This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
So Google uses something called "federated learning" which is not as fun as it sounds. It's where they load a small model onto your device, train it on all your data, then send the resulting training data back to headquarters.
So it's totally cool! Because your actual PII never leaves your device! Just everything about you statistically that might be useful to advertisers or governments! Really, whoever can pay!
I'm convinced (and would place money on) the mechanism for LLMS to start self propagating and maliciously wreck all internet connected devices (read: Our entire society) is via companies trying to offload compute via something very similar to federated learning.
Just put a teeny model on everyone's device and let it adapt to the user needs and oops skynet
That would indeed suck. Very paperclip maximising. Doesn't even have to be malicious, really.
But yeah I was just reading about yet another critical CVE this morning. The third this week. And wondered to myself if I was seeing the end of the open internet.
Like will there be a day where it simply isn't safe to leave a device just passively connected to the internet or any broadly distributed network? Like I'm behind two firewalls at work, surrounded by highly capable network and cybersecurity PhDs and still one of our systems got low-key pwned just this month.
When I setup pihole, the google home speakers I had were making dns requests something like 20k times a day. More than pretty much every other device on my network.
I removed them all after that.
Same for Roku, and worse now that they were bought out. Sorry grandma, the Roku is getting cut off. Lol
Realistically it doesn't need to request the DNS record every time. It's probably retrying over and over because you blocked it, otherwise it would just cache the result for a while.
I remember some huge number of blocked requests when I set up my pihole, but eventually they calmed down as devices gave up their retrying.
Mine too. I've got 1.6 million sites blocked in pihole from multiple lists, they don't chatter much. I'm not saying they aren't listening/spying, but I do like having them and until I get a new home and a different system, they can talk a little.
I'm surprised it didn't just have google's DNS hardcoded to bypass your pihole.
That ought to be illegal.
(No, seriously: disobeying DNS the owner set by DHCP ought to count as "exceeding authorized access" under the CFAA.)
Unfortunately the monkey's paw would curl here and using DNS other than that provided by your ISP would become illegal.
(I know there's a difference between your devices using their network to access the internet and your "purchased" (licensed software running on) your device using your network to access the internet - but the monkey doesn't care)
RFC 2132 says DHCP option 6 provides "a list of Domain Name System name servers available to the client". That's a MAY use, not a MUST use. You are welcome to block DNS requests to outside servers if you prefer.
They do, but thankfully with pfSense you can do DNS overrides with firewall rules to force all network devices to use local DNS, blocking everything else.
https://dominetec.com.br/en/redirect-all-dns-requests-to-pfsense-router
Neat! Trying this in a few minutes. Be lovely having everything go through my local Pihole VM.
Chromecasts do that. I had to intercept port 53 on the router to fix it.
DNS over ssl.
I redirect all out going dns requests to my self hosted DNS server.
Only one I can't block is DoH. DoT is easily blocked and my firewall picks up on it.
Yup, me too. It's why I made this:
Seeing comments from people that have one of those on lemmy reminds me that not everyone here is a tech-savvy person and/or knows/cares about privacy.
I have more than 100 zigbee devices, a unifi setup, I host my own email server, I use Arch BTW, use Firefox, have been in IT since years started with 1 and until recently my daily driver was a ThinkPad x200 with libreboot (because coreboot had binary blobs) and I have not one, but 3 of these. They are cheap, convenient, sound okay and are easy to monitor for internet traffic.
But what's a decent alternative for a wifi-enabled speaker that won't pull any shenanigans?
Or is the only solution to forget about wifi and use bluetooth-only speakers?
Search for sendspin, ist an opensource protocoll for spreaker sync. I have a setup together with Musik Assistant and i can perfectly sync musik on my laptop, phone , yamaha stereo and selfbuild speaker. You can have then in the same room and enjoy the musik.
It's amazing how much open source software exists these days. I try to donate as much as I can. I'd rather support them than some company like Google.
Yes, just use Bluetooth. Or cut the speaker off completely from internet on router level and lose some functionality. Some tools are not compatible with security/privacy.
Why does anyone willingly use these spying devices on themselves?
the average person consumes mindlessly as lomg as their base needs are met
Proving once again that the average person is stupid
Because I haven’t built replacements for the HomePods yet.
Tbf there isn't much in the voice activated smart speaker space. If I could just program some speech to text abstraction and link it to automations I would. None of the solutions really seem mature enough.
I genuinely don't understand the point. I've gone my whole life without smart speakers and voice commands. Seems like laziness at the cost of privacy.
You wouldn't download a home
I took mine out when I discovered from the log that it would randomly cause massive deauth and noise on my wireless network. All my stability issues vanished since.
I unplugged mine when it kept coming to life after hearing "Hey <any other fucking word under the sun>". If all it did was act as an internet radio and set timers I'd still be using it.
They do this outrageous download numbers just to hide the amount they upload at the same type.
Not to say that it couldn't be an annoyance in terms of bandwidth contention, but I'd be a lot more concerned about what's uploaded by smart speakers than what's downloaded.
If we're talking bandwidth contention, as far as I'm aware, traffic-shaping functionality in routers for downstream traffic isn't great. We have good functionality for prioritizing and limiting traffic on the sending side of the bottleneck link. That side knows how congested the link is. With most Internet connections, though, the last-mile link is the bottleneck. That means that effective shaping is gonna have to happen on the ISP's side (and the ISP doesn't know how the consumer wants prioritization done, and there's presently no mechanism for consumers to inform the ISP), or have smarter routers on the consumer side that can make themselves the bottleneck and shape there. The latter would be nice, as one could solve ISP bufferbloat on the consumer side.
I would think that it should be technically possible for a home router to passively detect upstream link saturation by monitoring traffic and then using ECN or packet drops to preferentially throttle a lower-priority connection.
Linux monitors RTT average time for TCP connections, which one can see in ss -i output. So the endpoint kernel is going to have enough information to passively infer link saturation on the downstream side via looking for correlated RTT increases. The problem is that a given machine on a network doesn't know what other machines are doing, so it's not in a great position to infer link saturation or shape its own traffic. You'd want the router to handle it.
I don't know if NAT is typically implemented by having a router proxy TCP connections or whether the NAT table is lighter than that, works mostly at the packet level.
checks an OpenWRT box doing NAT
No entries in ss or netstat output, so I would guess not.
Still, even if the Linux kernel on a router isn't presently tracking that statistic, it'd be possible to do so.
Once you have downstream bandwidth, you have something like a rate-limited, fair, prioritized qdisc on a Linux router with the rate kept just below the point where RTTs start spiking.
I'm not too much of a privacy wonk, but I'll never have one of those things in my house. Apart from anything else, I simply have no use for one.
Bugs happen. Here's an LG coffee maker uploading 1TB in 10 days: https://www.tomshardware.com/networking/it-pro-says-his-parents-keurig-smart-coffee-maker-sent-1tb-of-data-over-their-wi-fi-in-10-days-it-saturated-an-access-point-on-its-own-but-he-says-most-of-the-traffic-never-left-the-home-network
