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Smart devices can testify against you: How home robot data is being used in court
(www.the-independent.com)
this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2026
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It's just DNS based, and iirc dont require any major effort other than patching the hosts file. Of course it is possible it is not enough, but I have high confidence in the authors after also having watched various talks at I.e DEFCON, that i would be surprised if they missed the firmware doing other nasty things.
Patching DNS is specifically possible to enable/disable on the firmware build tool: I.e https://builder.dontvacuum.me/_dreame_r2416.html and the source for that is here https://github.com/dgiese/dustbuilder-script-public/blob/7afed16999711833a8ac0b3b482e935c3ef77219/modifys8image.sh#L169
Incorrect. That was technically sorta the case back on the S5 (and even there it needed firmware modifications), yes, but if DNS redirection was all it needs, then why even root the bots in the first place. Just do that on a network level and be done with it.
Oh okay, I just assumed the main method to redirect the vendor cloud connections to the local valetudo was based on the patch DNS parts in dustbuilder that seems present on most models, but if you say more is required elsewhere to block vendor cloud connections I'm sure that's true.
In any case your work is highly appreciated! And i didn't mean to suggest that it hasn't taken a massive amount of work overall to make valetudo work as well as it does.
Aaah! Oh. Yes that makes a lot of sense indeed.
The UX (and architecture, for that matter) of the dustbuilder has been.. uh.. lacking.. due to the lack of refactoring. It evolved over all these years, and things that had a meaning once suddenly gained a different one, but are still named in the old ways.
Good point, thanks for pointing it out! I've been doing some refactoring there, actually, and there, it's named "disable cloud", but I just did that for correctness. It did not occur to me that from a user-perspective, this is not just weird but actively misleading. I mean it kinda did, but I did not make the mental connection to this specific misconception. Oh well.
Interesting.
This seems to be a model-specific quirk and moreso a side effect of getting Valetudo to work rather than an explicit goal - the same option does not appear in DustBuilder for my model (Roborock S5, still going strong after 941 hours of cleaning time).
I feel like I should check out this DEFCON talk though.
I learned something new today, thank you for that