Google Home and Chromecast Could Be Overloading Your Home Wi-Fi (theverge.com)

Google Cast products could be to blame for your wonky internet connection. According to TP-Link, "The Cast feature normally sends packets of information at regular intervals to keep a live connection with products like Google Home," reports The Verge. "However, if the device is awakened from a 'sleep' mode, it will sometimes send a burst of information at once, which can overwhelm a router. The longer a Cast device has been in 'sleep' mode, the more information it might send at once." The engineer says that could exceed over 100,000 packets, an amount that "may eventually cause some of [the] router's primary features to shut down -- including wireless connectivity."

TP-Link has reportedly fixed the issue in its C1200 router, but a broader fix from Google's end has not been found.

Comments

Always recording?

[b0s0z0ku]

A Google Home is just a smart mic that responds to a keyword. What is it storing in "sleep" mode that it needs to spit back to Google when it wakes up? Is it recording at all times and spewing compressed audio back to the mothership?

Re:Always recording?

[110010001000]

It is sending whatever the Google programmers want it to. Your conversations. Your data. Whatever they decide. And they can update it at any time to change whatever they want it to send to them. And you paid $99.

Re:Always recording?

[b0s0z0ku]

Well, I didn't. If someone gave me one for free, I'd be sure to return it, at high velocity.

Re:Always recording?

[Xenx]

From TP-Link's statement on the C1200 update, it looks like it's MDNS multicast discovery packets.

Re:Always recording?

[msauve]

So, unless their router does mcast routing (nope, it doesn't), they should just be dropping those. And if the switch part of it can't reliably flood multicast packets, they should simply give up and quit the business.

Re: Always recording?

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly what you said. Furthermore, it does not even need to record in audio format. Just the written words and metadata is even better.

I would really love to be a marketer at Google with this powerful tool at my disposal. It is an incredible situation.

Re:Always recording?

[peragrin]

nope, google home, and chromecast use multicastDNS like apple bojour to locate devices on the same access point.

a quiet side effect is chromecasts, don't work well in multi wireless access point networks. (ie a computer connecting to you AP can't reach devices connected to another AP)

the issue is some update is basically spamming mdns requests across all nodes which is causeing network congestion.

some routers are going so far as to limit udp trafffic from google products to prevent network congestion issues.

Why google hasn't issued an update is anyone's guess.

Re:Always recording?

[sexconker]

Is it recording at all times and spewing compressed audio back to the mothership?

Of course it is. Why would anyone believe anything else?

Re:Always recording?

[DontBeAMoran]

It is sending whatever the Google programmers want it to. Your conversations. Your data. Whatever they decide. And they can update it at any time to change whatever they want it to send to them. And you paid $99.

Not me! I bought it on sale for only $79!

Re:Always recording?

[LiENUS]

nope, google home, and chromecast use multicastDNS like apple bojour to locate devices on the same access point.

Nope, as long as they're on the same layer 2 network they communicate fine.

a quiet side effect is chromecasts, don't work well in multi wireless access point networks. (ie a computer connecting to you AP can't reach devices connected to another AP)

What? I have 4 access points and it doesn't matter which one I'm on I can connect to the chromecasts fine, I even have multiple ssids (to manage bandwidth restrictions for guests), Doesn't matter which AP or SSID, all chromecasts work.

Re:Always recording?

[Anonymous Coward]

PCAP or it didn't happen. I believe facts. You know, those things that nerds do, that matter?

Re:Always recording?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a TP-Link router. It can't handle over 60Mbit on NAT even though a direct wired connection with a static IP on the cable provider's hardware is 115Mbit/sec. Wired and wireless speeds on that router are identical. Their hardware is underpowered, so they have a reason to redirect blame.

Re:Always recording?

[Xenx]

I'm not speaking to the quality, or the perceived lack of it, of TP-Link devices. That being said, they're reportedly not the only affected manufacturer. Bigger names are also affected by this issue. Whether it's only the lower end devices or not, I haven't a clue. I just know the problem isn't restricted to TP-Link.

Re:Always recording?

[rwven]

This is pretty much why I just dumped my Echo. The fact that I literally have no idea what it's transmitting at any given time makes me nervous. I love the idea of a voice driven assistant, but I also don't love the idea that MS/Amazon/Google could know anything I say to anyone.... I work from home and discussing sensitive business information within earshot of an always-on microphone makes me twitch.

Re:Always recording?

[Xenx]

Given that other major players are also affected by the issue, I doubt that "inept" is the answer here. Things are generally designed they way they are for price and performance. It likely hasn't been a realistic concern until now.

Re:Always recording?

[gl4ss]

there's a timer on sending some packets.

send every x seconds.

when it's in sleep, it sends it for whatever it missed when sleeping. probably same data, I suppose.

a not that uncommon glitch.

it just proves google doesn't give a fuck about quality anymore than others.

Re: Always recording?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, except some APs filter multicast traffic intentionally, and then it doesn't work very fine at all..

Re:Always recording?

[Anonymous Coward]

Moran!

They should be paying you to store information on you.

numbnuts

Re:Always recording?

[Anonymous Coward]

Plus it totally clashes with your tin-foil hat.

Re:Always recording?

[hawguy]

This is pretty much why I just dumped my Echo. The fact that I literally have no idea what it's transmitting at any given time makes me nervous. I love the idea of a voice driven assistant, but I also don't love the idea that MS/Amazon/Google could know anything I say to anyone.... I work from home and discussing sensitive business information within earshot of an always-on microphone makes me twitch.

Did you ditch your cell phone too? You're more likely to have it infected by malware and recording your conversations than to have Amazon or Google decide to break their promise that their devices only listen after the wake word.

Re:Always recording?

[Anonymous Coward]

It is sending whatever the Google programmers want it to. Your conversations...

If I ever live in a place with one of them it's going to be recording so many farts.

Re:Always recording?

[supremebob]

You're aware that it only sends over the voice commands it gets after it hears it's "Alexa" activation keyword, right? People have confirmed this by connecting packet sniffers to their network and monitoring that it sends over. Same deal with Google Home.

Sure, this will probably get hacked (and patched) at some point, but I think that people like you are being overly paranoid. Unless you work for a three letter spy agency, you don't have much to worry about .

Re:Always recording?

[gnick]

Is it recording at all times and spewing compressed audio back to the mothership?

Of course it is. Why would anyone believe anything else?

Lack of evidence beyond paranoid speculation? I'm all for jumping on the Google-hate wagon, but I really doubt they're doing this. It's of questionable benefit and the consequences of getting caught would be pretty major.

Re:Always recording?

[AmiMoJo]

If only there was some way you could inspect the packets to see what data was being transmitted.

Re:Always recording?

[Anonymous Coward]

Archer C7 does 90MBit/s downloads over NAT (the internet connection is via 100MBit/s Ethernet, so it's likely not limited by NAT speed).
But I am sure they have cheap devices not designed for speeds like that. Which seems entirely sensible given that many won't be used for NAT at all, and others will be connected to only 16 or 25 MBit/s internet.

Re:Always recording?

[mujadaddy]

Lack of evidence beyond paranoid speculation?

Remember when they said the same thing about Carnivore?

Re:Always recording?

[Anonymous Coward]

Even if you do work for a three-letter spy agency, you shouldn't be talking about it at home.

Re:Always recording?

[Anonymous Coward]

Encrypted packets show up as encrypted. You can inspect timing, not content.

Re:Always recording?

[Bryansix]

Given that other major players are also affected by the issue, I doubt that "inept" is the answer here. Things are generally designed they way they are for price and performance. It likely hasn't been a realistic concern until now.

You would be surprised. Employee retention is a major problem in the corporate world today. Its a problem a lot of CEOs and HR departments don't take seriously at all. People leave and never conduct a knowledge transfer and then new people are hired and the boss just assumes that they know everything the last person did. Granted, they might know the RFC for something exists but not how or if it was actually implemented.

Re:Always recording?

[sexconker]

Fact: You have absolutely no clue what that little black box is doing.
Fact: It's designed to be always on and always listening.
Fact: It has enough processing and storage on board to listen to everything, record only when it wants (filtering out silence), analyze it to convert it to text or simply compress it to 6 kbps or less (see Opus), then send it off later as part of its expected data stream (after you say "Okay, Google") via an encrypted connection you have no way of looking into.
Fact: They're remotely updateable. Even if you trust Google today (you fool), one update later and you're fucked, one national security letter and you're fucked, one remotely exploitable vulnerability and you're fucked.

PCAP isn't going to show you shit. The thing will filter, compress/textify, encrypt and send later, stowing away on an expected data transmission.

Re:Always recording?

[sexconker]

What were the consequences of violating copyright en masse by scanning every single book they could get their hands on and reproducing them online?
What were the consequences of illegally collecting location information of users?
What were the consequences of "accidentally" mapping out the location of every WiFi AP without consent?

I dare you to name one negative consequence Google has faced and balance that consequence against the action itself and its benefits to Google.
Feel free to do the same for Amazon, Facebook, etc.

Re: Always recording?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah. Because they don't already have your information ðY

Re:Always recording?

[Rakarra]

Carnivore did exactly what they said it was supposed to do.

Re:Always recording?

[mujadaddy]

You are ignoring the fact that they denied Carnivore's existence for years, just like they denied that the NSA existed, just like they denied the Snowden allegations, just like... do I really need to go on?

Re:Always recording?

[Rakarra]

I was unaware that the NSA are the ones selling Google Home. I thought that was a Google product.

Re:Always recording?

[Anonymous Coward]

their devices only listen after the wake word.

How would this even be possible? Simple logic dictates that it can't hear the wake word if it isn't listening.

Surprised?

[bhcompy]

Not the first time they confuse "what you technically could do" with "what you actually should do"

Re:Surprised?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not the first time they confuse "what you technically could do" with "what you actually should do"

This is the world of sanity: "We can have X capability, here's a set of pros and cons for and against it. Should we implement it?"

This is the world of Capitalism: "Fuck it, it makes us money, so it's going in."

Guess which world society has chosen for itself?

Not saying it's right, but until you remove the "it makes us money" or "people covet money over any and everything else" parts, that's the world that we will have.

Re:Surprised?

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is transparency. At least these devices acknowledge that they've got a more or less permanently hot mic. Cell phones don't really advertise about their ability to listen when not being used.

If more people knew about this sort of thing and the implications, they might choose not to go along with it. Or, at bare minimum demand that they receive appropriate compensation for their second job. It's beyond me why companies should be allowed to get rich by stealing my data, in most cases without permission or even advertising it.

Re: Surprised?

[Anonymous Coward]

Cell phones don't really advertise about their ability to listen when not being used.

Doesnâ(TM)t iOS turn the titlebar/screen header red when an app is using the mic in the background?

Translation

[Anonymous Coward]

Google home and chromecast products are constantly spying on you and sometimes send so much microphone and viewing data that it will momentarily tank your network while sharing all of your personal information. But don't blame us, you bought it.

Its the router stupid

[Dorianny]

The headline should read "Google Home and Chromecast Could Be Overloading" the horribly implemented network stack of you routers software. Do yourself a favor and get a router supported by dd-wrt/open-wrt/tomatoe or even better one that already uses one of those already

Re:Its the router stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

Using the alternative firmwares you suggest did absolutely nothing for me. Had the problem described in the article (WRT3200ACM) and wifi would constantly crap out with the latest dd-wrt. As I noted below, Linksys just released a new firmware and so far wifi has been behaving in a civil manner.

Re:Its the router stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

The WRT3200, 32x are a POS when it comes to stability with DDWRT, get yourself a WRT1200 or WRT1900. Linksys screwed the pooch with that piece of hardware

Re:Its the router stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

You actually need the new *firmware* for the radio, not just the router cpu... yeah, confusing.

The Atheros-based^Wqualcomm-Atheros routers don't care, and just work. Even the ones from tp-link.

Re:Its the router stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

That remains to be seen now that I am running the latest Linksys firmware addressing this issue. So far not a single wifi issue now for six hours. Wasn't able to go that long before.

Re:Its the router stupid

[guruevi]

You can still get a very shitty router. I noticed MANY routers are simply underpowered. They have 3 antenna's, a 1.2GHz chip, some shitty software and a power supply of 500mA, replace that with a 1A and given the system doesn't overheat, it won't "crash" or power cycle anymore. Also, crack open the case and put a decent power sink on the chips.

I have gotten some mixed results from Asus, I've actually melted the plastic off a Netgear home router by attempting to use its gigabit ports, the Linksys is a big stay-away, TP-Link the name says it all, toilet-paper link.

If you want a really stable, good router, that's compatible with DD-WRT or OpenWRT go with Buffalo or shell out for a professional system, they're maybe twice as expensive but well worth the extra range, US-based support and hassle free experience.

Re:Its the router stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

Running a TP-Link TL-WR2543N/ND v1 with OpenWRT 15.05.1 and have this issue.

Re:Its the router stupid

[thegarbz]

The fault is from both sides. The router for not managing the traffic it is receiving, and the device for causing a completely unexpected Denial of Service attack using a protocol in a way that no sane device should.

The problem is far more the Google devices than the router. It is unreasonable to expect a perfectly functioning network from any router during an internal DoS attack.

Re:Its the router stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

A low current PSU it not going to make a difference in the temperature the router runs at. If the PSU cannot deliver the current the router needs, the voltage rail will sag and the system will crash. Or if you want to use Apple's terms "shutdown". A low current power supply will cause the exact same issue Apple is having with its batteries. When the CPU spikes, the voltage rail cannot be maintained and it crashes.

A higher voltage PSU on the other hand will make a router get warmer, but not the CPU. If the router has a good regulator, the regulator will just release more heat having to regulate a higher voltage down to the operating voltage. If it has a shit regulator it might fail allowing full voltage though and frying all the components.

Re:Its the router stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly! TP-Link in particular has a problem with this where this kind of load would require their devices to be reset multiple times daily. Until now, they refused to fix it. This is a vendor issue cause by poor design choices because they thought they could get away with it. Maybe they could in the past. Hopefully the word will get out and the poorer designs will now fail in the market place.

Hmmm, that could be the

[Anonymous Coward]

reason Linksys just recently within the past day or two released a firmware update for the WRT3200ACM. In a thread, can't find it at the moment they did mention an issue with android devices though they were not terribly specific only mentioning sleep mode.

Re:Hmmm, that could be the

[bobbied]

LOL, that router is trash anyway... They released the firmware update to fix the LAST firmware update that the had to pull because it totally hosed up the router beyond reasonable recovery. Seems the radio has some major issues and all their attempts to fix it thus far have failed.

How do I know this? Because I have one, collecting dust, because I got tired of having to factory reset the thing every few hours to get it working again. You could make it last a bit longer if you turned off literally EVERYTHING you don't absolutely need, including IPV6, prioritization and certainly the VPM stuff, but even running stripped of all but the essentials I'd get a day or two out of it before it was time to factory reset again.

Horrible router.. Get ANYTHING other than the Linksys WRT3200ACM.... Seriously, the WRT1900 is even better..

So they release ANOTHER firmware load? Does this one actually work? I'd love to dust off mine and actually use it for more than a paperweight.

Re:Hmmm, that could be the

[Anonymous Coward]

So far it's been working for six hours without a burp on wifi, wasn't able to go near that long before. Can't say it's totally fine on a six hour burn but well as in all things computerdom, your mileage may vary.

TP-Link?

[msauve]

"that could exceed over 100,000 packets,"

Maximum sized packets are normally 1500 or less because that's the standard Enet MTU. So, TP-Link "routers" can crap out when you send 200 MB through them? Time to buy a competitor's product.

Re:TP-Link?

[Anonymous Coward]

That would be the number of packets, not the size of a single packet.

Re:TP-Link?

[Anonymous Coward]

"that could exceed over 100,000 packets,"

Maximum sized packets are normally 1500 or less because that's the standard Enet MTU. So, TP-Link "routers" can crap out when you send 200 MB through them? Time to buy a competitor's product.

You have no idea what you're talking about.

Re:TP-Link?

[Anonymous Coward]

>>> 1500*100000
150000000

He was being generous and rounding up from 150MB to 200MB but yes 100k packets is just 150MB.

Re:TP-Link?

[MatthiasF]

There's more to throughput than simply bandwidth.

For instance, most enterprise grade routers are rated for packets per second (PPS).

A cheap enterprise-grade 4-5 port router with a 2-core 500Mhz processor will most likely be rated around 1 million PPS while a 4-core at 1Ghz will be able to handle over 3 million PPS.

For comparison, the latest version of the of the TP-Link Archer C1200 mentioned in the article has only a 1-core processor running at 900Ghz processor which I assume would be rated around 800,000 PPS.

So, if one model of home device alone puts out 100,000 packets suddenly and there are more than one of the device in the house (Google Home in 2-3 rooms, Chrome Cast on 2-3 TVs), it all adds up pretty quickly on top of normal use in the background.

Re:TP-Link?

[TheDarkMaster]

Funny, you do not think the problem may be actually in fact Chromecast clogging the router with requests when he should not be doing this? I've been seeing similar behavior in Google Chrome, it insists on creating an avalanche of UDP connections to mDNS that easily knocks down any home router not expecting such abuse.

Re:TP-Link?

[Anonymous Coward]

Chromecast is actually female. Please refer to it by using its preferred pronouns.

Re:TP-Link?

[msauve]

This issue is these cheap "routers." Here's more detail.

First, the issue 'taint got nuttin' to do with routing. The Google devices are sending lots of mcast traffic which affects WiFi. That's strictly a WiFi AP/bridging function. Second, although it may clog WiFi for a while, there's no excuse for an AP to crash because of it.

Third, people need to stop calling these things routers. That's like saying Dr. Dre is a Doctor. They don't route multicast, they don't do routing protocols. Most won't even route between networks, they'll only do some forms of NAT. They're cheap, home, multifunction (most of them have internal switches and/or APs) NAT gateways, not routers. In this case, it's an AP issue, not a router issue.

I'm not sure what a "A cheap enterprise-grade 4-5 port router" is. Any modern enterprise router will do wirespeed to at least 10G. There may be some SOHO ones which still use a CPU to do forwarding and where pps is still the bottleneck. There are certainly firewalls which do cpu forwarding. But none of them will crap out when packets arrive faster than they can forward them - they'll just drop some.

Re:TP-Link?

[msauve]

Whether or not the Google device's behavior is technically correct/allowed (it is) or polite/proper/necessary (it isn't), a network device should not crash because of it.

Re:TP-Link?

[Anonymous Coward]

They crap out at a much lower speed - 60Mbit.

Re:TP-Link?

[complete loony]

So it's basically; while(true) { send_packet(); next_packet += interval; sleep(next_packet - now()); }

eg, when the CPU wakes up, try to send all the packets you missed?

Re: TP-Link?

[AvitarX]

I haven't used a router that couldn't route in ages, and I meant off the shelf consumer stuff for $100ish. They all had the ability to do some poor level of routing.

As for the cheap enterprise thing, I'd assume that's more marketing related, as companies are using it to describe products that can do more routing beyond the off the shelf buffalo (example, ubiquiti has plenty of cheap, four port, routers that they call enterprise, you can argue that they're not, but it was pretty obvious to me what the poster meant, what would you call them?).

Re: TP-Link?

[msauve]

Feel free to download the user manual for the TP-Link C1200 mentioned, and point out where one can configure actual routing (not NATted) between multiple subnets. It does support static routes, but not interfaces on multiple networks, AFAICT.

Re: TP-Link?

[AvitarX]

Well I guess you're right.

In my defense I moved to the $150 "enterprise" stuff a while ago.

My cheapish Bufalo definitely could.

Re:TP-Link?

[Anonymous Coward]

So sad that slashdot has come to this. You seem to be the only person that got this. Everyone thinks it's buffering all of the surveillance data and sending it on wakeup. But the chromecast doesn't even have any surveillance features yet it apparently exhibits the problem. And this is the sort of very common problem that we all should have encountered. I know I've made that mistake in my early days of programming. And I know I've seen countless applications that do this sort of thing. It should have been painfully clear to any developer as soon as they read the description of multiple packets on wakeup and also the part about sending more packets the longer it's been asleep. Dead giveaway.

Re:TP-Link?

[guruevi]

200MB? You mean 200Mb/s.

Gigabit Ethernet handles:
1,000,000,000 b/s / (84 B * 8 b/B) == 1,488,096 f/s (maximum rate)
1,000,000,000 b/s / (1,538 B * 8 b/B) == 81,274 f/s (minimum rate)

If they crap out at 100,000 packets your router is indeed shitty, that's what 100Mb/s networks peak out at.

Re:TP-Link?

[guruevi]

100,000 packets bursting on a WiFi over a few seconds does not get close to the 1M PPS most routers should be able to push these days (you got to figure in that WiFi is for most of these systems a half-duplex broadcast).

Re: TP-Link?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's 100k packets, and then it stops spamming. So counting it as a fixed number of MB makes sense although the packets are probably not full since it's sending a very small announcement.

Re:TP-Link?

[MatthiasF]

Thanks for sharing the Gizmodo link. Wish I could up-mod.

Re:TP-Link?

[Anonymous Coward]

Which is the responsibility of the device that crashes. Why should google care of they crash a router, especially if it's an obscure brand (I know TP-Link isn't but using it as an example).....

Fail gracefully comes to mind....

Re: TP-Link?

[Anonymous Coward]

143MB after dividing by 1024 twice. This is /., not some site for pretend techies. Rounding to the nearest hundred makes it 100MB, not 200.

Re:TP-Link?

[tlhIngan]

If they crap out at 100,000 packets your router is indeed shitty, that's what 100Mb/s networks peak out at.

Most routers are software routed. If you're lucky, they run some form of Linux to do the firewalling, NAT, bridging (to WiFi), and everything else those routers are tasked to do (media serving, etc).

Modern enterprise routers do hardware routing and try to avoid process packet switching as much as possible because it's trivial to overload the main CPU this way.

So you have a relatively wimpy processor that has to handle packets coming in on multiple interfaces and handle all the processings.

And let's not forget most cheapo routers have barely any RAM to work with - just enough for the OS and barely enough for Linux tables and other stuff.

Hell, most cheapo home routers crash because the system simply runs out of RAM. Which could happen for many reasons - perhaps the wifi driver couldn't allocate a chunk to bridge the packet from WiFi to ethernet, LInux runs out of memory doing whatever, etc.

So just because in theory it's possible, you have to remember home routers are process switching and routing and serving up tons of other things at the same time.

Re:TP-Link?

[msauve]

You're confused, and are the only one who brought up the time domain.

Re:TP-Link?

[AmiMoJo]

This happens periodically. Back when BitTorrent was new it could crash some routers, particularly Linksys and Netgear as I recall, but also my ISP supplied cable modem. The problem was the number of connections it opened rapidly. Those old devices didn't have much RAM and didn't purge old connections very fast, so unless you set BitTorrent to a maximum of say 1 new connection per second it would quickly crash them.

Consumer hardware is mostly cheap crap. I started buying routers designed for the Japanese market where gigabit fibre was common 15 years ago, which could easily cope with puny UK broadband connections. Throw DD-WRT on them and they are great.

Re:TP-Link?

[thegarbz]

So, TP-Link "routers" can crap out when you send 200 MB through them?

No. TP-Link routers can crap out when you send 200MB multicasting at a very short interval, something that no client is expected to do.

Time to buy a competitor's product.

Whose? D-Link, and ASUS both have come out and said they are affected. This problem is affecting my father's top of the line D-Link modem/router too. It also apparently affects Google's WiFi as well as Apple's Airport.

There's more to data than just how much is going through.

Re:TP-Link?

[guruevi]

Most cheapo home routers do not run Linux, I've never seen a Linux-based router crap out completely even if it's running low on RAM.

TP-Link

[Anonymous Coward]

Toilet Paper Link.

Re:TP-Link

[viperidaenz]

Als impacts routers from Asus, Linksys, Netgear and Synology. Possibly more.

TP-Link are the ones who figured out what the cause was.

Re:TP-Link

[Anonymous Coward]

Gotta have a TP-Link to clean up the shit!

Re:TP-Link

[omnichad]

You're confusing that with Google Wave...er...I mean Google TiSP

Re:TP-Link

[guruevi]

Shitty router brands unite. I had the same issue almost 10 years ago, until I installed OpenWRT on my Asus. No more issues. Then the Asus burned out and I got a Buffalo router. Also, never had issues.

Re:TP-Link

[viperidaenz]

Asus have switched their firmware to one based on dd-wrt and openwrt
They call it "asuswrt"

Roku was doing something similar...

[Anonymous Coward]

Roku's WiFi-Direct which the remote uses will flood wifi making other devices lose connection.

GAYSEX

[Anonymous Coward]

BEAUHD LIKE IT IDB

I'm shocked

[Anonymous Coward]

Google's foreign engineers don't know about this. I guess if they'd hired Americans that would be different.

Oh well.

chromecast downloads

[Anonymous Coward]

Chromecast constantly downloads background images too. Hires. I'm on a 22GB cap, so I had to send mine back after it downloaded 250MB worth of images the two weeks I owned it.

The battle of the throttles

[aberglas]

I have an slowish ADSL line. At regular intervals various Daemons on various computes wake up and decide to download gigabytes of junk. Microsoft update is the worst offender, but there are many others. They all do so at maximum speed, killing the internet access.

So on my Gargoyle router, I throttle all the download addresses that these services use. But they daemons are smart. They keep finding new servers to download from. I currently have about 50 /24 sites throttled, but more appear every week or so.

Dropbox and Google Drive can be throttled locally nothing else seems to have that ability unless one gets into heavy group policy configs or jailbreak Apples.

Re:The battle of the throttles

[complete loony]

It's not the download speed that's the problem, it's that most servers pushing data to you are using a TCP protocol that actively tries to keep the bottleneck network buffer full. If all those servers swapped to BBR, which actively tries to keep that buffer empty, the problem would probably disappear.

At home I get about 4mbit through my ADSL connection. With 4 windows machines downloading OS and game updates, the internet was essentially unusable. So I now run my own DNS and redirect windows & steam download domains to an nginx proxy. That way I can use the rate limiting features of my crappy modem to throttle all traffic going to the proxy's IP.

Re:The battle of the throttles

[Anonymous Coward]

TCP has feedback. The servers don't push more than a window of data before waiting for the feedback from the client. So throttling downloads works quite well in practice.

Get a Gargoyle router. No need for that ngix proxy.

Re:The battle of the throttles

[Anonymous Coward]

> But they daemons are smart. They keep finding new servers to download from.

Um... that's what CDNs are built for, dude. The downloaders you're fighting with probably switch to different servers when they find the one they're using is too slow.

> I currently have about 50 /24 sites throttled

You need to get more clever. Look for the A and AAAA records coming back from name resolution requests made by these updaters. Examine the TTL for the records handed back and throttle just the IPs returned in those responses for the TTL in those responses. This will make your life far easier.

Re:The battle of the throttles

[Anonymous Coward]

It's even more of a problem when on a mobile data connection. On my Mac I use a program called TripMode, so I can choose to block or throttle everything, but allow chrome and terminal access for example. You can probably get something similar for Windows.

Re:The battle of the throttles

[pjt33]

Microsoft update is the worst offender, but there are many others. ... They keep finding new servers to download from.

Microsoft uses P2P for large updates: have you explicitly disabled that?

Re:The battle of the throttles

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft uses P2P for large updates: have you explicitly disabled that?

Provide instructions for how to disable p2p.

Re:The battle of the throttles

[bn-7bc]

The instructions are here read tru the otions yo migt consider allowing p2p for computers on yoyr lan as this redces the ammubt you have to get across your rathe limited adsl

Re:The battle of the throttles

[MatthiasF]

You know you can just tell Windows Update to throttle, right?

https://thomas-barthelemy.gith...

No need to make your router do more work than it should when you can just tell the processes to behave.

When most us in the Seattle area...

[Anonymous Coward]

have dial-up or ISDN at home, overwhelming our connections isn't surprising.

My neighborhood has 1.5 Mbps with Frontier...

[Anonymous Coward]

since I moved near Microsoft. We ignore Microsoft updates since the'y're so ridiculously large.

Re:My neighborhood has 1.5 Mbps with Frontier...

[Bryansix]

...We ignore Microsoft updates since the'y're so ridiculously large.

Sounds like a solid game plan. Let me know how that works out.

Get a better router

[Anonymous Coward]

If your router melts on 100K packet burst you should probably get a better router.

Easy solution ...

[Anonymous Coward]

There's an easy solution to this .. Stop buying fucking products from companies whose primary goal is to collect every bit of information about your, analyze it, and monetize it.

You invited this shit into your home. You though "wow, awesome, an always on mic in my home to record what I say". You can choose to not be an idiot or to keep being an idiot.

All of these products are just like every other piece of software rushed out the door -- it's either full of bugs and security holes, or it's full of shit which is designed to spy on you. The likely answer is probably both.

I'm past the point of sympathy for this shit. The world is clamoring over themselves to bring things into their home which is like the creepy surveillance state, but instead operated by for-profit companies -- who will then hand over the rest to the creepy surveillance state.

Fuck that. The reason I don't have this shit in my house is because I assume it's defective by design, and fundamentally lacking in enough years of maturity to not be riddled with other defects.

While you peckerwoods are bringing more of this shit into your home, I'm bringing none at all.

So I hope to fuck you get hack, scammed, ripped off, and have everything you do in your home handed off to government.

Because it serves you fucking right.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

In other words...

[bobbied]

TPLink recommends you buy a better router than what they sell..

Seriously? A hundred thousand packets over the radio causes it to crash? Toss that trash in the trash.

If your hardware cannot handle the media speed of a radio link, how are you going to handle 100BaseT much less a gigabit link? I'd say TPLink is trying to cast blame on something else to hide their failure.

No Pay no attention to the device that actually failed in this scenario.. It was the evil Google device that sent us to many packets.... (smoke and flames rising up) Pay no attention to the fact that your evil Google device is still running and the nice, inexpensive and valuable TPLink router just crashed and burned...

Re:In other words...

[thegarbz]

TPLink recommends you buy a better router than what they sell..

Seriously? A hundred thousand packets over the radio causes it to crash? Toss that trash in the trash.

Yeah TPLink. Oh also D-Link, ASUS, Google, Apple, and Netgear. So who's product should I buy?

The problem isn't the number of packets, but also the type, frequency, and the fact that this is a completely unexpected DoS scenario from within your network. mDNS isn't supposed to cause 100000 packets, ... unless you count them over the course of a year.

Re:In other words...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah TPLink. Oh also D-Link, ASUS, Google, Apple, and Netgear. So who's product should I buy?

If you live in a small space, get a Netgear Nighthawk. If you life in a bigger house, get a Netgear Orbi. Orbi now supports a mesh network topology too so if you live in a really big house, you can get it to work with the appropriate number of satellites. The reason I prefer Orbi over Google WIFI or the other mesh products is the the Orbi firmware has more features and allows a lot more customization than the others. I can do 360mbit/s over its WIFI.

When the spy in your home...

[gurps_npc]

is sending so much information that it disrupts your internet connection, perhaps it is time to kick the spy OUT of your home.

Same for any other 'helpful' product that connects to the internet when it wants to, rather than when you need it to.

News: TPLINK routers can't route

[Anonymous Coward]

The real headline should be that a purpose built, single job piece of hardware can't function when it has to actually do it.

Netgear too

[NaCh0]

My friend's netgear router is crashing all of the time and she has a chromecast attached. I hope netgear issues a patch too.

Re:Netgear too

[Anonymous Coward]

My friend's netgear router is crashing all of the time and she has a chromecast attached. I hope netgear issues a patch too.

Which model? Some old 802.11g router? Netgear's older routers were junk just like TP-Links are.

My Honeywell device in 1985...

[greenwow]

used a 110 baud modem and the newer ones used 330 baud so this is just sad.

What is this sleep mode of which you speak?

[Fly Swatter]

I bought a basic chromecast to be able to cast my screen to a non-smart tv. Um it has no sleep mode AFAICS. It just sits there forever changing backdrops (and of course downloading those damn backdrops every minute or so). If it actually had a sleep mode, the TV could turn off after some time with no HDMI signal - which I, like an IDIOT, thought it would be designed to do - but no, the chromecast is always sending an HDMI signal - my plan for a self powering down TV blown all to hell.

So I plugged the chromecast into the tvs usb port so that it WILL turn off when I have to turn off the tv. Gee I hope they didn't get an energy star rating for that poor design choice. Also silly me I was expecting HDMI CEC communication to work too with the chromecast and my LG tv but nope thats an empty promise too. Honestly if a 40ft HDMI cable was feasible I'd probably just run one and save myself the trouble and data collection. For my use it's not much better.

Turns out I don't use the chromecast as much I thought I would, or really much at all.

Re:What is this sleep mode of which you speak?

[hankwang]

The constant downloading of backdrops bugged me, too. You can reduce the bandwidth by setting up a Google photo album with two small images. Two, because it won't work with a single-image album.

Re:What is this sleep mode of which you speak?

[Anonymous Coward]

This one on Amazon seems to have decent reviews
https://www.amazon.com/Cable-supports-FullHD-Ethernet-KabelDirekt/dp/B00DI895MU

Better hardware...

[Anonymous Coward]

Meh. Shitty hardware/software. We install Mikrotik Hap AC's all day long and never have issues like this.

Re:Better hardware...

[Anonymous Coward]

Not heard of them, but I mentally read the story as "according to TP-Link, who still haven't patched the WPA2 KRACK wifi flaw on any of their insecure worthless products"

3 years since my first chromecast - always done it

[Anonymous Coward]

I bought a chromecast very soon after they came out. This has been a problem since the start. Two cable modems went out, I bought a separate wireless, it went out. I disabled all chromecast IPs, and automagicly, every other device started working.
Chrome* device on my network = NULL.

TP link is full of crap

[Anonymous Coward]

I've used my chromecast with 4 different AP these last years and the C1200 was the only one to crash again and again. Hopefully I got a refund a month ago.

Ring Doorbells/Security Cameras

[Anonymous Coward]

They do the same thing. Ever since getting one, my wifi keeps kicking my cell phone and computer off randomly. I even set up the wifi to give each device specific IP addresses and have MAC address filtering on top of a strong WIFI password. Looking at my router logs, it thinks the Ring doorbell is preforming a DDOS attack on it and according to the Ring support, this is normal.

TP-Link is Crap

[Anonymous Coward]

TP-Link makes substandard, cheap routers that aren't up to the task. I should know, I've owned several different models and they are cheap compared to other vendors. Basically, what TP-Link is saying is: our wimpy routers can't handle real internet usage loads.

Re:3 years since my first chromecast - always done

[ledow]

I've had several Chromecasts, of the different generations.

All connected.

Never had a problem.

That said, I see no reason for a device on my wireless network to be connected all the time so they were off a lot. Also, I see no reason for the Chromecast to be able to swamp my wifi, so it was QoS'd and band-width limited (i.e. it could only "guarantee" 5-10Mbps, the rest was "if it's there and not being used).

I can't say that I ever saw a single similar problem whatsoever.

Now my Chromecast is connected to a 4G Wifi box (the size of a matchbox, with a SIM in it and not much else. It's battery powered (but constantly plugged into USB), low-power, pocket-sized, portable, not really designed to be "the entire house network" but does an admirable job and the Chromecast connects straight to it along with 9 other devices. Can't say I've seen a problem, and we use it all the time.

Over Christmas, it was casting friend's YouTube videos periodically while a crowd of people used it to play Jackbox games online while all the laptops and tablets and smartphones were turned on. Hell, it had a PS4 connected to it for downloading updates.

Sorry, but Chromecast's *shouldn't* do this, agreed, but if your hardware can't handle a few thousand packets in a stream of 400Mbps devices connecting to them, then they really aren't fit for purpose anyway.

Doesn't seem to happen to me

[Anonymous Coward]

My TP Link router seems to work just fine - I haven't noticed the issue at all.

Oh wait - I don't have a TP Link router because they're shit. Oh, and I don't have a Google Home because they're shit.

dd-wrt

[ArchieBunker]

I tried dd-wrt on a cheap TPlink access point. It had nice features but the throughput was terrible compared to the stock firmware.

I knew it!

[Anonymous Coward]

I knew it! My wifi router (tp-link) worked great until just after Black Friday, where my wife and I grabbed two google homes and a new TV which had chromcast built in. Right after setting up everything my router became very flaky, requiring at least 2-4 resets a day. The firmware update last week fixed it completely. I suspected the TV was causing the issue, and now I see it was the issue along with the google homes.

The question I have is why the hell the router would go down to the point where it needs to be reset just because of a burst in traffic? A well designed router should just throttle the traffic or drop packets, not go down completely. What kind of POS designers/coders do they have? And that many brands are affected? Terrible.

Apps too - like Chrome?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm suddenly seeing these Google mcast packets on my network since installing a derivative browser. So - the browser communicates with Google home?

Don't know where else they'd be coming from and I don't have Google home.

Like what?

[Anonymous Coward]

What the hell is it sending in such volume?

pfSsense

[Anonymous Coward]

My pfSense firewall with 12us latency and at least 1.44M-pps forwarding around 15% load, shouldn't have any issues. That's with traffic shaping. I would like to try a full bidirectional pps load test, but I don't have enough high performance computers at home to send an recieve 2.96M-pps of linerate full-duplex gigabit. 1.95Gb/s when doing a bidirectional bandwidth test, and the CPU is idle around 5%. I assume the Ubiquiti-AC-HD is perfectly happy. HP 1810-24Gv2 linerate switch is like a Honey Badger, it don't give a crap.