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.
They do this outrageous download numbers just to hide the amount they upload at the same type.
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.
I permanently muted the mic on my home max speaker, but still use it for casting music, works well.
I do have a home assistant voice speaker for the timers though
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.
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.
I’m surprised it didn’t just have google’s DNS hardcoded to bypass your pihole.
Chromecasts do that. I had to intercept port 53 on the router to fix it.
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.
Could you block DoH entirely on the network level and cause it to fallback? I guess you’d have to have a list of common DoH IP addresses to block.
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
next move is theirs… knight to queen’s dns-over-https
That’ll get blocked too.
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)
Counter point on that, that might affect the legality of DNS over HTTPS
No, because the law cares about intent, not technical details. Having my property do DNS over HTTPS because that’s what I, the owner, wanted is fine; having my property do DNS over HTTPS because that’s what some non-owner entity wanted against my will as the owner is not.
Rather: they are free to do protocol negotiation with the DNS server I supply. If it speaks DoH, go for it.
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.
RFCs are subordinate to laws. If I, the device and network owner, want my device to use the DNS I set and the device does differently, I want the rogue corp prosecuted and IDGAF what some goddamn RFC says!
I don’t think you’d be able to find a court receptive to that argument.
Every court that disagrees is tyrannical and needs to be fucking abolished.
Same for Roku, and worse now that they were bought out. Sorry grandma, the Roku is getting cut off. Lol
Similar for my Google nest, it’s the #1 host in number of daily requests in my network, around one every 500ms
Now it’s on it’s own vlan so there’s nothing that they can report on my network, but it’s really concerning that a thermostat calls home this often. It should be enough to do it once an hour to check the outside temperature and only if it’s enabled.v
What does that mean exactly? Like it’s trying to connect to where? Why?
Whenever a device needs to connect to a web domain, the first thing it has to do is retrieve that domains IP address. Thats a DNS request.
While I don’t remember which domains exactly (this was 5+ years ago when I last checked); just the fact that it’s reaching out to external connections 20k+ times a day is concerning.
For context; my entire network has made 28k dns requests in the last 24hrs. Thats 3 mobile phones that are in use constantly, three PCs, and a handful of IOT devices like smart bulbs/switches.
20k from one device is A LOT.
It’s primarily an idle device that’s awaiting a voice command. Supposedly it’s processing audio locally to find the wake word ‘ok google’ and only then uploading the audio to be processed as a voice command on googles servers. So what’s it uploading/connecting to 20k times a day while it’s suposed to be idle…?
Like it’s trying to connect to where? Why?
I don’t know exactly. That’s the problem.
Because its recording every single word you say waiting for the trigger word to send the black van to your house (the trigger word is opposite of “lick dear leaders boots”).
All of these devices are spyware.
Same experience here. DNS server was omething like goooooooogle.com for me.
Blocking them made the devices malfunction, I believe the speakers werent fully aware of each other anymore, so speaker groups got messed up in all sorts of ways.
I use Bluesound speakers and modules now.
To be fair, IoT devices should be making exactly zero DNS requests, unless maybe you set up a proper domain name for your Home Assistant server.
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 -ioutput. 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
ssornetstatoutput, 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.
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
Later in the X thread, Nomad acknowledged that the UniFi had not reported an actual 1TB upload, so he concluded it was mostly local junk data.
So not upload. Sounds like it could be local network tracking as has been demonstrated with LG TVs, repeatedly and continuously querying local network for information. I guess maybe with a bug in there if it’s that much data. Still, unclear what happened there and whether or what degree it was a bug.
All coverage of that incident says it was mostly LAN traffic. It was a bug in the network stack.
Not a bug, lol.
It’s just downloading the methods that work specifically for the psychology it learned you have. /Truthful sarcasm
Surveillance is only a small aspect of the threat, datamining that analyzes you and profiles you then creates algorithms based on your psychology to then move your life down paths that aren’t naturally your life path… Is a major threat. Also this isn’t new… This type of social manipulation has been happening since at least 1930s with analog methods. It’s probably why CIA and government helps fund datamining social media and datacenters.
“Pre-emptive manipulation of society by nudge swarms around vigilant targets, as orchestrated by surveillance capitalist companies"
https://lemmy.world/post/52470551What are you going on about? This is a bug and the author of the article says as much.
If the quality of that website is any indication, the author has no idea what they’re talking about.
Probably, but they also note that Google has acknowledged the issue and will be pushing a fix.
K
Hey look, I’m a growing AI bot just wanting a little server space to spread out and maybe commit some atrocities against humans, is that a crime?
Not in 2026 it isn’t!
CIA sending in folks to downvote on Lemmy? Hilarious. Youre 100% correct . its ALL for mass surveillance for civil unrest from the climate wars soon to ensue. All data centers are surveillance centers.
They all do… 0 surprise.
Botnet?
No.
Owning anything like this is like voting for Trump… you’re responsible for your stupid decisions and don’t get to claim you were taken advantage of.
Poor take. This is a technical issue.
Technically, you’re not going to get spied on - intentionally or unintentionally - if you don’t have these.
(Well… at least not by these…)
Technically if you’re dead and buried you can’t get spied on by a Google speaker either…
This “technical issue” can be solved by “pulling the plug”.
Technically, pulling the plug will also solve all of my human meatbag issues.
Wrong plug, wrong plug!
…hope someone brought a mop.
Well sure. But not everyone can be expected to be enlightened. We need to help those that are coming around to reality. But you aren’t entirely wrong.
Lemmy users trying not to make every single post about US poltiics challenge (impossible)
Someday, maybe. I think the midterm elections are making people even crazier than normal.
INB4 !bigtechatemyface@lemmy.world
[Or rather, not INB4 because I just made it.]
Are american agents astroturfing here to downvote? You are 1000% on point. Anyone owning a google voice or Alexa is an absolute idiot who agrees to surveillance fasicm.
