So one of my three year old kids smashed my 65" LED flatscreen with a die-cast model of the Atlantis shuttle. I was fine with this and was not planning on buying a replacement in any haste but my wife keeps complaining. Would prefer at least 65"+ and absolutely not a smart tv. What suggestions do you have, companies to avoid, etc. Help me SN, you are probably my only hope of not just buying another spysung.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 21 2018, @09:13AM (1 child)
As the poster said he has a gateway firewall, the trick is to see where the thing is trying to send stuff, and then block the remote IP.
Assuming that it isn't a hard-wired IP number the TV is trying to talk to (a good bet, as it's probably a Round-robin entry pointing to some cloud wankfests somewhere...), monitor all DNS requests from the TV box and see what hostnames it's trying to resolve (what do you mean, you don't transparently redirect all DNS traffic on your network to your own server?¹ ) then if you're using dnsmasq have an entry like address=/remote.dodgy.host/=127.0.0.X, or, if you're feeling inquisitive, address=/remote.dodgy.host/=your.local.honeypot and then see what you can find out about the crap they're sending back.
Yes, this means that you'll have to allow it to monitor you and report back, but only for a little while, and only once.
Then you make public the remote hostnames it's trying to talk to.
[¹ Never, EVER, trust that any bit of software you don't have the sources for will use the DNS servers you tell it to....I'm looking at you in particular, Corel.... ]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 21 2018, @09:34AM
Sorry, too many = in there, they should have been
address=/remote.dodgy.host/127.0.0.X
address=/remote.dodgy.host/your.local.honeypot
(you try typing when two of the furry little overlords are demanding some serious fussing....)