At this point it is really tough to find devices that don't leak data like a sieve.

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.

The Magnuson–Moss Warranty Act of 1975 ensures that’s not the case in the US. I suspect something similar is true in EU.

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.

To get 5 stars by EuroNCAP (and AFAIK EU law demands it too) the car have to call 911/112 automatically if it detect a crash. I doubt you can remove telemetry without also disabling this. If you do the car is illegal.

Interesting point. I wonder if an insurance company can argue the modification made the car lose the safety certification, and in effect the user made the car more dangerous by removing the SIM card, and that it would not pay out for injuries sustained in a crash.

Illegal to sell by the OEM or illegal to drive? Two very different things.

Because it is probably part of the vehicle type approval, it would be a modification that needs to be authorized by whatever institution does that in your country.

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

Given what I see driving around on US roads, there is epsilon-squared chance this would be found let alone fined here. (I’m also not nearly convinced that it’s even illegal in my state and likely not so in any of them, especially given that my car had a dealer service to remove the SIM card as a recall item.)

It definitely wouldn't be illegal to remove a vehicle's cell modem from your own car in the US. The US is very friendly to vehicle modifications compared to much of the world. At a federal level, pretty much the only thing you cannot do to your own vehicle is remove emission equipment. The US does not even have universal requirements for insurance or safety inspections. And even in the states that do have safety inspections, there are typically very few pieces of safety equipment that are required.

Yep. My state has no inspections of any kind. No safety, no emissions, nothing. Insurance is mandatory, but not really verified in any reliable way.

Theoretically illegal perhaps but I'd be very very surprised if this ever actually gets picked up by anyone even on an annual roadworthiness inspection. Maybe during some OEM servicing but then again maybe not.

You don't need to remove the modem, just find the SIM card and pull it. It's probably in your armrest console compartment or glovebox.

It's not just shitty devices. By putting it on the HTTP layer which usually is even available to sandboxed applications they made it possible for every single application to bypass your own resolver. Pretty much a trojan horse.

I've hated DoH from the beginning, and not just because shoehorning everything into http is a silly idea, but as I suspected, we now live in a reality where you have to keep an adblock-esque list of DoH servers. Now you have yet another internet arms race.

DNS based blocking was already trivially bypassable before DoH was ever conceived so I don't see how DoH or its use by browsers is at fault for that problem.

As mentioned in TFA, configuring a firewall to redirect DNS traffic from broken or malicious software is also trivial. Or are you talking about hardcoding IP addresses?

There are plenty of other alternatives. The simplest (but least flexible) would be hardcoding an IP of the final server.

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.

Note that malware of various sorts has done all of this for years. It used to be reasonably common to get command/control server info via IRC, basically DNS over IRC. DNS blocking has never been an effective network management strategy, and it never will be.

You can/should block connections to IPs which were not returned by DNS recently.

Should be done by your host/gateway/router, not each client app.. Same goes for SSL SNI filtering if that ever gets accepted... router should know where requests are going...