncsi

So, yes, they are broken when you think about them like that. But, they cover the 95% use case... That case where most people say "The Internet is down" ;)

Giving the 95% a good experience should always be prioritised above giving 100% of users a mediocre experience.

I always wish people would reply when downvoting.. A -1 without a comment could mean a million different things.. :(

Browsing samsung.com on ones TV's close to a 0% use case, not a 95% use case for users. Therefore checking to make sure samsung.com is up helps about 0% of their users.

See, that doesn't really describe the situation here. The internet was working just fine, but samsung.com was down. As a result, the TV wouldn't let users get to Netflix, Amazon Instant Video, or other services because it insisted it was offline, even though those services were working perfectly fine. The problem is that that for virtually every user, the TV was insisting "the internet is down," but their connections were working just fine.

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