this is very much a tangent and besides the point so...

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this is very much a tangent and besides the point so i'm not going to go poking at OP for information about what their network setup is like, but if their four different wifi networks are four routers all going to the same modem upstream then it sounds like netflix also might be sending the names of wifi networks or private ip addresses back to HQ which sketches me out but is not really surprising to me given the kind of lengths that netflix has been going to in order to cut down on account sharing

e: just want to emphasize that this is very much theoretical, and i don't really have a way to test it myself

Like 6 Oct 2023 at 17:56 | Open on tech.lgbt

12 comments

@rudi well _this_ is relevant to my interests

6 Oct 2023 at 17:57 | Open on tacobelllabs.net

Rudi (ryjelsum)

@arrjay i would be interested in testing it out myself to see what exactly they're looking for but i don't think we even have an active netflix account in the family right now

6 Oct 2023 at 18:01 | Open on tech.lgbt

@rudi I think we largely watch via PC intermediation so I'm curious if this is something the app is doing, yeah

6 Oct 2023 at 18:03 | Open on tacobelllabs.net

Rudi (ryjelsum)

@arrjay i was thinking the same thing, wondering if it's only something they can really do as an android/ios app. kind of why i don't like company specific 'apps'

6 Oct 2023 at 18:09 | Open on tech.lgbt

@rudi and _in theory_ ios is not supposed to reveal network information, so...yeah this is an unreliable signal at best.

(there's also an entire book of "what makes a family" in here but I suspect you're aware.)

6 Oct 2023 at 18:11 | Open on tacobelllabs.net

Rudi (ryjelsum)

@arrjay my thought is, given how OP's network setup sounds a little bit screwy they might have misfired something that's intended to differentiate 'households' behind a cg-nat setup or something like that. but these things are always intentionally a little bit opaque

6 Oct 2023 at 18:19 | Open on tech.lgbt

13 barn owls in a trench coat

@rudi @arrjay it's okay with four discrete Wi-Fi APs, correctly NAT'ed, which we have now that we have fibre, but we used to have four routers, each connected to its own 4G modem, and I bet that would have set off whatever OP triggered.

I can only speak to Netflix France, but it sounds like OP and I have similarly inconvenient-to-network rural architecture.

6 Oct 2023 at 19:17 | Open on eldritch.cafe

@HauntedOwlbear @rudi *looks over at 4G sticks*

oh, I could use some QoS to deliver a _really_ bad time.

6 Oct 2023 at 19:21 | Open on tacobelllabs.net

Tony Petrangelo

@rudi also besides the point, their WiFi sucks *because* they have four different WiFi networks.

6 Oct 2023 at 18:14 | Open on mspsocial.net

Jess👾

@rudi I suspect it's to attempt to catch people who VPN from their own house to the house of the subscriber in order to watch movies without being caught. The technical details of how they do that seem sketchy as fuck, though.

6 Oct 2023 at 19:02 | Open on infosec.exchange

Mike Myers

@JessTheUnstill @rudi lol this is me. I set up a site-2-site from the main house to the vacation house so it showed as one network and haven’t had any issues. I also don’t broadcast WiFi names so unless they’re trying to grab BSSIDs they aren’t grabbing that either.

7 Oct 2023 at 13:42 | Open on infosec.exchange

Riedler

@rudi the funny thing is that they're probably using money to make less money here. I used to use someone's netflix account occasionally before they cracked down on password sharing. Now I just don't use netflix anymore. Their loss :blobCat_shrug:

6 Oct 2023 at 20:24 | Open on catcatnya.com