What am I doing if I block Google public DNS?

[Tech9]

Not exactly... we're losing money on bird seed!

Yes, you have to make investments in order to attract... birds.

What happened to the Ubiquiti product detail in your signature...

I have 4x networks already, some changes here and there, but in general the same GbE setups with UCG-Ultra gateways, universal omnidirectional U6-Mesh access points and whatever needed switches USW-Ultra and USW-Flex-Mini. Fair price hardware, power efficient and trouble free. Site Magic is site-to-site WireGuard based VPN, Teleport is Tailscale WireGuard based VPN for mobile devices outside of LAN.

 

[OzarkEdge]

Yes, you have to make investments in order to attract... birds.

I have to make investments to keep the bird I married! We're at 43 years and counting.

Thanks for the product detail. I've got some reading to do.

OE

 

[Viktor Jaep]

Looking forward to @Viktor Jaep getting ahold of this one ...

I INVOKE ALL MY RIGHTS TO BE FORGOTTEN AND DELETED. PRONTO!

 

[Tech9]

I've got some reading to do.

I'll give you real life numbers. The UCG-Ultra ($129) is GbE capable 3-in-1 Gateway, Controller and Switch. Very small device and only 6W. It can go Gigabit WAN-LAN with IDS (Suricata), ~500Mbps with QoS (FQ-CoDeL or Application), ~500Mbps on WireGuard and ~150Mbps on OpenVPN. U6-Mesh ($179) is Gigabit capable AP with IPX5 rating for indoor/outdoor applications, very small size device and only 13W, omnidirectional radiation pattern, PoE injector is included, desktop stand and wall/pole mounts are included. With UCG-Ultra you can expand your network up to 30 UniFi devices and up to ~300 clients. Wired performance is 940Mbps, wireless performance on 80MHz wide channel is ~800Mbps to common 2-stream AX-class client. U6-Mesh range at 30dBm EIRP is similar to RT-AX86U AIO router in my environment.

 

[Tech9]

I INVOKE ALL MY RIGHTS

You have the right to start working on BIRDMON.

 

[sfx2000]

dig does not seem to be a command on my new Win11 Pro(?)

Hmmm... Not a big windows user except for games and apps that don't have something that is available on Mac/Linux - I'm sure there's something equivalent, and there's always the choice of running WSL, which is quite good, and there, dig is available as part of Ubuntu on WSL

Mine is a Sony BRAVIA XR A80J 4K HDR OLED with embedded Smart Google TV (2021) XR-55A80J. When I got this TV I unplugged a ROKU Ultra. I've been avoiding southeast Asia OEM media, mobile, and appliance products... too many features, too much cleverness, if that makes any sense. My daughter recently bought a new fridge and commented how many have WiFi... this speaks to my concern that they are bombarding us consumers with features, connectivity, and now AI. Given how difficult it has been for them to secure past devices, I figure the future will be even less secure/private.

Agree on the privacy concerns - and I've heard that the Sony Bravia OLED's are very good...

There are ways to disable much of the upstream data sharing, but it does tend to be specific to vendor and release versions - reddit might be helpful resource there..

I'm not freaking out about it... I'm just giving it some thought, trying to anticipate what might be coming at us next.

A recent discovery here... a bird feeder with a cam in it claimed the microSD slot on the cam was not usable. So I put a 32GB card in it to see what would happen. The app is unaware of it. After a few days I removed it and inspected it on my PC... it was full of bird event videos that included my yard and house... 'residual backend system data'. Point being... these Things do more than we know.

OE

Interesting - I sent a game camera over to my dad a few years ago to try and see what was eating the food he set out for his barn cats (he lives out in the country side) - it had an option for a "rolling" buffer that wrote out to the SD card, so at any given time, it kept the last day on the card... hard on cards as they would wear out on extended use and go to read-only....

BTW - it was a racoon that was starving the cats, and it was given a proper exit via 22LR...

 

[OzarkEdge]

I've heard that the Sony Bravia OLED's are very good...

It's been very good, nice picture, I have it on a SONY AVR with 5.0 speakers... need to add a woofer to offload the speakers, but it sounds plenty fine as is... my only reservations come with Google updating things... I'm afraid to turn it ON and find a slew of new settings. But so far, it's serving well.

SONY and TLC are joining their TV businesses. I appreciate SONY's historical AV accomplishments so I wonder what this will mean going forward.

BTW - it was a racoon that was starving the cats, and it was given a proper exit via 22LR...

Raccoon or possum would have been my first guess. We garden in a rural setting and had all sorts of critters visiting until I designed and erected a good-looking 'deer/critter 58" multiwire electric fence'. It's a linear 150' with a 30-mile charger on it! The charger indicates 17kV with no load... it drops to 12-13kV with the fence load ON. The literature I studied recommended 4kV to exclude the largest animals... bear/elk/moose! If you touch it, you will not forget it. It only takes once and they don't come back...an electric fence is a psychological barrier.

We still see all sorts of critters moving around but none of them seem interested in the garden produce anymore. We had coyotes carrying off ripe cantaloupe! The occasional new squirrel or bunny might slip in and do some minor damage, but one errant touch must soon happen because they don't come back for more. I brushed the bottom wire 4" off the ground one day while passing too close with my STEEL TOE work shoe... it lit up the whole side of my body and changed my outlook on life!

And of course, she's happy now. She simply demanded a fence, but I had to first learn how to exclude all sorts of clever critters and make it look good and require no maintenance.

OE

 

[Viktor Jaep]

Agree on the privacy concerns - and I've heard that the Sony Bravia OLED's are very good...

It's been very good, nice picture, I have it on a SONY AVR with 5.0 speakers... need to add a woofer to offload the speakers, but it sounds plenty fine as is... my only reservations come with Google updating things... I'm afraid to turn it ON and find a slew of new settings. But so far, it's serving well.

SONY and TLC are joining their TV businesses. I appreciate SONY's historical AV accomplishments so I wonder what this will mean going forward.

Just to address the privacy elephant in the room, practically any "Smart TV", including these Sony TVs, will constantly collect screenshots and sound using ACR to feed back to the mothership to sell your data and viewing habits to advertisers, government entities, who knows. It will even collect stuff from HDMI-connected devices... think like gaming consoles, dvd/blu ray players, family videos, etc.

Shedding a bit more light on this subject:

Are Your Smart TVs Taking Screenshots? What Texans (and Everyone) Should Know

Texas sues five TV brands over "periodic screenshots" here's what it means for your living room privacy

cyberlifecoach.substack.com

Sound counter-intuitive, but the best thing to do is actually disable Wi-Fi on your Smart TV, and go with a dedicated streamer that adheres to privacy, like the Apple 4K TV streamer. I am by no means a huge Apple fan, but the 4K TV streamer does not use ACR and has no invasive tracking or ads on its home screen. Using the Apple TV 4K basically allows you to bypass the Sony’s data collection entirely. The TV functions only as a display (a "Dumb TV") in this case, receiving content from the Apple TV, which means your viewing habits are not tracked by the TV itself.

 

[Paliv]

Just to address the privacy elephant in the room, practically any "Smart TV", including these Sony TVs, will constantly collect screenshots and sound using ACR to feed back to the mothership to sell your data and viewing habits to advertisers, government entities, who knows. It will even collect stuff from HDMI-connected devices... think like gaming consoles, dvd/blu ray players, family videos, etc.

Shedding a bit more light on this subject:

Are Your Smart TVs Taking Screenshots? What Texans (and Everyone) Should Know

Texas sues five TV brands over "periodic screenshots" here's what it means for your living room privacy

cyberlifecoach.substack.com

Sound counter-intuitive, but the best thing to do is actually disable Wi-Fi on your Smart TV, and go with a dedicated streamer that adheres to privacy, like the Apple 4K TV streamer. I am by no means a huge Apple fan, but the 4K TV streamer does not use ACR and has no invasive tracking or ads on its home screen. Using the Apple TV 4K basically allows you to bypass the Sony’s data collection entirely. The TV functions only as a display (a "Dumb TV") in this case, receiving content from the Apple TV, which means your viewing habits are not tracked by the TV itself.

This is what I do. I like my TVs dumb.

 

[OzarkEdge]

Just to address the privacy elephant in the room, practically any "Smart TV", including these Sony TVs, will constantly collect screenshots and sound using ACR to feed back to the mothership to sell your data and viewing habits to advertisers, government entities, who knows. It will even collect stuff from HDMI-connected devices... think like gaming consoles, dvd/blu ray players, family videos, etc.

Shedding a bit more light on this subject:

Are Your Smart TVs Taking Screenshots? What Texans (and Everyone) Should Know

Texas sues five TV brands over "periodic screenshots" here's what it means for your living room privacy

cyberlifecoach.substack.com

Sound counter-intuitive, but the best thing to do is actually disable Wi-Fi on your Smart TV, and go with a dedicated streamer that adheres to privacy, like the Apple 4K TV streamer. I am by no means a huge Apple fan, but the 4K TV streamer does not use ACR and has no invasive tracking or ads on its home screen. Using the Apple TV 4K basically allows you to bypass the Sony’s data collection entirely. The TV functions only as a display (a "Dumb TV") in this case, receiving content from the Apple TV, which means your viewing habits are not tracked by the TV itself.

I believe you're right. When I bought the SONY for $1300, I assumed then that Google might be subsidizing the cost to get its fingers deeper into us.

There needs to be a concerted effort to resist this or do we just rollover and accept it like the majority do. Trying to fight this at the device level is hopeless and endless. I want a gateway with a firewall facing inward that dumps the nefarious outbound traffic.

I'm not sure Texas is the best place to wage this consumer battle.

OE

 

[Tech9]

I want a gateway with a firewall facing inward that dumps the nefarious outbound traffic

UCG you asked about has customizable Zone-Based Firewall rules with nice WebUI and can do Application filtering in many categories using the DPI engine, but there is a big chance to hurt yourself with this approach. You can block all of this from Internal to External Zone, but expect many things to stop working properly after.

 

[OzarkEdge]

UCG you asked about has customizable Zone-Based Firewall rules with nice WebUI and can do Application filtering in many categories using the DPI engine, but there is a big chance to hurt yourself with this approach. You can block all of this from Internal to External Zone, but expect many things to stop working properly after.

Still, it's a start... maybe a combination of select device purchasing combined with follow-up filtering can solve 90% of the problem without having to expend 100% of our time getting nowhere comfortable about it all.

OE

 

[Viktor Jaep]

I'm not sure Texas is the best place to wage this consumer battle.

 

[Tech9]

Still, it's a start...

I don't block anything network-wide on home networks. It's like enforcing limitations on family members without asking for permission. Only my Guest Networks have Adult Content filtering and Safe Search enforced because guests' kids may connect there and try to open things their parents are not okay with.