Philips Hue hub caught pants-down trying to call China.

I can't conceive of any legitimate reason why my Philips Hue hub would need to chat to baidu.com or qq.com, but there is is.

This may be for connectivity checking, analytics, metrics or other marketing reasons. See this thread:

Yeah, that was my first thought.

The Hue connects to loads of API-related Philips domains though, so I would have thought one of those would be perfect for connectivity tests... since that's what the... er... connectivity is for... ¯_(ツ)_/¯

I ended up just blocking the whole device on my firewall. When I need to control the lights remotely I can VPN into the home.

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