Random thoughts

TL;DR: LG7304 Android Smart TV gets its software update server from somewhere in the Amazon cloud. The server name is not disclosed via regular DNS and most likely gets learned via some previous HTTPs connection. I have a LG7304 Android Smart TV that I want to prevent from getting updates (in the hopes it will become rootable in the future). I've been getting an annoying update message for weeks now (even though automatic updates are disabled in the menu), so I tried to suppress it via DNS. I set up port mirroring for the TV's ethernet port and captured boot traffic for analysis. It seems the TV communicates with several hosts located in Amazon AWS cloud, but without making DNS requests that return those IPs. So, it must either have them hardcoded in its firmware or must be getting them through an encrypted channel. You can get a list of IP addresses that your TV communicates with by using Wireshark -> Statistics -> Conversations -> IPv4. You can use whois (whoi...

Avid readers of my blog (ha!) will complain that there's hardly anything to read. Well, that's because I've published most of my work in Odroid Magazine , since it was related to SBCs. Here is a list of published articles (quite a few, it seems), for your (and my) enjoyment: Multi Screen Desktop Using VNC - Part 2: An Improved And Simplified Version Running Linux under Android Multiscreen Desktops using VNC Manage your kid's computer time with mqttNanny Lutris: Gaming on the ODROID-H2 ODROID Crossgrading: From armhf to arm64 Upgrading Ubuntu to 18.04 KeePass: Password Manager  Home Assistant: A DIY Smart Light Project Home Assistant: Tracking People With Wi-Fi Using Kismet Home Assistant: Using Infrared, Motors, and Relays Home Assistant: Scripts for Customization Home Assistant: Designing A Fancy Dashboard Setting Up Your ODROID: ODROID-XU4 As A General Purpose NAS Mycroft: Open Source Artificial Intelligence Home Automation ...

Problem: You want to download some content (e.g. video) from a website that doesn't want you to download that content, only to stream it. You may want to do this to view it later (maybe it expires after a while), or to view it offline or on a different device. Please note that circumventing the content owner's wishes against downloading may be a legal problem, but there are less sofisticated ways of doing it (e.g. screen recording either software or with a camera pointed at your screen), so we'll analyze it from a technical point of view. Up until recently, downloading video content was fairly easy, by starting the debugger (F12 in the browser), going to the network tab, identifying the video resource, copying the curl command and pasting it somewhere for offline download. But the sites got clever and detect when you open the debugger and stop accessing the video content, so that you can't find the video link. The solution to this is more convoluted - we're going t...