Bob Goodwin - Zuni, Virginia, USA writes:
Can anyone tell me how to block Apple iCloud in my router? I've
tried
filtering
icloud.com as mentioned in Google but it still downloads at about
3GB per hour, a rate that would use up my month's allocation in about 8
hours! There seems to be a dearth of information on Google on the subject
although it is a recognized problem.
I'm not sure if this is the same issue, but when one member of my household
acquired a Macbook, that thing just started flooding my bandwidth.
I didn't know, at first, WTF was going on, and I didn't tie it to the
Macbook, but, fortunately, at that time I /was/ running a router with DD-WRT
firmware, so I could ssh into the router itself, and see that it was the
Macbook flinging crap into the Intertubes.
That hacked router, sadly, gave up the magic blue smoke some time ago, and I
just didn't have the mental fortitude to set up another hackarouter, so I
now have a stock Netgear WNDR3700v3 which, AFAIK, doesn't have any way to
report which connected device is generating how much bandwidth, so I don't
think I'd have any way of know what is coming out of which device, but, back
then I was lucky.
Anyway, the traffic that I saw coming out of the Macbook was massive amounts
of /UDP/ traffic to high ports, looked like some kind of a peer-to-peer
protocol. But it was all UDP. I didn't want to waste any more time on this
nonsense. The DD-WRT firmware allowed me to bind filtering rules to MAC
addresses. So, I set up a rule tied to the Macbook MAC address, that blocked
all traffic to UDP ports 1024-65535.
That solved the problem for good, and I had no complaints. There's no
legitimate, mainstream, consumer Intertube use that needs high UDP port
ranges.
P.S. The replacement Netgear router's firmware couldn't do MAC-based
filtering. So, when I carefully configured it, I just had the router's DHCP
server bind the Macbook's MAC address to a statically assigned IP address,
and set up the router to block all traffic from that IP address to UDP ports
1024-65535.