You might control the resolver on your personal computer (for now). You probably don't control it on your phone. You most likely won't control it on your embedded devices.

I think it's insane that devices can effectively be bricked if they can't phone home. It's nothing short of waste, and I think environmental legislation should require device manufacturers to supply ways of disabling or overriding these mechanisms such that devices can continue to operate regardless of whether home servers are blocked or otherwise out of reach, e.g. company goes belly up, censorship etc.

Actually you probably should return such devices as broken.

It was kind of hard to send back a really nice device that I had just opened up and was ready to fly.

Thing is, some companies just use it as a way to fire their customers.

However, they are also playing these sorts of games with other types of devices, where no such justifications exist ( https://www.eevblog.com/forum/eevblab/eevblab-83-dji-pocket-... ) That needs to be answered by returning the product as defective.

I will admit I haven’t done any further investigation, but simply concluded that the gateway at some point started phoning home and if it didn’t receive a response went into some catatonic state. Maybe I’ll dig deeper at some point, time permitting.

If it doesn't see internet it just blocks itself and goes to a screen "Oops I have no internet".

So you can forget about watching movies from your local server using the VLC app as well. Ridiculous.

Hold up. You are claiming that the fact that DoH prevents DNS requests from being visible in cleartext network traffic is a bad thing?

...what? In a world where the choice is between one party (the DNS provider) having access to my DNS requests and everyone on the network including my DNS provider having access to my DNS requests, I'll choose "DNS provider having exclusive access" every single time.

It is when its my network. If they cared about people sniffing they would use DNSSEC, but still use the network DNS server. DNS over HTTPS is just a way for shady companies to hide what they're doing.

Using DoH, especially one served by an advert company is just signing up to be their open book.

The way we solve this is that we assume any knowledge the device has about the outside world can become obsolete, so we do we have a two layer approach.

The bottom layer is that we have a set of semi hard-coded fallback values that are likely to work in the forseeable future. Updating these fallbacks requires an over the air firmware upgrade which isn't a terribly big deal since we regularly upgrade firmware over the air. The goal of these values is to make sure we can get the device online and direct it to somewhere where we can trigger firmware updates.

The second layer is that one or more times per day we ping a config server that sends a packet with configuration data to the unit. This is typically API endpoints etc. The configuration data is essentially a prioritized list of resources, so if one won't respond it will go to the next on the list (while still trying to determine if a higher priority resource becomes available).

Last week we got a chance to see how this failed over beautifully as multiple resources were removed and a fleet of devices just adapted as they should. (The shutdown of these resources were planned, but presented a good opportunity to do a fire drill).

These devices do usually have an UI. Why not provide some options to the user? Let him choose among different types and providers. I'd set mine to use the one provided by DHCP or enter the address of my resolver manually.

In my experience, product design is generally done with a well-meaning attempt to protect the average user from themselves. People who can and do manage their own networks in sophisticated ways are, unfortunately, far less common than people who have no idea that their ISP fscks with DNS lookups.

Personally, I'd bury this setting pretty deep in an advanced-usage-only tab and behind a notice SCREAMING about how using these settings is unsupported. And then tell support staff that they are not obligated to support whatever crazy configurations people cook up for their home networks.

I understand not doing it at all. A few people will complain, but the number of people who will refuse to buy a TV because it doesn't play nice with their pihole is almost certainly too small to register on any material financial statement, and attempting to please them will generally run into some other point they are unwilling to budge on. The number of people who screw up an advanced setting they don't understand will show up in support costs.

The problem of shitty devices on your private network is a different one.

I recently bought a car, and could not find one without a cellular modem and microphones. Removing the modem voids the warranty. The period where you can opt out is mostly over.

For the manufacturer to avoid a warranty claim due to a modification or aftermarket part, they must show that the defect was linked to the part or modification.

They might have to show that it was caused by, but in any case, if your paint fails prematurely, they can’t say your warranty is void because you disabled the cell connection.

Otherwise it is probably mostly equal to driving without registration. It may not be a felony, but it will be fined.

Somewhat more sophisticated would be hardcoding an IP to a server with a REST endpoint that returns the real final IP. (Basically just like what DoH does, but without calling it DoH).

Even more sophisticated would be hiding the final IP on some kind of public web service like Twitter or Github.