For the curious, here’s what the connections log of an Addon C10 speaker with no external services enabled looks like. The device was only connected on the network to allow for tone control access.
NMap reveals something like 30 open ports, and there’s DNS calls for s000.linkplay.com, even though Addon isn’t on the list of Linkplay customers. It returns a MAC range belonging to LinkSprite for the Wifi module.
According to their support guy, the only way to prevent this behaviour is to not connect the speaker to your network at all. There is no way that I could find to disable WiFi, let alone get granular control over the network services offered.
I’m no IT or infosec specialist, but out of principle, I’d make sure to quarantine the hell out of that thing if you’re going to let it connect at all. Seat of the pants feelings from looking at all the open ports, and the somewhat nonchalant attitude Addon support had when prompted is that this thing is a dumpster fire ready to be hurled at your basement NAS. I’d be curious what someone with actual knowledge and skills could get that thing to do.
So while this all isn’t anything truly alarming, it is bothersome, in the sense that you absolutely cannot dumb this thing down and stop it from connecting all over the place: if you don’t connect it to your network, you’re, at worst, good for the open network that would allow your neighbours to blast music, at best good for something that’ll add a WiFi network you can’t rename and pollute the signal for your other devices (you could probably reconfigure it and add a password to protect it from your neighbours is how you’d get it to only pollute your WiFi neighbourhood). If you do connect it to your network, you’re getting something that pings alibaba, amazon, akamai and yahoo absolutely non-stop, so you’re going to have to block that if you don’t want to pay for the privilege of getting them whatever the hell they’re getting off of those things (which may be nothing at all).
Consider yourselves warned: if you want to make one of these into a Roon endpoint, get the T10, or get something from a different brand, do the tone control through Roon’s DSP, and connect it using a well-maintained third party device (say, a RaspBerry running Ropieee).