Comment by runeks | Hacker News Reader

Comment by runeks | Hacker News Reader

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As far as I can see, this issue exists because, fundamentally, there is no such thing as "Internet access". If a device can access only 50% of hosts on the Internet, does it have Internet access? What about 1% or 99%?

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).

Well, the system-wide "internet available?" variable isn't completely useless from a user perspective.

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.

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