What is HR22 sending to bbvdms.dtvbb.com?

[Voix des Airs]

Greetings all,

I apologize if this has been asked and answered before, but I couldn't find an answer...

My new (two-week old) HR22 is daily sending increasingly large amounts of data via an HTTP POST to bbvdms.dtvbb.tv/DMS/DMSServer on port 8080. I've been watching these uploads with a network probe and they have been getting progressively larger every day. The posts started out less than 10kB but the last one was >31kB.

[I also see it talking to directv.com (PING) and dtvcall.dtvbb.tv (L2TP - but this is stopped on the way out at my firewall since I don't allow VPNs).]

Does anyone (actually) know what it's sending and why the quantity of data gets larger every day?

Thanks,
VdA

[Spanky_Partain]

Most of the stuff seems to be encrypted now. When I caputred a "report to home" it was not plain text and could not be easily read from a data captture. I know that if the phone is no longer connected it will pass the PPV stuff up via the network connection as well instead of the older model of calling home via modem in off hours.

[Voix des Airs]

Most of the stuff seems to be encrypted now. When I caputred a "report to home" it was not plain text and could not be easily read from a data captture. I know that if the phone is no longer connected it will pass the PPV stuff up via the network connection as well instead of the older model of calling home via modem in off hours.

Yah... I looked at the data too and although apparently text (ascii) it looks encrypted to me too. The thing that caught my interest was that the size of the upload kept getting bigger every day. I haven't bought any PPV so I can't at all figure out what it's sending 30+kB of (and increasing) home every day.

I think I might try letting it establish a VPN like like it seems to want to and see what happens if I do that.

VdA

[BattleZone]

It also sends in your viewing habits if you have a DVR. This of course is nothing new, and is done by every company including TiVo and Dish. I imagine that's the reason for the ever-increasing size; if it doesn't get through, the data will grow daily until it does, or until it reaches a certain threshold.

[Stuart Sweet]

My understanding is, there's a certain amount of reliability/uptime data, certainly nothing overly personal.

[yuppers519]

http://bbvdms.dtvbb.tv:8080/DMS/DMSServer

This is class com.directv.dms.DMSServer, using the GET method

Anyone know what the GET method is?

[Voix des Airs]

It also sends in your viewing habits if you have a DVR. This of course is nothing new, and is done by every company including TiVo and Dish. I imagine that's the reason for the ever-increasing size; if it doesn't get through, the data will grow daily until it does, or until it reaches a certain threshold.

That makes sense, as does the diagnostic data suggestion, but I don't think that it accounts for the ever-increasing size of the upload. To be specific, yesterday, the upload (the actual payload) from my HR22 was 31k bytes. Today's was >32k bytes. The size doesn't fluctuate, it always gets larger from day to day.

(In case I wasn't clear in my first post, this data is sent successfully. It's the apparent attempt to create a VPN with dtvcall.dtvbb.tv, which my HR22 tries to do twice a day, that is blocked. These apparent VPN attempts do not occur at the same time as the uploads).

It's not that I'm necessarily worried about this... But as a general principal, I don't think that a device should ever communicate information out of my house to the internet without clearly telling me what it is communicating, to whom, and why.

[jgrade]

http://bbvdms.dtvbb.tv:8080/DMS/DMSServer

This is class com.directv.dms.DMSServer, using the GET method

Anyone know what the GET method is?

The HTML specifications technically define the difference between "GET" and "POST" so that former means that form data is to be encoded (by a browser) into a URL (http://www.cs.tut.fi/%7Ejkorpela/rfc/2396/toc.html) while the latter means that the form data is to appear within a message body. But the specifications also give the usage recommendation that the "GET" method should be used when the form processing is "idempotent", and in those cases only. As a simplification, we might say that "GET" is basically for just getting (retrieving) data whereas "POST" may involve anything, like storing or updating data, or ordering a product, or sending E-mail.

Uh....well that sure answers the question. The bold text seems to be the crux. :)

[Voix des Airs]

Anyone know what the GET method is?

When to use GET or POST are, if I remember correctly, somewhat poorly defined, but the simplest way to think of the difference is that with GET, the data to be sent is placed in the URL itself (after a "?" - I'm sure everyone has seen this, just look at your address bar right now) whereas with POST, the data to be sent is placed into the body of the message (i.e. it doesn't show up in the URL; you can't directly see it without inspecting the packets sent out).

To the best of my understanding, GET is used when the data does not change anything (e.g. is not entered into a database - like a query to search search a database, which is what you should be seeing in your address-bar right now). POST, on the other hand, is used when the "world is somehow to be altered" by the data being sent. To use the former example, the text I am typing right now will likely be sent to dbstalk via a POST to be entered into the comments database.

All this probably doesn't matter much since I'm sure DirecTV is only using http: to send the data so that it can easily get through firewalls. Nobody firewalls http: (ports 80 and 8080) since they couldn't surf the web if they did.

[bonscott87]

It's not that I'm necessarily worried about this... But as a general principal, I don't think that a device should ever communicate information out of my house to the internet without clearly telling me what it is communicating, to whom, and why.

You can opt out of the viewing data via your online account at directv.com

Other then that it's not really communicating anything different then the receivers have been via the phone line for a decade and a half. :D I think the only additional thing is perhaps some error reporting.

[Elephanthead]

It is probably just trying to download the newest American Idol singles off of bit torrent, expect a letter from the RIAA.