Hacker News Reader

Comment by Driky | Hacker News Reader

The title wrongfully is accusatory. The switch is very bad when it comes to network "cleanliness" with its propensity to broadcast for anything. But the fact that some roku devices are unable to handle proprietary network calls is on Roku not on Nintendo...

View on HN

What is wrong with the Switch broadcasting?

It is indiscriminately connecting to every IP on the local network on port 26037. Should be using mdns/bonjour or other well established local discovery protocols. Or at the minimum sending a packet to the broadcast address.

Why? All that assumes a home network is setup correctly, which is almost never the case. One huge use case would be all the shitty SOHO routers that don't/can't bridge wired and wireless networks so broadcast and high level discovery/advertising are completely useless between wired and wireless segments. In some cases useless between cells in a mesh, even with 'enterprise' gear this is not as reliable as it should be.

Nintendo made an informed decision and their hardware is welcome on my networks.

> all the shitty SOHO routers that don't/can't bridge wired and wireless networks so broadcast and high level discovery/advertising are completely useless

If you assume basic _routing_ doesn't work, why do you assume a TCP connection from one to another would work? If an AP implements client isolation (as many home models do now for "guest" networks) broadcast would be the only thing that works.

Pretty much every printer you buy now uses Bonjour for printing, so your average SOHO router is going to make sure that works.

I can't fault them, at one point I thought this was the right way to do autodiscovery on a LAN too. Then I learned from my mistakes.

Being pedantic, because there's all sorts of reasons a TCP connection works in the face of buggered routing, not the least of which is that the endpoints are on the same L3 network. Yeah, guest networks are a thing, but a postit note with the WLAN PW is an even bigger thing if most of the home networks I'm familiar with are any indication.

Bottom line is that nothing on an IP network should do something st00pid if it gets a random weird packet from a random IP, because the whole history of IP shows that you will, eventually, get one.

Have you considered what kind of networks a Nintendo device is expecting to interact with?

it probably sends a packet to the broadcast address. I mean "sends a network discovery packet to each device on port" probably is a fucking broadcast.

Especially considering malicious actors don't play by network "cleanliness" rules either. Being able to handle malformed packets is essential to the security of pretty much anything.

Allowing videogames to make network calls using arbitrary port numbers seem like poor engineering by Nintendo, videogames should have to use an API to do network calls regardless of what port the console uses to connect to such networks (internet or other network).

Peer to peer protocols use arbitrary ports in almost every implementation.

Edit to add: and Pokémon games have used peer to peer protocols before on different systems, so this use isn’t new to Pokémon or Nintendo systems.

Says who?

Nobody you consider important.

Well, yeah...anyone who doesn't bother or isn't capable of explaining why they make absolutist pronouncements as to how other people should do thing aren't particularly important to anyone.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com