The meme of "if you're not paying, you are the product" is, of course, true, but it doesn't acknowledge the host of cases when you are the product even if you're paying. This guy basically paid to be spied on.
Which is why this meme is a half-truth. Other examples include old-world companies like magazines and banks selling our data despite us paying for the service.
Even in areas other than privacy, my bank mistreats me far worse than Internet companies like Google and Twitter.
Not to mention that in a multi-sided ecosystem, Internet companies need to keep both users and advertisers happy, so even if you're not paying, your desires still factor into the decision.
To be clear, I didn't say this meme is a lie, just that it's a half-truth. It makes sense to some extent.
my bank mistreats me far worse than Internet companies like Google and Twitter
Oh boy is this true, I'm on my fourth bank for my UK business and they have all been appalling. I'm not very happy with the current one but have given up on the idea that any other might be better.
You should write it up in a blog post or something. Given the climate around Facebook right now, it’s not inconceivable that it could get enough attention that your bank stops doing this.
Read it again, you are falling in a logical fallacy. The phrase is only saying that "if you are not paying", it doesn't make any claims to what happens when you are paying.
I'm fairly certain the smart features are what's subsidizing current TVs and making them relatively cheap. Last time I checked dumb TVs were reserved for the more high end part of the maker's lineup (if at all available).
So, yes, you're still paying, but you get a price cut in exchange for being … productized?
I bought a 32-inch dumb TV just a couple of weeks ago. It was only $77US, on clearance at Walmart from $129US. The brand is Element, which I'm unfamiliar with, but it works nicely and has absolutely no smart capabilities. So you can find dumb TVs on the low end these days if you look for them.
So, a small, 720p TV? In other words, a TV most people don't want? I fail to see how that's an alternative when I'm looking for a 60" 4K model, not to mention I have no idea what the quality of the device will be.
Ive heard great things about swedx, never had one myself however. Theyre also not IPS/HDR.
Also, its important to use the pixel policy 1, there are some dead pixels otherwise.
Non-smart TVs from the major brands are reserved to their enterprise line-up, that's why they're more expensive.
I worked at Samsung and given how much they poured into Tizen and the various in-house services for SmartHub, I guarantee they aren't making any significant money from them. They have zero leverage with apps for services that people consider a given (like Netflix). And a lot of smaller partnerships don't end well (see Peel for instance).
I'm not sure about brands that went with Android TV, but Google is pretty smart in such partnerships and fully takes advantage of the fact that OEMs like Sony don't have the internal resources to come up even with a half-decent OS.
Questionable updates that push things like samba.tv are probably a (poor) afterthought.
First day I used my Pixel 2 XL I saw ads in the Gmail app. I mean, this is not some $100 phone. I paid 1k for it and Google still showed me ads in Gmail.
On the other hand, if there was special code running in the Gmail app to detect if you're on a google phone and behave differently, would you also be annoyed?
The ads are there because you're using gmail the service, not because you're using gmail the app. If you use "gmail the app" with your own imap server or a paid google apps account, you will not see ads.
> This information is then used to market to you within the TV and offer you a "hot list"... but it is also used to "Detect, investigate and prevent fraudulent transactions and other illegal activities and protect the rights, safety and property of Samba and others"
This app pushes ads and tries to protect everybody except the user!
panasonic has a good middle ground on quality (hardly hear about bad panels, dead pixel, different from LG), new tech (only brand to have plasma and oled early on), and price.
What do you consider good? Even bottom barrel TVs today have good picture quality, so I look at big brands (Samsung/Sony/Vizio/LG/etc...) and buy whatever one doesn't have 'smarts'. Admittedly, I stay way behind the TV technology curve though. I might get 4k when my current TV breaks years from now.
Currently I have a Samsung and 2 LGs in the house.
TCL might be the best option since they’re running a Roku OS. I just picked up an LG B7A (great time of year to buy 2017 TVs on markdown) and it’s great but the advertising crap was a minefield.
I absolutely love that media interfaces are getting snappy again (e.g., no more hitting a button on the remote and waiting 4 seconds to it do finish opening a menu).
I hear you but I still think it should be reasonable to buy a random product from the store and not have it actively try to poison you, set your home on fire or spy on you. And yeah, I'm so entitled as to expect this without having to carefully follow news about companies that do these things.
I think the law already did a decent job on poison & fire, so maybe there is hope for the privacy too.
This sort of crap makes me think a manufacturer should brand a dumb tv, and simply market: "it's just a high end tv without all the crap we know you hate and dont use anyways, also the CIA can't hack it"
I am quite angry that my PS4 is full of ads. I paid money for that box.
What I want is a law that requires a product to clearly indicate if it has ads or not in the software, and it cannot change at any point in the product's life. So I know what the price tag actually is.
Edit: I want to be clear. I am not against advertising or the freedom for a manufacturer to decide that advertising is their business model. What I want is to protect consumers who pay for a product that slowly devolves into an advertising box. I am also not expecting my rush-designed law to prevent ads or give consumers more options. All it would do is make it clear to consumers what they're paying for.
Advertising is just another form of payment. Imagine if you bought a smart fridge and 3 years in it required a subscription to use the "smart" part of it. You would be furious.
Sony makes money off every video game sale; attempting to get more from ads is just greedy. And how they present the ads as another game a very dark pattern.
Isn't it obvious? That's the buyers problem because any time they "buy" something for less than it actually costs, they actually get an ad/app/service subsidized experience.
As I pointed out above Sony has, does, and will continue to make up the hardware subsidy by the markup and money they get on games. That is, there is no need for Sony to subsidize the platform further through ads.
This makes ads on the PS4 a product of greed alone.
And why should I care? If Sony is losing money on each ps4 then it's their problem. It's not like when Amazon clearly made two editions of the Kindle, one more expensive without ads and another cheaper one with them. If I bought the most expensive ps4 version available I should not have the console auto-downloading new games that I might want to try and advertising them on the main screen.
Has it not been that way since the days of the PS1?
The cost of games is like printers and ink. The hardware is the loss leader more than made up for by the "subscription" to those over-priced consumables.
There was anger and upset, and many articles in dead-tree magazines at the change in the expected price of full games, and sheer greed of manufacturers, during the launch phase of those consoles.
Ads were another bait and switch for yet more greed.
Which Sony makes up for with all the content, network fees and accessories a PS4 owner must buy so that their initial purchase has utility beyond being a $300 Netflix machine.
Let's assume that rule is implemented. What are you going to do, not buy a PS4? Your alternatives would be xbox, which has different set of games and likely will also have ads, or Nintendo, which has even more different set of games.
Google does this too with Android. Maps now pops up ads for local businesses every time I open it. I paid money for a phone which did not have ads on it, and now they have added ads via a software update. It's infuriating.
Windows 10 has so far served me ads on the lock screen and in the start menu. If I try to search my computer for a file, it also sends that search query to Bing. This OS should be free.
If this happens under EU jurisdiction, then you can deny the update and legally demand that the TV continues working. The manufacturer may not impose new rules after the selling contract.
Fuck this wild-west anarchistic behaviour of software companies. When we have legal protection, we can make use of it.
Also have a Sony Smart TV, and I live in the EU. After updating the TV, it asked me whether I wanted to enable Samba, and I simply declined. Seems to be disabled now.
The only way to be sure with untrustworthy devices like this is not to connect them to the network at all (i.e. use a separate device you can trust instead), or better yet, buy a dumb monitor instead.
I hope EU will push more laws, when you buy hardware like a smatphone,TV,PC all the extra crap on top should be opt-in not opt-out, I bought an ASUS cheap smartphone(new, unlocked no carrier contracts) and it has extra apps on top of the basic Android that I can only disable and not remove.
At startup there should be a prompt with suggested apps that they want the user to install, if the user selects an app to install it(after reading the description) then pull that app from the store.
Are these the depths to which we have sunk? I remember when a television was a thing that showed moving images using a cathode ray tube. The switch to liquid crystal displays was a genuine technological improvement. Now we need to treat our televisions as hostile surveillance devices because "ad tech" runs the world? I can't wait until our robot taxis drive diabetics to Krispy Kreme, then to Bob's Dialysis Center.
Yup, that would be the ideal solution, but their prices skyrocket as soon as one goes above the "normal" office/gamer panel sizes. They're also probably built using better parts and better quality control. Economies of scale do the rest.
I looked at monitors 35" and larger and the cheapest I could find are at least twice as expensive as the corresponding TVs.
Maybe it's just a marketing thing but there are definitely differences which make monitors a hard sell to be used in place of TVs (e.g. in a living room, opposite to the sofa).
Not readily available in the sizes popularly used for TV/video viewing, as far as I can tell. Large-format monitors tend to be full of "digital signage" or touchscreen features now; some are even Android-based.
Same for speakers. I have a decent sound system already, i don't want to pay a extra $20-$50 for crappy speakers that i will never use. I want the best panel for my $, nothing else.
Family members co-founding a company is a perfectly natural thing that sometimes happens, but that doesn't magically make it not nepotism, and a setup that over time will cause problems. It creates a company where anyone below knows that the opportunities for upward mobility are severely curtailed by the family interests that generally override company needs when push comes to shove.
Since there doesn't exist a good panel without Smart TV capabilities, what I do is just don't give them access to the network. Everything runs through an Android Box connected to an HDMI or a PS4 when I want to use Netflix (I never managed to make it work on the Android box)
Eventually they'll just ship with some sort of connectivity out of the box.
If consumers are 'lucky' it will surface as something they can use. But the bare minimum of a persistent connection to load you ads and track your usage seems inevitable.
AT&T does this on their Android phones pretty frequently. Missed my alarm the other day because they decided to push an update overnight and you need to input a password to boot into your phone after it restarts. I'm just waiting till the high profile lawsuit where someone can't call 9/11 because AT&T just forcibly turned their phone off.
I thought about this but I discovered that my Roku has the same things going on behind the scenes with respect to data "visibility", or, "sharing".
What they need to do is just to make the panel with no network features. I ended up simply disconnecting the tv panel from the net work and using a small pc to get to netflix. Crude, but effective.
Information you provide Roku through the Roku Services includes, for example, your name, email address, postal address, billing and shipping information, telephone number, product purchase information, credit card and other payment data, product registration information, and demographics. If you connect with Roku’s accounts on third party social networking sites, we may also collect information about your social networking accounts, for example, your name, user name, or handle.
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We regularly and automatically collect information about your Roku Devices and your usage. The collected information includes, for example, the IP address associated with your Roku Devices, your device types and models, device identifiers (including RIDAs as described in Section II-B-2 below), the retailer to whom your Roku Device was shipped, various quality measures, error logs, software version numbers, Wi-Fi network name (SSID – service set identifier) and strength, and information about other devices connected to your Roku Device.
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everything Samsung touches becomes an absolute privacy nightmare. when i got my GearVR i had to accept a 58 page (!) privacy policy [0] through the glasses (not 100% sure if that was for Samsung VR, or for an Oculus thing.. is FB, so figures)
Love VR but feel bad ever since.. going to ditch it, I think
Yep, I used to use the Netflix app on my Sony TV (bravia W8) but after an update couple months ago it stopped working completely, Netflix just closes when I try to play anything. I actually have completely changed my opinion on OTA updates over the last few years - I don't want any updates. I want the software my phone/TV/car shipped with and I don't want to to change for the sake of updating, it's universally more pain than it's worth.
I've been looking at getting a new washing machine lately. One of the "hot new features" some new washing machines have is the ability to "download new washing programs via our app!".
Really? The 40+ different pre-programmed wash cycle options aren't enough and you expect to think of new washing machine routines over the next year or two? Its like ... DLC but for washing my clothes. Who thinks this is a good idea?
I wonder how much of that functionality will still work in 10-15 years when the machine is getting long in the tooth.
I can't wait for botnets made up of old internet connected washing machines. You know its just a matter of time before some Russian teenager takes down github using your grandma's washing machine.
You think botnets don't already include all these smart devices? We recently bought a new fridge and freezer with that functionality but there's no way they are getting hooked up to any network.
Reminds of when microwave ovens were a new thing. There were a ton of cookbooks about how you could throw away your range and conventional oven and cook all your meals in the microwave. Consumers very quickly realized this was nonsense, but to this day it's still impossible to buy a microwave without a dozen buttons, only two of which ever get used ("popcorn" and "add 30 sec").
Why let it ‘run’ on your network or the internet at all? I’ve never connected my newest TV to my WiFi, and can’t ever foresee a reason to do so. All of the apps I want are running on a connected box I trust to maintain a degree of privacy that I’d never assume from Sony, Samsung, or the like.
It’s not as if Netflix or Hulu actually force you to use the embedded TV apps.
If you ever read some av forums, you'll find that modern TVs are about as reliable as modern computers, i.e. it's amazing they even turn on when requested. Features are DOA for new lines and need multiple updates to be useful, sometimes they're completely disabled and only get enabled after a year, e.g. Dolby Vision on 2017s Sonys.
My parents' TV has an incredible anti-feature where, if the video gets dark enough, the whole screen dims temporarily. There's no firmware update for it so they've just lived with it for years.
Yeah, sometimes those might actually make things go smoother, but generally it's security updates, which you almost certainly won't need without internet connection.
2008: Manufacturer finds a defect in the firmware code that causes excessive processor usage, thus causing the internal electronics to fail earlier than anticipated. No fix available.
2018: defect in firmware found. New version deployed to internet connected devices and lifespan extended.
Both of those are made up scenarios, but I would argue that there are legitimate reasons for devices to be connected to the internet. Along with a bunch of terrible reasons, of course.
>2008: Manufacturer finds a defect in the firmware code that causes excessive processor usage, thus causing the internal electronics to fail earlier than anticipated. No fix available.
There is a fix available - return it to the store.
Why do you think most Android phones stop receiving months after release and flag carrying ones one or two years after release? And what firmware in a HDMI decoder is supposed to be fallible? And why can't updates be supplied via USB stick.
I also have a smart TV that I have never connected to the internet, and I never foresee a reason to either. When I want to use apps on my TV, I use a separate streaming box. If in the future there is a software update for the TV with a cool feature I want (unlikely), I would connect it via ethernet temporarily, perform the update, and then disconnect ethernet.
I would never connect it over WiFi for fear that it wouldn't forget the network. If someone has a smart TV that only supports WiFi, then I would suggest they setup a new WiFi network, temporarily connect the TV to perform the software update, and then disable the WiFi network.
A few times at home with my parents, I've used the 'chrome-cast' functionality to view Youtube controlled from my laptop, without any cable hassle.
The same thing with Plex worked, but finicky. Somewhere between linux, plex and the TV, there is some compatibility problem.
That 'cast' functionality has improved and enhanced my life more than I expected. It saves significant time, hassle and stress to be able to connect to either of the two main screens in my house from my laptop when I want to show someone what's on my screen (remote desktop in reverse is how I think of it). No redundant searching, or going to the trouble of sending someone a link. Just cast and it's there.
However, it works best for images and text-- video or graphics tend to have more issues, and there is definitely a lot of lag, as with remote desktop.
Some web-apps, like youtube, do the casting for video in a more complicated manner.
Rather than actually doing the 'remote desktop in reverse' they essentially instruct the Smart-TV to go to the same video end-point and start streaming. Thus, none of the rendering, decoding or even downloading will be done on your laptop.
This is slightly worse from a control perspective, but quality wise it is great.
How much longer do you think it will be possible to buy a TV that works without Internet access? I assume at some point soon they will demand connectivity to even display images coming in on the HDMI port. Internet services is the future profit center for screen manufacturers; also it's easier to build a system if you assume it has Internet connectivity always. (For, say, HDCP updates.)
I also don't allow my screens to have Internet access; did that the second time Samsung demanded I approve a firmware update before I was allowed to watch my TV show. Fuck that.
What reasoning behind your assumption? It hasn’t happened yet, and there are still tons of people using TVs in places without Internet.
I say, tackle the problem when it gets here, for now I’ve never had a smart TV hooked up to the internet and it’s not even because I hate Smart features, I just don’t see a point, my 30$ Chromecast covers every use case I could have.
If I purchased a TV and only found out after the fact that it required internet access I'd be returning it to the store as defective. If I can't use it for movies with a DVD player in my fishing cabin, it's clearly not a TV.
My parents’ TV has various apps built in and one of them is Skype. They discontinued the Skype service so now every single time the TV turns on it displays a stupid error message about “a problem with an app” that can’t be uninstalled and that they never used.
Smart TVs are full of stuff like this. They need to go.
That's why I went with Roku TV. They are the only platform with a consistent track record of supporting old hardware. You also don't suffer from the single vendor lock-in of Tizen or WebOS or the wild west of Android.
if you are going to get a smart TV, definitely get a Roku TV. While the interface for controlling the settings is much better than any other TV, the remote app is nice and the private listening is awesome, the hardware is slower than AppleTV 4K, and it doesn't handle fast forward and rewind as well. The right half of the home screen is used for ads and the remote buttons for quickly going to other channels isn't customizable and you are stuck with whatever provider paid Roku for placement.
We have two Roku TVs and two other TVs with Roku sticks. We also have AppleTvs connected to each of the TVs - one 4K ATV and the rest 3rd Gen ATVs.
The ads are obnoxious and the way every "app"/service implements their own interface with quirky behavior (Does the "up" button show the timeline, pause, or take you back out to the episode/series selection screen?) is annoying.
Fortunately it's possible to fix the ads at least by blocking doubleclick and the roku ad/tracking domain at the router level. Doing this leaves a blank "empty poster" graphic instead of an ad, but doesn't seem to break anything else. Updates, search, and content all continue to work fine.
The software in „smart“ TVs is awful. Always been, always will be. Don’t use it. You could try and find a dumb panel, but you could also simply not use it.
Get an AppleTV or whatever, plug it in, problem solved.
I just picked up a 55" TV, and the troubles I had explaining I did not want any "Smart" features was like explaining to morons that smoking is bad for you. The store had no commission on the sale, but the sales people, all of them, could not understand why I'd not want TV apps and Internet.
Same story, but one more caveat: When I'm playing a game a nice "Youtube encountered an error and needs to be close [ok] [report]" dialog pops up in the dead center of the screen.
Why is youtube running? Apparently the TV is an Android base, but I have no information on how to flash it because if I could turn it into something not Sony produced I'd be a lot happier.
--
Another annoyance is that it /really/ wants me to use speech to text in everything, but the TV has (thankfully) no mic.... Why!?
Is it even possible to buy a non-smart TV today (not counting PC monitors)? I bought my TV in 2015 and even then it seemed like most of the non-smart options were overpriced older models with worse image quality, etc.
Aren’t hotel TVs pretty much all smart these days? Honestly, it even makes sense as you can use it as a media center (Spotify etc), movie ”channels” are easier to implement etc.
Sadly the panels used in such models are almost always crap compared to high-end consumer models. Even models which are supposedly identical to some consumer model are usually not identical. The software often lacks features such as Game Mode and such.
Google wants Android to be "cleaner," to better compete with Apple. This means no underhanded service modules or system extensions, and no intrusive or otherwise low quality privileged apps.
Android phones are inexpensive because Google doesn't make money directly from licensing the OS. Barriers to entry are low, competition is fierce, and hardware differentiation is only possible at the high end (e.g. vertically integrated OEMs like Samsung).
This means at the high end Samsung's product managers won't give up making Samsung phone differentiated through things like Bixby, which is a value-subtracted wart on Android, and at the low end, cheap OEMs won't stop taking payments from app makers who monetize by collecting user data.
Google has the power to reject OEM products that violate whatever standards Google chooses to impose on OEMs, but, as Microsoft learned decades ago, standing between a low margin OEM and a few extra dollars per unit is a difficult position. Once a product ships, policing updates is even harder.
If you are wondering "Why can't I get a 'clean' TV, phone, PC, etc?" This is why.
>as Microsoft learned decades ago, standing between a low margin OEM and a few extra dollars per unit is a difficult position. Once a product ships, policing updates is even harder.
What is this about? Afaik windows (desktop) and windows phone all get 5+ years of patches.
> From their own privacy policy: https://samba.tv/legal/privacy-policy/ they track what you watch, when you watch it, your location, your interactions with other apps. And they share this with... well, everyone basically.
I wonder how the GDPR will affect companies like Samba's business model.
Also, isn't this effectively true of all internet connected TVs since they will never receive security patches and become part of the botnet of things?
GDPR only increases engineering and compliance costs. It doesn’t have any consumer-side impact since to a first approximation, zero consumers take advantage of data privacy laws.
One significant advantage that comes with GDPR is the fact that users will be able to opt-out from any tracking that is not required for the service to function.
That's not true. GDPR means you have to have explicit, clear consent for many things. It can't be hidden behind "you agree to our updated terms and conditions, click (here) for details" type things.
> since to a first approximation, zero consumers take advantage of data privacy laws.
That's where that nice multiplier of 250,000 gets going. See, even if to a first approximation zero consumers take advantage of these laws if it turns out that 'approximately zero' out of 100 million is say 10,000 you're still fucked if you decide to play dumb.
So round off all you want, but keep in mind the multiplier.
No, because of that multiplier all companies are coming into compliance and it's costing all of them a lot of money. But it isn't going to affect their revenue or advertising business models at all because nobody uses the tool. I've done GDPR work at one of the biggest tech companies in the world. They had an existing (pre-GDPR) privacy tool that literally less than 100 people had ever used. This is a company with hundreds of millions of users.
So, you're saying 'it works and that's why we shouldn't use it'?
One company isn't a particularly solid sample.
For some contrast: I've looked at 9 companies since the beginning of the year and all of them took the GDPR serious enough that it made them re-evaluate their privacy, security and data life cycles. The interesting bit is that they would have never done any of that if not for the GDPR, and that no matter what level of use the data privacy tools will see it doesn't matter because before they didn't have those tools and now they do.
Besides that the GDPR has much wider scope than just allowing people access to their own data. Also, you should expect that as people become more aware of these things - and consumers will be more aware - that such tools will see more use.
I'm the author and linking to my tweets is a bad idea because they auto-delete after 14 days.
For future HN context, as the author I'm reproducing them here in full:
My @Sony "smart" TV has updated itself and tried to force me to use a new app from https://samba.tv and boy oh boy... this is worse than recent @facebook stuff.
From their own privacy policy: https://samba.tv/legal/privacy-policy/ … they track what you watch, when you watch it, your location, your interactions with other apps. And they share this with... well, everyone basically.
This information is then used to market to you within the TV and offer you a "hot list"... but it is also used to "Detect, investigate and prevent fraudulent transactions and other illegal activities and protect the rights, safety and property of Samba and others"
If you have a "Smart TV" from any brand and it's doing an update you will 100% want to disable Samba.
Samba is not a feature for you, it is a snitch in your living room, snitching on everything you watch on your TV, it's a feature for corporations only.
To disable Samba the soft way... don't agree to their T&Cs post OS upgrade.
To disable Samba the hard way... use Android system settings to disable the app.
This is a good time to say that if you own a "Smart TV" from any company you should run it on a different network than your NAS and other computers. And that all other devices best require passwords to connect to them.
Ideally you run a TV on a different VLAN.
And this is where I wish that dumb panels were all the rage, and that the only "smart" functionality was external to the display itself. But when @netflix and other content providers decline the use of their apps outside of integrated devices this is the hell we live in.
I really wish that @Google provided a TV box that was the full Android TV, but that was vanilla Google with the ability to install @netflix, @BBCiPlayer, @mubi as apps. That I could just plug this into any display panel, including dumb displays.
HN replying to myself with some context outside of the tweets.
I actually trust stock Android over Samsung, Sony, etc Android. Hence my "if we're going to have Android TV perhaps Google could supply it without the forced add-ons". I see this similar to installing Windows yourself rather than having "Windows with added vendor crap"... like if you know you want Windows, a stock one is better and same with Android.
I'm now looking at purchasing the Nvidia Shield and disabling all network connectivity on my Sony TV.
The Sony TV is a recent one, about a year old. A Bravia something or other. I have disabled the Samba app using the Android Apps system.
One thing I didn't include in the tweets was Samba's patent list, because it's too deep a topic for Twitter. The patent numbers are on their site though... go take a look: https://samba.tv/legal/patents/ Some of those are downright scary and have no positive application for privacy conscious users.
Why Android over Linux or MacOS? It feels like at this point, Android and Windows are surveillance systems. If you don't want a surveillance system, you need to go with Linux or MacOS (or iOS.)
If it's doing some kind of "always scan WiFi in the background" shenanigans then it's still a computer slowly going out of date without security updates and occasionally exposing itself to the local area.
I wish I could take a "smart" TV and flip a switch and have it gracefully fall back to "dumb" TV where the Android device is physically disabled.
I know its pushing the problem onto another device, but I dont use the "smart apps" on our bravia anymore. It's just an HDMI dumping ground. Right now a blue ray player has all the smarts
Edit: mainly cause they'd stopped working years ago...
My Philips start TV can connect wired or wireless. Using Netflix native on it, goes quicker than via Chromecast. The EPG data contains an ad (!!!). I cannot even pay to remove it. So I just use my settopbox to watch & record. Advantage to that is that I am allowed to skip ads on local recordings (if I use remote recordings though, only on public broadcast TV, and they only last for a week).
Chromecast is basically a smart TV on a stick, controlled with a remote from smartphone (and partly, even the remote control of the TV). You can run a Chromecast wired as well. Same with Steam Link. It can run over wireless or wired.
I find on all of these wired far more reliable, and I keep more bandwidth for my wireless applications. Even my printer is wired. Then again, I got a 8 port gbit switch for connectivity and barely any wires visible.
The caveat is that my smart devices, although wired, are currently NOT on a VLAN, and that Chromecast is a data resource for Google, and as I mentioned the EPG data on the TV contains commercials. Instead of the Steam Link I could even just run a HDMI cable straight from computer. I can also plug in a Bluetooth USB adapter on my USB hub to listen via Bluetooth on the couch to the TV.
Other than that, its a great TV for its price. Make sure your TV has enough HDMI ports. You might also wanna have a look at Chromecast alternatives such as Miracast devices or Amazon Fire Stick (the ethernet adapter came free with Chromecast Ultra but for the other Chromecasts it costs 20 EUR extra).
Not giving it your WiFi password doesn’t make it immune from a nearby open/Mifi/phone access point that may allow the TV to exfiltrate data or become exposed.
How do I even turn off location services without breaking Android Device Manager?
I have location history off but I still get notifications from maps that say things like "X place you're at is popular, click here to see reviews or something"
1. You don't need to use Android Device Manager. Unlike iOS, Android gives you a choice of device finders.
2. Location services is different from location history. Location services is an AGPS service that does not track anything tied to your account. iOS does the same thing, and worse, used to send your location to a third party AGPS provider (Skyhook).
3. Google Maps is separate from location history. Google Maps on iOS will tell you to see reviews as well, and it is a setting in both. Unlike on iOS, on Android, you have a choice not to use the default maps application at all and instead use an entirely offline map.
The above three points when support my initial claim that Android is a better privacy-focused system than iOS.
If it's Maps then I presume it is aware of Google's knowledge / collecting of hotspots and is then able to guess where you are. Probably some other voodoo as well. Point being, even with location off you're still trackable.
If you turned off wifi so you think that would help?
I've had the Nvidia Shield for a couple years now, and highly recommend it. It's a bit expensive if you're not using it for gaming or Plex server (I'm not) but I find it worth it because it's reliable, still gets updated, and generally "just works". It's literally the only content used for my TV now: Netflix, Plex, YouTube, weather, Tinycam (baby monitor), Google Music, and I can also cast from a phone/computer/etc without changing inputs.
I've bought a Sony Bravia TV set around this time a year ago, too, but mine doesn't seem to have Android TV. Or does it? The firmware only has basic TV, EPG, and recording capabilities, plus Netflix but no "apps". It's an absolute joke compared to PlayTV on PS3 of ten years ago. I was about to reset/update it because the recording software is stuck in a state where it can't delete a scheduled recording in the past and won't take programming for new recordings.
So I'm selfishly asking if you could look up the version number of yours, so that I can identify mine and avoid updating it?
On which RPi? With hardware rendering? Which codec? Cause whenever I try it, I get stutters. I first suspected it'd be the wireless of the Chromecast, but that wasn't it.
I've paid for streaming for a number of years, while more than half worrying I was just making myself a sucker.
And, sure enough, the libraries have gone downhill while the prices have gone up, and my money seems to just be going to lawyers and technology to ever-more lock things down, while content is balkanized to maximize what I've come to consider rent-seeking.
I'm not interested in a "smart TV". I want good hardware with a lot of hardware connectivity -- preferably open connectivity, but that ship has already sailed in good part. Nonetheless, connectivity I set up and control.
If I'm going to stream, it's going to be out of a separate box, that I can segregate and replace when it's warranted.
If I can get off my duff and do it, it's time for me to stop paying for streaming content and put the money instead towards purchases where I end up with a physical copy, more or less in perpetuity. If, because the media degrade or the playback devices abandon functionality or get more locked down, the lifespan of what I've purchased is limited, I no longer have any qualms -- other than "lead pipe" law enforcement -- about breaking protections and making a sustainable copy.
I feel like a sucker for having put my money into a system that perpetuates these schemes, for too long.
Time to hit eBay for those boxes of DVD's I've heard about, before everyone else catches on and they dry up.
My parents have a somewhat older "smart TV" -- Samsung. Recently, it received an OS update. The UI responsiveness did pick up -- it was halfway abysmal, before. But the picture quality took a major hit. (I'll let Dad fuss with that, as is his wont, if he gets around to it. He doesn't use that TV much.)
This just reinforced for me, that you can't trust these updates nor the software on these things. If it works well as a display device, keep it unconnected and so "dumb" and just pipe stuff in over HDMI.
By the way, it was on a separate "friends" subnet that their wireless router provides. But performance seemed marginal, at times, so it ended up on an Ethernet cable. The router only has physical ports on the main subnet; there went that protection. Ironically, after the OS update, it defaulted to the wireless connection and seemed to perform significantly better with it. It got switched back to the Ethernet connection, but maybe they should undo that, now.
Really with all this stuff, it's coming down to the very basic... "truism", it's proving to be: If they can, they will.
It's up to us, individual users and consumers, to stop them. No one else is.
How is the current situation possible? Shouldn't some company be able to buy the same panel, put minimal electronics and casing around it and sell it cheaper?
What if... Work with me here... The "Smart" TV company is paid by malicious hackers to include malware that snoops on its customers.
That would allow them to lower the price of the TV to below the cost of the dumb TV. Mind you, they might have to call the malware "apps" and call the hackers "partners."
Ok, snark aside, what if the makers of Smart TVs call them "platforms," and they get a subsidy for bundling apps, and maybe even a revenue stream from people who sign up for things like Netflix through the TV?
Again, they will be able to make a cheaper TV if there's more money in apps than margin on hardware.
This is analogous to the situation with phones. For most companies, there's more money in the telecommunications service than in the hardware margin, so most phones are subsidized by the service providers.
So-called television is going there: It's just a platform for advertising, tracking, and services that generate revenue on subscription. This is going to relentlessly drive hardware margins deep into the negative, which makes it impossible to sell a "dumb" display for a reasonable price.
I fully expect that it won't be long before leaving a smart TV unconnected to the internet won't be an option: They won't work unless they can phone home.
Samsung's partners don't want you hooking a 4K TV up to an AppleTV and routing around their platform in favour of Apple's app store, not if you bought that TV at a discount thanks to their subsidies.
Right on. It's the same way a windows computer is often cheaper than the same computer without an OS. The seller doesn't get paid by McAfee, Microsoft Office, Norton, and so on for bundling their crapware and has to make up for that by charging more. All that crapware probably covers the license cost of Windows and then some.
You can bet Sony didn't put this app on the TV because they wanted to give consumers an improved experience for free out of the goodness of their hearts.
If most people prefer the TV with 'more features' then they'll take it. The savings of using a dumb TV are probably not a lot, I'd ballpark it at $50.
How many consumers are going to think "$50 dollars more to get netflix straigt on my TV? Great!".
Besides, that $50 advantage could well be lost in the smaller scale costs.
This.
I use a "Smart TV" but never ever configure any Internet connectivity to it.
An old Mac mini serves as a media server connected to TV via HDMI. Everything works like a charm with a wireless keyboard and mouse.
I couldn't find a non-smart TV. They are everywhere. If you want the 4k, then you have a smart TV.
The best alternatives were super large monitors (way over the price of a TV, and with no decent sound built in), or corporate display panels (for advertising, signage, etc) whose prices are also way above a TV and include no sound system at all.
Amazon used to provide free networking for its readers... I think that it is very cheap to transfer text/"meta-data"... It might even be sponsored by the government...
You may be able to check that by reviewing FCC documentation online similar to how people sleuth out new phones, though I've never looked at what precisely is required in terms of filing.
To a rough approximation, a "smart TV" consists of a computer, laptop-style, connected to the display and speakers.
From various places online, you can buy "scaler" boards that take HDMI/VGA/etc. to whatever interface the panel uses (LVDS is common), i.e. they comprise essentially all the electronics inside a standard non-smart monitor. They are intended for laptop display conversions but can drive much bigger displays too, as long as the interface is the same. That might be an alternative to buying a much more expensive "dumb TV", i.e. buy a smart TV and "dumb it down" yourself!
For example, this particular one is configured for an iPad's display but the sellers usually have other configurations available:
It's not as dangerous as a CRT, but there are some dangers; however it doesn't really matter. They're tightly integrated, you can't just pull out the smart bits and leave behind a tuner.
Generally most modern TVs are gonna have a power supply, a main logic board, a display driver board and maybe another control board for stuff like backlights or sound. The logic board is basically gonna be an embedded mini computer running a full embedded OS that orchestrates the UI/smart features, decoding the inputs and generating the control signals for the panel driver. This will all be highly integrated on a single board, probably with almost all of the functionality in one or two main chips. Point being, you can't just yank out the smart stuff and still have a functioning TV. It'd be a bit like trying to remove a feature from a computer motherboard.
The ideal way to go about it would be to write your own firmware for the chips, but that's a practical impossibility because almost always there's no data publicly available on the chips or the other parts like the panel. You might also be able to get something working if the actual panel uses a standard interface, but it'll be a ton of work.
There aren't that many teardowns of televisions online that I can find, but this article has some to give you an idea.
That particular model number is apparently exclusive to Shoppers Drug Mart (store-exclusive model numbers are a pretty common problem; in many cases the actual difference from a "standard" model is something trivial like a slightly different remote or bezel). There's an interesting forum thread about the overall product family / platform / whatever [1].
Optimum points are really nice for stuff like this. Just hold onto them until something nice shows up.
It would be very interesting if some details of the FW came out. Not going to reverse engineer my new TV but the service menu gives me the feels of something that is very customizable.
Consumer projectors have built-in sound but you'll still want to hook up surround sound. And if you care about hi-res that much, you'll want it on a nice big screen where you can see the difference. I project onto a 100" screen.
The best alternatives were super large monitors (way over the price of a TV, and with no decent sound built in), or corporate display panels (for advertising, signage, etc) whose prices are also way above a TV and include no sound system at all.
I wonder how big the market is for "dumb" TVs priced lower than smart ones --- given that the development costs, if any, for one would be much lower since you're basically just asking an OEM to combine existing parts (panels and electrics), perhaps it could be a startup opportunity to sell "the TV you watch" --- essentially big monitors with speakers and tuners and nothing else. Some things they could advertise:
- absolutely no data collection
- zero boot-up time
- near-instant control response
- no software requiring constant upgrades or maintenance
What you say makes sense, but I wonder if the amount of money they make re-selling our data would allow them to actually undercut the cost required to produce a "dumb" TV. So it's possible it would cost more for a dumb TV because it isn't subsidized by data reselling (I'm purely speculating here. I would guess dumb TVs would drive down the cost of smart TVs as they eat into their profit margins to maintain market share, which is important to the value of their data).
Nevertheless, a dumb TV marketing to me like that evokes an immediate "take my money!" response.
Not only selling data, but selling pre-installed app slots as advertising. Sure they won't be able to convince Netflix or YouTube to pay to have their apps pre-installed on the home-screen, but other wannabe streaming platforms would probably be happy to cough up
I doubt that would be any cheaper. Something like that would already have an ARM processor inside for all the digital housekeeping, the cost to bump specs a bit and make it run an embedded OS and GUI are likely extremely low.
The boot time is something that has irked me forever, and it seems the culprit is the HDMI protocol itself, so that wouldn't be improved either.
Why would a dumb tv cost less than a smart one? Presumably the manufacturers are making money on each sale because of the ad tech. So wouldn't TV's without the tech cost more?
They would be more expensive, same as buying a laptop with no bloatware is more expensive than its loaded equivalent. Manufacturers/Labels/distributors get kickbacks from the bloatware companies per install so they can afford to reduce the price of the machine vs a 'clean' system.
I bought a Vizio P65-C1, excited to have found a modern TV without smart features. Then, a couple months later, an OTA update made it smart. I had to read the fine print to realize that this came with some bullshit "feature" where Vizio auto recognizes whatever I'm watching. I disabled it deep within some totally nonintuitive menu.
> I couldn't find a non-smart TV. They are everywhere. If you want the 4k, then you have a smart TV.
Or, hmmm... How about simply not buying that 4k if it is "smart".
The only feedback channel you have to the makers about your displeasure over the TV offerings is to simply not buy one.
They listen to nothing else. If the unit sells, they don't care about any other expressed dislikes (it sold, after-all). If the unit does not sell, and none of the units sell, only then do they listen.
But as I said at the outset, too few folks care enough to make a dent in their sales figures. So those of us who do care are left with simply not buying a new TV.
they do work without internet access. You can also tell your TV to try to access the internet via Ethernet (w/o having it plugged in) and that will usually shut down all the intrusive BS (at-least on Samsung "smart TVs")
You can find non-smart panels or monitors in most common TV sizes, but they aren't TVs because they lack TV tuners. Of course, unless you are doing OTA or no-box cable (is that even a thing anymore?) you aren't going to use a builtin TV tuner anyway.
Exactly. A commercial display / signage display is indeed what you need to buy if you want a "dumb" TV.
Not only are they as dumb as dumb gets but they are highly reliable and usually fairly rugged.
Many of them have an expansion card slot which allows you to change the inputs - you could remove your 2x HDMI card and insert an SCART card instead, for instance.
Finally, if you get a video wall model, you'll get near-zero bezel.
They're not that expensive - how could they be if they are being purchased twelve at a time for display walls ? Yes, they are more than $399 + mail-in rebate from Frys.
The problem I've run into: the buggy software that's 3-6-9 months+ out of date by the time you get it out of box. Offline sofware update is not always an option. Maybe update once and then disconnect? As someone mentioned, only until they have autoconnect built in through partnership with mobile providers
Disregarding the fucking awful campaign against them because some 3rd party developers make piracy-focused add-ons, as someone who never owned a smart TV, Kodi seems pretty feature-compatible.
Look into LibreELEC, I use that and buy android tv boxes. You can dual boot, LibreELEC from an SD and android from NAND. It's stable enough that I've began to just flash nand and run soley LibreELEC, but you'll be limited from the wide availability of android support for most major content providers apps
the ones from the vendors are all closed source. Best bet is to buy a good TV and use another device to run software that makes it "smart" - ie. AOSP / Kodi
The only thing to gain from "smart tvs" are apps that can be controlled w/ the TV remote, if you're privacy coincious, you should know by now that it will take a bit of effort to secure your data.
Not much of a solution since it will never happen. The best TV's are "smart", and people like nice things, myself included. You're much better of simply never connecting them to the internet. They get the same message and you don't limit yourself to a small set of poor options.
And if you never connect you're device the message they get is "the consumer wanted our TV, but not our software." What's hard to understand about that?
Nothing hard to understand about your logic. It is the underlying assumption that is flawed.
The makers are not tracking that statistic (number of units sold that were not connected to the internet). They don't care if you connect it to the internet or not. Anything that happens after the initial sale (beyond returns and warranty repairs) is simply irrelevant to them, because there is zero income stream (unless they are charging an 'upgrade fee' later for something).
They care only about that initial sale. The only feedback channel they listen to is "units sold".
But too many people are addicted to the upgrade cycle and as a result not enough will simply turn away and say "no thanks, I'll stick with my dumb TV" (or go hunt down those few dumb TV's that still exist, so the sales numbers shift to dumb TV's).
> The makers are not tracking that statistic (number of units sold that were not connected to the internet). They don't care if you connect it to the internet or not.
That is absolutely wrong. They are making money off of the data; of course they care! That's the whole point!
> linking to my tweets is a bad idea because they auto-delete after 14 days.
I feel like you should mention that in your bio, it's not standard and breaks conversations. People should know that they should cite you if they want something to be preserved in conversations or when linking.
Doesn't Twitter gate high volume access behind contracts for money?
In any case, if Twitter allows posy deletion, then it's standard. You may consider deleting bad form, but that's just another case of someone's perception of a platform not matching reality.
The internet makes it hard to definitively remove something, but a large percentage has already been lost to churn and bit rot due to lack of care.
Although I couldn't see a way to do it when I first looked at Medium, I'm told that there is now a way to use it with your own URLs.
I haven't bothered to examine how it works, but if you can do that and you have a disaster recovery plan that replicates your entire output to a different service (e.g. GitHub Pages) while retaining the link structure, then perhaps Medium is now superior to Posterous's original offering.
If you think this will upset future historians, just wait until you find out that this is something that journalists like to do with their Twitter accounts too, and I would be entirely unsurprised if there's an overlap between the journalists who do this and the ones that start dubious but widely believed viral claims using their Twitter accounts.
Every so often I just delete all my tweets. It's not automated, because I do it when I feel like it. The first ever twitter app I made was a delete-all-tweets app just for myself to use.
I purge content from my law firm website all the time.
I completely trash and start over my personal website every few years, too, and I've never kept anything in a purge. I have personal archives of it, and the various archiving sites have been snapshotting my stuff since 1999, so, meh, if anyone wants to find my old work product, there's a way, without me having to archive it all for the whole world for all eternity.
Sometimes it's nice to start over.
I like to purge my real life too. De-cluttering is fun. My zen would be to have nothing left.
Regarding link rot, the walled garden comment above/below is spot on. When you're dealing with a bunch of walled gardens, link rot is so far unavoidable.
"I like to purge my real life too. De-cluttering is fun. My zen would be to have nothing left."
There is a huge difference in not valueing material property as high and not having anything left. I would figure out that difference before reaching the goal.
Don't worry about it, some people want everything for free, if they want to cite you they should plan that the internet is temporary and there is no guarantee that content will be there in the next 15 minutes let alone a few years. Keep deleting your stuff and don't worry about the people who think you should do this or do that with the way you handle your internets.
Downvoted for not contributing to the conversation. It's basically a personal attack on me and others sharing my opinion: saying we want everything for free, that we should not assume Twitter to be there in 15 minutes (when there is all the reason to assume the contrary), calling OP out to keep doing what I said I thought was not a good idea (without explaining yourself further) and not to worry about people like us. This isn't a logical argument and doesn't help the conversation, and that's besides the fact that you make it sound very personal.
It's interesting how this post gets more downvotes, as the front-page post "delete tweets older than X days" gets more upvotes. I wonder if this is due to priming.
That seems perfectly explainable by the fact that they're both correlated with time passing, given the possibility that the average HN voter agrees with the deletion of old tweets and disagrees your comment. This explanation has the added advantage of not being decapitated by Occam's Razor, the way your priming proposition is.
I have a Chromecast but I meant more like an Android TV box, like the Nvidia Shield. To separate the TV display capabilities from the internet capabilities.
Now I know the Shield exists that's what I'll be doing.
Without thinking about it I configured my current TV to join my wifi network. After it so kindly started putting ads on the screen while watching things I turned it off. A few months later, ads again. Somewhere in the bowels of the settings the wifi was reenabled, so I shut it off. A few months later, more ads. In a new place in the settings it was back on. Repeat a few more times.
Changed my wifi password and that took care of that.
Actually I take it back, that is what kept changing location. They'd have an opt out but bury it in increasingly arcane places, and of course since it was "different" I was opted back in.
Then I started disabling my wifi and that kept magically re-enabling.
I had a Samsung plasma TV about that long ago and it started to show notifications every time it turned on that some service I never used was being decommissioned.
I temporarily set my SSID to some long random string and connected my TV to it. Then I turned off my TV's networking and changed the SSID back to normal. Even if my TV wanted to silently re-enable networking, it wouldn't have a network to connect to.
> But when @netflix and other content providers decline the use of their apps outside of integrated devices this is the hell we live in.
I don't understand. I can just open a web browser on a little media center PC, connect it by HDMI, point it to Netflix and play a movie, right? (Admittedly I haven't tried because our Panasonic has Netflix and no ads or spy apps that I've noticed)
But what exactly does Netflix forbid that @buro9 is referring to? And does anyone know what their reasoning is for doing so?
I ask because I'm rather interested in the concept of buying a dumb TV once this one breaks (hopefully long from now), but I do like me my Netflix. Lots of people in this thread suggest buying a dumb TV but I don't understand why Netflix and friends would disallow customers using that.
You can definitely watch netflix on a computer connected via hdmi, running either windows or macos. You can watch netflix with a chromecast, with nvidia shield, there are endless choices. I like these external devices because i feel they are less likely to spy on me than crapware in a tv.
Samba have patents for how to communicate and track across the boundaries of security sandboxes for example.
Whereas Netflix on my Android that has NetGuard really is just talking to netflix.com and apparently not doing anything else bad.
I have zero expectations that an app won't track in-app use for that app... but Samba is (with the consent of the hardware provider who owns the local instance of Android) tracking everything it can across apps.
Content owners dictate in contractual terms the availability of their content in high definition (UHD, 4k, etc) be determined by the app securing access to the content.
The result is that the higher quality content is only available on apps on closed platforms.
So if you got a dumb panel and wanted high definition content, you'd still need to hook up something like the Nvidia Shield... essentially a closed platform (Android again in this instance).
Right! Ok this makes sense. Any clue on why content owners do this? It seems a bit arbitrary.
Fortunately I'm the opposite of a videophile - I don't even know how High the Definition of our TV is. But I see your point, so indeed, a 4k dumb TV won't be able to show most Netflix content in 4k, correct? That's a major shame and pretty ridiculous.
edit: I just noticed that Netflix actually supports UHD on the Windows 10 app and on Microsoft Edge[0]. So running Windows on the media center PC appears to be a practical option.
> Netflix actually supports UHD on the Windows 10 app and on Microsoft Edge
Still a closed platform :)
It's the DRM problem. They insist on these limitations as an anti-piracy measure. Fundamentally the only way to decode 4k in real time is to pass it fairly-unmodified to the video hardware, and at that point in a non-closed system a driver could steal it. Or just record it off the screen from the inside.
Sure, but not a smart TV and that's the part I personally care the most about. I doubt Microsoft, even with all their telemetry nonsense, will ever include something as ridiculous as samba.tv. Also, they employ more than 0 UI designers.
Thanks for the explanation btw. So it's basically the 4k video version of copy-protected CD's. And that was a great idea that totally worked!
The 4K quality is tied to some pretty specific hardware and drivers as far as I remember. And 1080p is also different in my experience in the Windows 10 App and in Edge. I was able to get 1080p for some content in Edge, but not everything. The only way to consistently get 1080p quality was to use the rather crappy App. The search and filter features were worse than the website in my experience, and I ran into quite a few bugs when I used it.
There's a lot of projectors that support 4K (see http://www.projectorcentral.com )
You can usually turn a smart TV into a dumb TV by not setting up the internet.
This is totally subjective but I find UHD/4K to be painful to look at on a large screen. The contrast is too high, everything is too focused. I don't need to see skin pores from across the room.
1080p is by far "good enough" to watch anything on TV, IMO.
I don’t have much experience with 4K but I’ve had to disable some motion enhancing features on 120hz screens because the movements seemed too fast and it was weird.
> The contrast is too high, everything is too focused. I don't need to see skin pores from across the room.
I re-watched a couple of episodes of "Friends" recently (apparently the series is now available on Netflix) at a couple of friends' house, on a huge tv set, and I had a totally different experience compared to what I remembered from last watching the episodes ~15 years ago because I could only focus on looking at the actresses' faces, asking myself: "Did Monica's face really looked like that? Did Phoebe's?". I'll stick with 1080 or even with 780 from now on.
If you used a DVI cable you could indeed do that. But HDMI was pushed and pushed and pushed and pushed despite no real benefit (having sound and video separate is an ADVANTAGE if you want to easily handle sound with different hardware..)
Huh? If you're coming from a PC you can definitely direct the audio separate the video. If you're using a set-top/streaming box you typically just send the audio back out the TV.
The number of people with dedicated audio equipment is too great for any TV manufacturer to break this.
Why though? If you're concerned about privacy and freedom (as you should well be) then why jump out of the fire into the frying pan? Grab a dumb TV, grab a small form-factor PC (like an RPi) and install whatever you want on it (kodi, etc.)
The nvidia shield is pretty much what you’re looking for. I just don’t hook my tv to the network and just rely on my shield for everything. Works great.
Learned my lesson a few years ago when my 3,000+ Samsung tv decided one day they were going to spam advertisements for GameStop in the notifications. Of course they deny that ever happened but I have proof on my twitter. Too lazy to look it up right now though.
Ha, I have the same setup, samsung tv and a shield.
The tv's never been updated since I bought it, never configured wifi and there isn't any open wifi around for it to try to connect to.
Smart tv's aren't smart enough to come with their own internet connection... yet. God I hope they don't put something like cellular connections in these things, then I'd have to find the damn radio and desolder the antennae.
I just want to understand how people believed all these services worked previously
for example,
did you know that when you purchase an ebook using kindle software amazon knows exactly what page you've read to and how long you've stayed on each page. They also know exactly what books you have purchased.
Or
Did you know that whenever you use a smart tv app that every time you "hover" over a tv show an event is logged that you hovered over it? Same with every click and every time you rent a movie.
This all seems pretty scary but these services could not function without this information.
> did you know that when you purchase an ebook using kindle software amazon knows exactly what page you've read to and how long you've stayed on each page. They also know exactly what books you have purchased.
Yea :'(
That's why i always purchase ebooks with my Laptop, then use Calibre + DeDrm plugin to send the ebook to my Kindle through usb. Also, my kindle is ALWAYS in airplain mode and has never been connected to any wifi.
It's so sad we are forced to do these things, and most people probably don't even realise they are being spied on and have their info/profile sold...
By the way, i hope my Pi-hole blocks all the smarttv trackers... but i'm not sure.
I kind of get where you are going with it, but yes, I'm aware of how things work when buying a product.
I don't consider my Kindle Paperwhite as an always-on tracking-my-reading device, I consider it as an e-ink screen that I can transfer my books to via USB.
I still buy books from Amazon, but that's because I know how to de-DRM them, which is something I don't know how to do with books from... for example, Microsoft Store, or Google Play Books.
I don't own a smart TV because I don't need a TV at all, I need a screen to plug an HDMI cable into.
I don't own Alexa / Google Home because fuck that.
I've refused to own a smartphone until August 2016.
...you should turn that crap off and replace it with a Roku, Apple TV, Fire TV, or anything else external. The Amazon app on our Vizio was so out of date that it literally couldn't connect to Amazon's API. Later updates fixed Amazon but enabled some flat-out 1984 level spying: https://consumerist.com/2015/11/09/vizio-smart-tvs-are-watch... . That's when I hard reset the TV, banned its MAC from our Wi-Fi, and started treating it exclusively as a dumb display for other devices.
Under no circumstances would I give any smart TV Internet access. It's not that I have great trust for any of the settop box manufacturers (although Apple's been doing a great job here), but I actively distrust all TV manufacturers.
> you should turn that crap off and replace it with a Roku, Apple TV, Fire TV, or anything else external. [...] Under no circumstances would I give any smart TV Internet access.
I totally agree, though my only exception is for Roku TV devices. They're essentially a flat-panel LCD with a Roku permanently stuck in the case with software that supports different inputs as "apps." I've been doing some packet sniffing and, so far as I can see, my TCL Roku TV doesn't do anything different on the wire that my Roku Premiere does.
I really do not know why you (and other commenters later) place such great faith in the add on devices, Roku in particular.
Just from a couple months ago: "And that’s where streaming TV company Roku comes in. Today, the company is introducing a new measurement suite called Roku Ad Insights that lets brands and agencies measure how effective their marketing is on OTT in four ways."
You really should assume that any app you run on any device is gathering data about what you are doing. Could be used in house and/or sold to third parties.
I run my Roku TV behind a super-duper locked down VLAN because of this. I wish I didn't have to, and I no longer recommend them because of the things you've mentioned.
> Samba is not a feature for you, it is a snitch in your living room, snitching on everything you watch on your TV, it's a feature for corporations only.
Serious question: so what? Lots of things don’t benefit me. Lots of things benefit corporations only. Why am I supposed to get outraged by this?
Please don't call Samba.tv just 'Samba'. We (the Samba project) have trademark on Samba, which is for the file server, authentication and print server that runs on Unix boxes and allows interoperability with Microsoft Windows.
Samba.tv is... Something else. It has nothing to do with us.
>"Infringement may occur when one party, the 'infringer', uses a trademark which is identical or confusingly similar to a trademark owned by another party, in relation to products or services which are identical or similar to the products or services which the registration covers"
this basically means that in order to have an infringement case, you need to show that both the name/brand/logo are confusingly similar, and also that the product/service/domain are close enough to each other. I don't know that "software" is a sufficiently narrow category to count.
That's exactly the scenario I was thinking of. I've run samba in a household with a (non-smart) TV, back in the day. There's definitely some overlap there.
I was sorely confused as I thought Samba was legitimately doing this at first. It's literally Samba's name with .tv appended, and one can play files using sambda + VLC..
When I first read this, I assumed Samba had started a file streaming service/app for Android TV to stream movies from Samba shares.
Admittedly, a few seconds of thinking made me realise they'd never do that... but it's easy to see why people are getting confused, which is EXACTLY where Trademark stuff comes in.
Unfortunately, I don't think it's very useful to call out the consumer on this -- it might make sense to go after Samba.tv in court to prevent them from using the trademark.
(BTW, I do really appreciate all the work done on samba over the past few decades, so thanks!).
I do put TVs on a separate VLAN and also cameras, phones, IoT stuff (those get the SEWER VLAN). I run a pfSense router and am seriously considering SSL splice in Squid in transparent mode for some of that lot. SSL Splice is nearly a MitM but does not need trustable faked SSL certificates, but you do get more logging and the ability to make certain URLs vanish. Now if the security of the device is crap enough to believe faked certs then why not try the full Bump and see what the bloody thing is really up to ...
If nothing else my SEWER VLAN has a very strange view of DNS (thanks pfBlocker) and a rather limited view of the internet as a whole.
> My @Sony "smart" TV has updated itself and tried to force me to use a new app from https://samba.tv and boy oh boy... this is worse than recent @facebook stuff.
@buro9, I'm Ashwin Navin, co-founder of Samba TV. As a company, we start from the principle of putting the consumer in control of the data he/she shares, and how it can be used. Samba TV’s analysis of viewership data follows a clear opt-in prompt when you setup your TV and settings to disable at any time from within your Smart TV settings.
By opting out of our service, we will no longer collect your TV viewing information, and our functionality we’ve built to enhance your TV experience – like content recommendations – will be disabled.
We believe there is a need for more guidance to discover new shows or be notified when a new season of your favorite shows come out. We also believe there is a need for better insights to guide the media industry, which is stuck with an antiquated system of measuring TV broadcasts. Our apps may not be for everyone, so when you disable Samba TV, your viewership data is not used in our media research or ad targeting offerings.
As far as advertising, we like the privacy model Apple has for iOS: If you want to continue using the functionality, but prefer your data not be used for advertising, you may reset your advertising ID and/or choose to limit ad tracking at any time through your TV settings. Your Samba TV advertising ID is a device ID used to serve targeted ads. By resetting this advertising ID, we will remove the link between your Samba TV advertising profile and the content you previously watched, so interest-based advertisements will not be served based on such content. Limiting ad tracking will opt your Samba TV Advertising ID out of receiving targeted advertising based on your TV usage.
As your product shares its name with an open source product that was created in 1992, will you be renaming your product? Assumedly there are no barriers to going to your prior name, Flingo.
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It's ironic that "growth at any cost" is now being used as a stick to beat scrappy little upstarts with - when that is literally Facebook's phrase.
What Facebook and Google lose in (pretty much entirely self-imposed, for now) regulations, they gain in the ability to index against all of your other activity, everywhere.
The scrappy startup has only one data point on you, and has to work with others to make it useful (which, with GDPR will be a lot harder to do).
"I really wish that @Google provided a TV box that was the full Android TV, but that was vanilla Google with the ability to install @netflix, @BBCiPlayer, @mubi as apps. That I could just plug this into any display panel, including dumb displays."
He is basically asking to be spied in a different way, just like his cellphone does.
While I'd love the option not to be spied on, If I don't have that option, I'd rather the spies be fewer and more competent.
The doomsday scenario is if we have tons of little pop-up 3rd party data collectors that fail at infosec and produce datasets that become public knowledge via leaks and can be cross-referenced for all eternity.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 301 ms ] threadEven in areas other than privacy, my bank mistreats me far worse than Internet companies like Google and Twitter.
Not to mention that in a multi-sided ecosystem, Internet companies need to keep both users and advertisers happy, so even if you're not paying, your desires still factor into the decision.
To be clear, I didn't say this meme is a lie, just that it's a half-truth. It makes sense to some extent.
Oh boy is this true, I'm on my fourth bank for my UK business and they have all been appalling. I'm not very happy with the current one but have given up on the idea that any other might be better.
Read it again, you are falling in a logical fallacy. The phrase is only saying that "if you are not paying", it doesn't make any claims to what happens when you are paying.
So, a small, 720p TV? In other words, a TV most people don't want? I fail to see how that's an alternative when I'm looking for a 60" 4K model, not to mention I have no idea what the quality of the device will be.
http://swedx.se/index.php?cPath=133_149&language=en
I worked at Samsung and given how much they poured into Tizen and the various in-house services for SmartHub, I guarantee they aren't making any significant money from them. They have zero leverage with apps for services that people consider a given (like Netflix). And a lot of smaller partnerships don't end well (see Peel for instance).
I'm not sure about brands that went with Android TV, but Google is pretty smart in such partnerships and fully takes advantage of the fact that OEMs like Sony don't have the internal resources to come up even with a half-decent OS.
Questionable updates that push things like samba.tv are probably a (poor) afterthought.
This app pushes ads and tries to protect everybody except the user!
if you still buy sony products, I can't be sory for you.
Such condescension towards those not in the know, even though they are likely allies or soon will be, is pernicious and self-defeating.
I've been reasonably happy with my Panasonic.
http://gonedigital.net/wp-content/uploads/PanasonicEPG.jpg
That’s worse than the Samba.tv app in the OP since Vizio didn’t even tell people they were doing it.
What a mess, I'm really curious to see if there are any good choices. The trouble is what is good now may turn into a turd somewhere down the line.
Currently I have a Samsung and 2 LGs in the house.
I absolutely love that media interfaces are getting snappy again (e.g., no more hitting a button on the remote and waiting 4 seconds to it do finish opening a menu).
I think the law already did a decent job on poison & fire, so maybe there is hope for the privacy too.
https://www.theverge.com/2017/4/25/15421326/smart-tv-hacking...
What I want is a law that requires a product to clearly indicate if it has ads or not in the software, and it cannot change at any point in the product's life. So I know what the price tag actually is.
Edit: I want to be clear. I am not against advertising or the freedom for a manufacturer to decide that advertising is their business model. What I want is to protect consumers who pay for a product that slowly devolves into an advertising box. I am also not expecting my rush-designed law to prevent ads or give consumers more options. All it would do is make it clear to consumers what they're paying for.
Advertising is just another form of payment. Imagine if you bought a smart fridge and 3 years in it required a subscription to use the "smart" part of it. You would be furious.
Sony makes money off every video game sale; attempting to get more from ads is just greedy. And how they present the ads as another game a very dark pattern.
Isn't it obvious? That's the buyers problem because any time they "buy" something for less than it actually costs, they actually get an ad/app/service subsidized experience.
This makes ads on the PS4 a product of greed alone.
The cost of games is like printers and ink. The hardware is the loss leader more than made up for by the "subscription" to those over-priced consumables.
There was anger and upset, and many articles in dead-tree magazines at the change in the expected price of full games, and sheer greed of manufacturers, during the launch phase of those consoles.
Ads were another bait and switch for yet more greed.
Ads are not an acceptable solution.
And since customers continue to buy PS4s it appears that they are (accepted).
Fuck this wild-west anarchistic behaviour of software companies. When we have legal protection, we can make use of it.
The only way to be sure with untrustworthy devices like this is not to connect them to the network at all (i.e. use a separate device you can trust instead), or better yet, buy a dumb monitor instead.
At startup there should be a prompt with suggested apps that they want the user to install, if the user selects an app to install it(after reading the description) then pull that app from the store.
Are these the depths to which we have sunk? I remember when a television was a thing that showed moving images using a cathode ray tube. The switch to liquid crystal displays was a genuine technological improvement. Now we need to treat our televisions as hostile surveillance devices because "ad tech" runs the world? I can't wait until our robot taxis drive diabetics to Krispy Kreme, then to Bob's Dialysis Center.
A $50 player box does everything better than the built-in player hardware and software.
Don't we have such things, called "monitors"?
Maybe it's just a marketing thing but there are definitely differences which make monitors a hard sell to be used in place of TVs (e.g. in a living room, opposite to the sofa).
Have a look at the Dell P4317Q, decent 4k 43" screen, less than 1k€.
I use it as a TV, very satisfied (and since it's got no tuner, I get to avoid the Irish TV tax (but IANAL) !)
Only caveat is no HDMI 2.0, you can only get 4k@60hz via DisplayPort so not fully compatible with ChromeCast 4k for example.
If consumers are 'lucky' it will surface as something they can use. But the bare minimum of a persistent connection to load you ads and track your usage seems inevitable.
What they need to do is just to make the panel with no network features. I ended up simply disconnecting the tv panel from the net work and using a small pc to get to netflix. Crude, but effective.
Part I. Information Collection
A. Information you provide
Information you provide Roku through the Roku Services includes, for example, your name, email address, postal address, billing and shipping information, telephone number, product purchase information, credit card and other payment data, product registration information, and demographics. If you connect with Roku’s accounts on third party social networking sites, we may also collect information about your social networking accounts, for example, your name, user name, or handle.
We also collect the personal information of other people, for example, if you provide email addresses of friends for referrals or postal addresses of recipients for gift purchases.
We may also combine information you provide with data we collect automatically (as further described in Section I-B below) and with data we receive from third parties. We may also associate information you provide with information we collect about you from different devices, browsers and platforms.
B. Information we collect automatically
1. Roku Site data
We may automatically collect information related to your use of Roku Sites - for example, we collect your computer’s or mobile device’s operating system type and version, Internet Protocol (IP) address, mobile device ID, access times, browser type and language, and the websites you visited before coming to a Roku Site. We also use cookies and related technologies such as web beacons to better understand your needs, remember your preferences, and to provide targeted advertising. For more information on how we and others use cookies and related technologies on Roku Sites, please click here to review the Roku Cookies Policy.
2. Roku Device data
We regularly and automatically collect information about your Roku Devices and your usage. The collected information includes, for example, the IP address associated with your Roku Devices, your device types and models, device identifiers (including RIDAs as described in Section II-B-2 below), the retailer to whom your Roku Device was shipped, various quality measures, error logs, software version numbers, Wi-Fi network name (SSID – service set identifier) and strength, and information about other devices connected to your Roku Device.
We also collect usage data such as your search history (including letters you key in for searches, and utterances provided if you choose to use voice search (if available on your Roku Device)), search results, content and advertisements you select and view, including through use of automatic content recognition technology (ACR) (see “Smart TV Experience and ACR on Roku TVs” (Section I-B-4) and “Choices regarding Smart TV Experience and ACR on Roku TVs” (Section IV-E), below), and content settings and preferences, channels you add and view, including time and duration in the channels, and other usage statistics.
https://docs.roku.com/doc/userprivacypolicy/en-us
Love VR but feel bad ever since.. going to ditch it, I think
[0] https://www.vrheads.com/vr-and-your-privacy-how-are-these-co...
I was affected by this, I'm never getting a Samsung TV ever again.
[0] http://adage.com/article/digital/samsung-smart-tv-update-for...
My refrigerator shouldn't need to reboot. Or at one point get into an endless reboot cycle. This "smart" but mediocre age needs to go away
Really? The 40+ different pre-programmed wash cycle options aren't enough and you expect to think of new washing machine routines over the next year or two? Its like ... DLC but for washing my clothes. Who thinks this is a good idea?
I wonder how much of that functionality will still work in 10-15 years when the machine is getting long in the tooth.
I can't wait for botnets made up of old internet connected washing machines. You know its just a matter of time before some Russian teenager takes down github using your grandma's washing machine.
I scanned the code and don't find any egregious problems like hard coded passwords but I just assume the codebase is a complete shit show with flaws.
I will not connect those devices to my wifi.
Why let it ‘run’ on your network or the internet at all? I’ve never connected my newest TV to my WiFi, and can’t ever foresee a reason to do so. All of the apps I want are running on a connected box I trust to maintain a degree of privacy that I’d never assume from Sony, Samsung, or the like.
It’s not as if Netflix or Hulu actually force you to use the embedded TV apps.
2018: your TV needs internet access because updates
What the hell happened? This is ridiculous.
2018: defect in firmware found. New version deployed to internet connected devices and lifespan extended.
Both of those are made up scenarios, but I would argue that there are legitimate reasons for devices to be connected to the internet. Along with a bunch of terrible reasons, of course.
Right. Sure. The manufacturer will spend time and money to extend the life of devices already purchased.
I would prefer not take the chance, and see what happens. If the TV dies early, so be it.
There is a fix available - return it to the store.
2008: profits from TV sales are declining rapidly. Manufacturers are panicking.
2018: TV manufacturers partnered with some shady organization that pays them big bucks to install spyware into their Smart TVs.
I would never connect it over WiFi for fear that it wouldn't forget the network. If someone has a smart TV that only supports WiFi, then I would suggest they setup a new WiFi network, temporarily connect the TV to perform the software update, and then disable the WiFi network.
When you want the IoT device to have Internet access, temporarily relax the restriction.
I did this because my TV is mounted on a wall with a large desk in front and its ethernet port is inaccessible.
However, it works best for images and text-- video or graphics tend to have more issues, and there is definitely a lot of lag, as with remote desktop.
This is slightly worse from a control perspective, but quality wise it is great.
I also don't allow my screens to have Internet access; did that the second time Samsung demanded I approve a firmware update before I was allowed to watch my TV show. Fuck that.
I say, tackle the problem when it gets here, for now I’ve never had a smart TV hooked up to the internet and it’s not even because I hate Smart features, I just don’t see a point, my 30$ Chromecast covers every use case I could have.
Smart TVs are full of stuff like this. They need to go.
We have two Roku TVs and two other TVs with Roku sticks. We also have AppleTvs connected to each of the TVs - one 4K ATV and the rest 3rd Gen ATVs.
Fortunately it's possible to fix the ads at least by blocking doubleclick and the roku ad/tracking domain at the router level. Doing this leaves a blank "empty poster" graphic instead of an ad, but doesn't seem to break anything else. Updates, search, and content all continue to work fine.
Get an AppleTV or whatever, plug it in, problem solved.
Why is youtube running? Apparently the TV is an Android base, but I have no information on how to flash it because if I could turn it into something not Sony produced I'd be a lot happier.
--
Another annoyance is that it /really/ wants me to use speech to text in everything, but the TV has (thankfully) no mic.... Why!?
Google wants Android to be "cleaner," to better compete with Apple. This means no underhanded service modules or system extensions, and no intrusive or otherwise low quality privileged apps.
Android phones are inexpensive because Google doesn't make money directly from licensing the OS. Barriers to entry are low, competition is fierce, and hardware differentiation is only possible at the high end (e.g. vertically integrated OEMs like Samsung).
This means at the high end Samsung's product managers won't give up making Samsung phone differentiated through things like Bixby, which is a value-subtracted wart on Android, and at the low end, cheap OEMs won't stop taking payments from app makers who monetize by collecting user data.
Google has the power to reject OEM products that violate whatever standards Google chooses to impose on OEMs, but, as Microsoft learned decades ago, standing between a low margin OEM and a few extra dollars per unit is a difficult position. Once a product ships, policing updates is even harder.
If you are wondering "Why can't I get a 'clean' TV, phone, PC, etc?" This is why.
What is this about? Afaik windows (desktop) and windows phone all get 5+ years of patches.
I wonder how the GDPR will affect companies like Samba's business model.
Also, isn't this effectively true of all internet connected TVs since they will never receive security patches and become part of the botnet of things?
Also it much be easy to opt out.
That's where that nice multiplier of 250,000 gets going. See, even if to a first approximation zero consumers take advantage of these laws if it turns out that 'approximately zero' out of 100 million is say 10,000 you're still fucked if you decide to play dumb.
So round off all you want, but keep in mind the multiplier.
anyway, a company like google or apple could hardly care less about a number like 250,000 but a small European startup is hopelessly screwed.
One company isn't a particularly solid sample.
For some contrast: I've looked at 9 companies since the beginning of the year and all of them took the GDPR serious enough that it made them re-evaluate their privacy, security and data life cycles. The interesting bit is that they would have never done any of that if not for the GDPR, and that no matter what level of use the data privacy tools will see it doesn't matter because before they didn't have those tools and now they do.
Besides that the GDPR has much wider scope than just allowing people access to their own data. Also, you should expect that as people become more aware of these things - and consumers will be more aware - that such tools will see more use.
For future HN context, as the author I'm reproducing them here in full:
My @Sony "smart" TV has updated itself and tried to force me to use a new app from https://samba.tv and boy oh boy... this is worse than recent @facebook stuff.
From their own privacy policy: https://samba.tv/legal/privacy-policy/ … they track what you watch, when you watch it, your location, your interactions with other apps. And they share this with... well, everyone basically.
This information is then used to market to you within the TV and offer you a "hot list"... but it is also used to "Detect, investigate and prevent fraudulent transactions and other illegal activities and protect the rights, safety and property of Samba and others"
If you have a "Smart TV" from any brand and it's doing an update you will 100% want to disable Samba.
Samba is not a feature for you, it is a snitch in your living room, snitching on everything you watch on your TV, it's a feature for corporations only.
To disable Samba the soft way... don't agree to their T&Cs post OS upgrade.
To disable Samba the hard way... use Android system settings to disable the app.
This is a good time to say that if you own a "Smart TV" from any company you should run it on a different network than your NAS and other computers. And that all other devices best require passwords to connect to them.
Ideally you run a TV on a different VLAN.
And this is where I wish that dumb panels were all the rage, and that the only "smart" functionality was external to the display itself. But when @netflix and other content providers decline the use of their apps outside of integrated devices this is the hell we live in.
I really wish that @Google provided a TV box that was the full Android TV, but that was vanilla Google with the ability to install @netflix, @BBCiPlayer, @mubi as apps. That I could just plug this into any display panel, including dumb displays.
Perhaps @Google could even call it Pixel TV.
I actually trust stock Android over Samsung, Sony, etc Android. Hence my "if we're going to have Android TV perhaps Google could supply it without the forced add-ons". I see this similar to installing Windows yourself rather than having "Windows with added vendor crap"... like if you know you want Windows, a stock one is better and same with Android.
I'm now looking at purchasing the Nvidia Shield and disabling all network connectivity on my Sony TV.
The Sony TV is a recent one, about a year old. A Bravia something or other. I have disabled the Samba app using the Android Apps system.
One thing I didn't include in the tweets was Samba's patent list, because it's too deep a topic for Twitter. The patent numbers are on their site though... go take a look: https://samba.tv/legal/patents/ Some of those are downright scary and have no positive application for privacy conscious users.
Feel free to ask anything.
The apps with rich capabilities are restricted to the platform.
Android is the one with them all.
(caveat on Amazon vs Google stupidity)
If it's doing some kind of "always scan WiFi in the background" shenanigans then it's still a computer slowly going out of date without security updates and occasionally exposing itself to the local area.
I wish I could take a "smart" TV and flip a switch and have it gracefully fall back to "dumb" TV where the Android device is physically disabled.
Edit: mainly cause they'd stopped working years ago...
Chromecast is basically a smart TV on a stick, controlled with a remote from smartphone (and partly, even the remote control of the TV). You can run a Chromecast wired as well. Same with Steam Link. It can run over wireless or wired.
I find on all of these wired far more reliable, and I keep more bandwidth for my wireless applications. Even my printer is wired. Then again, I got a 8 port gbit switch for connectivity and barely any wires visible.
The caveat is that my smart devices, although wired, are currently NOT on a VLAN, and that Chromecast is a data resource for Google, and as I mentioned the EPG data on the TV contains commercials. Instead of the Steam Link I could even just run a HDMI cable straight from computer. I can also plug in a Bluetooth USB adapter on my USB hub to listen via Bluetooth on the couch to the TV.
Other than that, its a great TV for its price. Make sure your TV has enough HDMI ports. You might also wanna have a look at Chromecast alternatives such as Miracast devices or Amazon Fire Stick (the ethernet adapter came free with Chromecast Ultra but for the other Chromecasts it costs 20 EUR extra).
I realize it's a bad solution, but that might work…unless it's "smart" enough to realize it has no connection and try other networks regardless…
https://www.apple.com/shop/question/answers/readonly/tag/app...
The only device that requires a SIM is an iPhone for obvious reasons.
How do I even turn off location services without breaking Android Device Manager?
I have location history off but I still get notifications from maps that say things like "X place you're at is popular, click here to see reviews or something"
1. You don't need to use Android Device Manager. Unlike iOS, Android gives you a choice of device finders.
2. Location services is different from location history. Location services is an AGPS service that does not track anything tied to your account. iOS does the same thing, and worse, used to send your location to a third party AGPS provider (Skyhook).
3. Google Maps is separate from location history. Google Maps on iOS will tell you to see reviews as well, and it is a setting in both. Unlike on iOS, on Android, you have a choice not to use the default maps application at all and instead use an entirely offline map.
The above three points when support my initial claim that Android is a better privacy-focused system than iOS.
If you turned off wifi so you think that would help?
So I'm selfishly asking if you could look up the version number of yours, so that I can identify mine and avoid updating it?
> Ideally you run a TV on a different VLAN.
Why don't you go with a pi instead of a shield ?
Also 4K and H.265/HEVC video support
And, sure enough, the libraries have gone downhill while the prices have gone up, and my money seems to just be going to lawyers and technology to ever-more lock things down, while content is balkanized to maximize what I've come to consider rent-seeking.
I'm not interested in a "smart TV". I want good hardware with a lot of hardware connectivity -- preferably open connectivity, but that ship has already sailed in good part. Nonetheless, connectivity I set up and control.
If I'm going to stream, it's going to be out of a separate box, that I can segregate and replace when it's warranted.
If I can get off my duff and do it, it's time for me to stop paying for streaming content and put the money instead towards purchases where I end up with a physical copy, more or less in perpetuity. If, because the media degrade or the playback devices abandon functionality or get more locked down, the lifespan of what I've purchased is limited, I no longer have any qualms -- other than "lead pipe" law enforcement -- about breaking protections and making a sustainable copy.
I feel like a sucker for having put my money into a system that perpetuates these schemes, for too long.
Time to hit eBay for those boxes of DVD's I've heard about, before everyone else catches on and they dry up.
My parents have a somewhat older "smart TV" -- Samsung. Recently, it received an OS update. The UI responsiveness did pick up -- it was halfway abysmal, before. But the picture quality took a major hit. (I'll let Dad fuss with that, as is his wont, if he gets around to it. He doesn't use that TV much.)
This just reinforced for me, that you can't trust these updates nor the software on these things. If it works well as a display device, keep it unconnected and so "dumb" and just pipe stuff in over HDMI.
By the way, it was on a separate "friends" subnet that their wireless router provides. But performance seemed marginal, at times, so it ended up on an Ethernet cable. The router only has physical ports on the main subnet; there went that protection. Ironically, after the OS update, it defaulted to the wireless connection and seemed to perform significantly better with it. It got switched back to the Ethernet connection, but maybe they should undo that, now.
Really with all this stuff, it's coming down to the very basic... "truism", it's proving to be: If they can, they will.
It's up to us, individual users and consumers, to stop them. No one else is.
Preferably, no one would ever purchase a smart TV. When smart TV sales go to zero, the makers would get the message.
Sadly, too many folks don't know, or if they do know, they don't care.
Ok, snark aside, what if the makers of Smart TVs call them "platforms," and they get a subsidy for bundling apps, and maybe even a revenue stream from people who sign up for things like Netflix through the TV?
Again, they will be able to make a cheaper TV if there's more money in apps than margin on hardware.
This is analogous to the situation with phones. For most companies, there's more money in the telecommunications service than in the hardware margin, so most phones are subsidized by the service providers.
So-called television is going there: It's just a platform for advertising, tracking, and services that generate revenue on subscription. This is going to relentlessly drive hardware margins deep into the negative, which makes it impossible to sell a "dumb" display for a reasonable price.
I fully expect that it won't be long before leaving a smart TV unconnected to the internet won't be an option: They won't work unless they can phone home.
Samsung's partners don't want you hooking a 4K TV up to an AppleTV and routing around their platform in favour of Apple's app store, not if you bought that TV at a discount thanks to their subsidies.
You can bet Sony didn't put this app on the TV because they wanted to give consumers an improved experience for free out of the goodness of their hearts.
If most people prefer the TV with 'more features' then they'll take it. The savings of using a dumb TV are probably not a lot, I'd ballpark it at $50. How many consumers are going to think "$50 dollars more to get netflix straigt on my TV? Great!".
Besides, that $50 advantage could well be lost in the smaller scale costs.
I did.
I couldn't find a non-smart TV. They are everywhere. If you want the 4k, then you have a smart TV.
The best alternatives were super large monitors (way over the price of a TV, and with no decent sound built in), or corporate display panels (for advertising, signage, etc) whose prices are also way above a TV and include no sound system at all.
Might be worth finding the network chips and disconnecting or breaking them off.
Now you're getting me paranoid.
From various places online, you can buy "scaler" boards that take HDMI/VGA/etc. to whatever interface the panel uses (LVDS is common), i.e. they comprise essentially all the electronics inside a standard non-smart monitor. They are intended for laptop display conversions but can drive much bigger displays too, as long as the interface is the same. That might be an alternative to buying a much more expensive "dumb TV", i.e. buy a smart TV and "dumb it down" yourself!
For example, this particular one is configured for an iPad's display but the sellers usually have other configurations available:
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/4K-eDP-HDMI-LVDS-Controller-...
Generally most modern TVs are gonna have a power supply, a main logic board, a display driver board and maybe another control board for stuff like backlights or sound. The logic board is basically gonna be an embedded mini computer running a full embedded OS that orchestrates the UI/smart features, decoding the inputs and generating the control signals for the panel driver. This will all be highly integrated on a single board, probably with almost all of the functionality in one or two main chips. Point being, you can't just yank out the smart stuff and still have a functioning TV. It'd be a bit like trying to remove a feature from a computer motherboard.
The ideal way to go about it would be to write your own firmware for the chips, but that's a practical impossibility because almost always there's no data publicly available on the chips or the other parts like the panel. You might also be able to get something working if the actual panel uses a standard interface, but it'll be a ton of work.
There aren't that many teardowns of televisions online that I can find, but this article has some to give you an idea.
https://www.techrepublic.com/pictures/cracking-open-the-55-s...
I also haven't been able to find a decent non-smart tv to no avail :(
https://forums.redflagdeals.com/rca-haier-avera-fluid-sylvan...
Consumer projectors have built-in sound but you'll still want to hook up surround sound. And if you care about hi-res that much, you'll want it on a nice big screen where you can see the difference. I project onto a 100" screen.
I wonder how big the market is for "dumb" TVs priced lower than smart ones --- given that the development costs, if any, for one would be much lower since you're basically just asking an OEM to combine existing parts (panels and electrics), perhaps it could be a startup opportunity to sell "the TV you watch" --- essentially big monitors with speakers and tuners and nothing else. Some things they could advertise:
Nevertheless, a dumb TV marketing to me like that evokes an immediate "take my money!" response.
The boot time is something that has irked me forever, and it seems the culprit is the HDMI protocol itself, so that wouldn't be improved either.
There a plenty of dumb 4K Blaupunkt TVs sold in Germany pretty much everywhere.
Specific models I don't know by heart.
Have you monitored it's network activity?
If not, how can you be certain the "disable menu" was not actually a placebo?
Or, hmmm... How about simply not buying that 4k if it is "smart".
The only feedback channel you have to the makers about your displeasure over the TV offerings is to simply not buy one.
They listen to nothing else. If the unit sells, they don't care about any other expressed dislikes (it sold, after-all). If the unit does not sell, and none of the units sell, only then do they listen.
But as I said at the outset, too few folks care enough to make a dent in their sales figures. So those of us who do care are left with simply not buying a new TV.
https://gist.github.com/peteryates/b44b70d19ccd52f62d66cdd4b...
Prices, though, are usually higher than TVs.
Exactly. A commercial display / signage display is indeed what you need to buy if you want a "dumb" TV.
Not only are they as dumb as dumb gets but they are highly reliable and usually fairly rugged.
Many of them have an expansion card slot which allows you to change the inputs - you could remove your 2x HDMI card and insert an SCART card instead, for instance.
Finally, if you get a video wall model, you'll get near-zero bezel.
They're not that expensive - how could they be if they are being purchased twelve at a time for display walls ? Yes, they are more than $399 + mail-in rebate from Frys.
It's worth it.
Disregarding the fucking awful campaign against them because some 3rd party developers make piracy-focused add-ons, as someone who never owned a smart TV, Kodi seems pretty feature-compatible.
I could be totally off though.
The only thing to gain from "smart tvs" are apps that can be controlled w/ the TV remote, if you're privacy coincious, you should know by now that it will take a bit of effort to secure your data.
I plug my TV into Ethernet to update it and disconnect it immediately.
Not much of a solution since it will never happen. The best TV's are "smart", and people like nice things, myself included. You're much better of simply never connecting them to the internet. They get the same message and you don't limit yourself to a small set of poor options.
If by "they" you mean the manufacturers, no they don't get the "same message".
The message they (makers) got was: "A smart TV sold". They interpret that to mean "purchaser wanted a smart TV".
The makers are not tracking that statistic (number of units sold that were not connected to the internet). They don't care if you connect it to the internet or not. Anything that happens after the initial sale (beyond returns and warranty repairs) is simply irrelevant to them, because there is zero income stream (unless they are charging an 'upgrade fee' later for something).
They care only about that initial sale. The only feedback channel they listen to is "units sold".
But too many people are addicted to the upgrade cycle and as a result not enough will simply turn away and say "no thanks, I'll stick with my dumb TV" (or go hunt down those few dumb TV's that still exist, so the sales numbers shift to dumb TV's).
That is absolutely wrong. They are making money off of the data; of course they care! That's the whole point!
I feel like you should mention that in your bio, it's not standard and breaks conversations. People should know that they should cite you if they want something to be preserved in conversations or when linking.
So - why are you using Twitter at all if you want to delete stuff so quickly?
You sound the kind of chap who would much prefer their own platform. Heard of these things called "blogs"?
Aaaaand it went away.
Walled gardens are always going to be a massive vulnerability for link rot.
In any case, if Twitter allows posy deletion, then it's standard. You may consider deleting bad form, but that's just another case of someone's perception of a platform not matching reality.
The internet makes it hard to definitively remove something, but a large percentage has already been lost to churn and bit rot due to lack of care.
Cool URIs don't change and all that... Thank heavens for the Internet Archive.
I haven't bothered to examine how it works, but if you can do that and you have a disaster recovery plan that replicates your entire output to a different service (e.g. GitHub Pages) while retaining the link structure, then perhaps Medium is now superior to Posterous's original offering.
The last time I googled it they had it discontinued this option.
I purge content from my law firm website all the time.
I completely trash and start over my personal website every few years, too, and I've never kept anything in a purge. I have personal archives of it, and the various archiving sites have been snapshotting my stuff since 1999, so, meh, if anyone wants to find my old work product, there's a way, without me having to archive it all for the whole world for all eternity.
Sometimes it's nice to start over.
I like to purge my real life too. De-cluttering is fun. My zen would be to have nothing left.
Regarding link rot, the walled garden comment above/below is spot on. When you're dealing with a bunch of walled gardens, link rot is so far unavoidable.
There is a huge difference in not valueing material property as high and not having anything left. I would figure out that difference before reaching the goal.
If people are worried about that they shouldn't be relying on a third-party (twitter) for record keeping.
Do you mean Chromecast? You can just plug it into your TV's hdmi port and use netflix/youtube/twitch/mubi android apps to control your streams on TV.
Now I know the Shield exists that's what I'll be doing.
Without thinking about it I configured my current TV to join my wifi network. After it so kindly started putting ads on the screen while watching things I turned it off. A few months later, ads again. Somewhere in the bowels of the settings the wifi was reenabled, so I shut it off. A few months later, more ads. In a new place in the settings it was back on. Repeat a few more times.
Changed my wifi password and that took care of that.
Do they have a in-hardware or in-app purchase to remove the ads? <- That would be a horrible trend to start.
Then I started disabling my wifi and that kept magically re-enabling.
And that's the point I took the nuclear option.
Same experience as https://us.community.samsung.com/t5/TVs/Annoying-notificatio... but with a different notification.
I don't think I'll buy a Samsung TV again after that, and I don't connect any TV to the internet anymore.
> But when @netflix and other content providers decline the use of their apps outside of integrated devices this is the hell we live in.
I don't understand. I can just open a web browser on a little media center PC, connect it by HDMI, point it to Netflix and play a movie, right? (Admittedly I haven't tried because our Panasonic has Netflix and no ads or spy apps that I've noticed)
But what exactly does Netflix forbid that @buro9 is referring to? And does anyone know what their reasoning is for doing so?
I ask because I'm rather interested in the concept of buying a dumb TV once this one breaks (hopefully long from now), but I do like me my Netflix. Lots of people in this thread suggest buying a dumb TV but I don't understand why Netflix and friends would disallow customers using that.
Samba have patents for how to communicate and track across the boundaries of security sandboxes for example.
Whereas Netflix on my Android that has NetGuard really is just talking to netflix.com and apparently not doing anything else bad.
I have zero expectations that an app won't track in-app use for that app... but Samba is (with the consent of the hardware provider who owns the local instance of Android) tracking everything it can across apps.
The result is that the higher quality content is only available on apps on closed platforms.
So if you got a dumb panel and wanted high definition content, you'd still need to hook up something like the Nvidia Shield... essentially a closed platform (Android again in this instance).
Fortunately I'm the opposite of a videophile - I don't even know how High the Definition of our TV is. But I see your point, so indeed, a 4k dumb TV won't be able to show most Netflix content in 4k, correct? That's a major shame and pretty ridiculous.
edit: I just noticed that Netflix actually supports UHD on the Windows 10 app and on Microsoft Edge[0]. So running Windows on the media center PC appears to be a practical option.
[0] https://help.netflix.com/en/node/13444
Still a closed platform :)
It's the DRM problem. They insist on these limitations as an anti-piracy measure. Fundamentally the only way to decode 4k in real time is to pass it fairly-unmodified to the video hardware, and at that point in a non-closed system a driver could steal it. Or just record it off the screen from the inside.
Sure, but not a smart TV and that's the part I personally care the most about. I doubt Microsoft, even with all their telemetry nonsense, will ever include something as ridiculous as samba.tv. Also, they employ more than 0 UI designers.
Thanks for the explanation btw. So it's basically the 4k video version of copy-protected CD's. And that was a great idea that totally worked!
Pleasant surprise:
Microsoft Store -> "..." button -> My Library.
I had it running on my second monitor as background noise while I was working on a project
Every time I'd use Alt+Tab, the entire window would go black. Presumably as part of its inane DRM
Unfortunately, the only way to get it to work again was to close and relaunch the entire app!
Is there even such a thing ? Honest question, because i looked for a "dumb" 4K with HDR10 support TV and i haven't found anything.
Which the insane video card prices recently getting 4K output is an expensive issue.
1080p is by far "good enough" to watch anything on TV, IMO.
I re-watched a couple of episodes of "Friends" recently (apparently the series is now available on Netflix) at a couple of friends' house, on a huge tv set, and I had a totally different experience compared to what I remembered from last watching the episodes ~15 years ago because I could only focus on looking at the actresses' faces, asking myself: "Did Monica's face really looked like that? Did Phoebe's?". I'll stick with 1080 or even with 780 from now on.
I'm specifying hardware too because of HDCP - you can't just connect it to some random monitor because it might not support 'DRM for monitors'.
If you used a DVI cable you could indeed do that. But HDMI was pushed and pushed and pushed and pushed despite no real benefit (having sound and video separate is an ADVANTAGE if you want to easily handle sound with different hardware..)
and now, well, you can't.
The number of people with dedicated audio equipment is too great for any TV manufacturer to break this.
Why though? If you're concerned about privacy and freedom (as you should well be) then why jump out of the fire into the frying pan? Grab a dumb TV, grab a small form-factor PC (like an RPi) and install whatever you want on it (kodi, etc.)
Learned my lesson a few years ago when my 3,000+ Samsung tv decided one day they were going to spam advertisements for GameStop in the notifications. Of course they deny that ever happened but I have proof on my twitter. Too lazy to look it up right now though.
The tv's never been updated since I bought it, never configured wifi and there isn't any open wifi around for it to try to connect to.
Smart tv's aren't smart enough to come with their own internet connection... yet. God I hope they don't put something like cellular connections in these things, then I'd have to find the damn radio and desolder the antennae.
for example,
did you know that when you purchase an ebook using kindle software amazon knows exactly what page you've read to and how long you've stayed on each page. They also know exactly what books you have purchased.
Or
Did you know that whenever you use a smart tv app that every time you "hover" over a tv show an event is logged that you hovered over it? Same with every click and every time you rent a movie.
This all seems pretty scary but these services could not function without this information.
Why does Kindle NEED to know how long I've stayed on each page?
Why does a smart TV NEED to store hover events in a persistent DB?
It doesn't, but every page turn event has a time stamp. Using that info it's pretty easy to know how long someone has been on a page.
>Why does a smart TV NEED to store hover events in a persistent DB?
When the company is doing AB testing to decide on the optimal page layout this information is important.
Yea :'( That's why i always purchase ebooks with my Laptop, then use Calibre + DeDrm plugin to send the ebook to my Kindle through usb. Also, my kindle is ALWAYS in airplain mode and has never been connected to any wifi.
It's so sad we are forced to do these things, and most people probably don't even realise they are being spied on and have their info/profile sold...
By the way, i hope my Pi-hole blocks all the smarttv trackers... but i'm not sure.
I don't consider my Kindle Paperwhite as an always-on tracking-my-reading device, I consider it as an e-ink screen that I can transfer my books to via USB.
I still buy books from Amazon, but that's because I know how to de-DRM them, which is something I don't know how to do with books from... for example, Microsoft Store, or Google Play Books.
I don't own a smart TV because I don't need a TV at all, I need a screen to plug an HDMI cable into.
I don't own Alexa / Google Home because fuck that.
I've refused to own a smartphone until August 2016.
There was also the Nexus Q a while ago but that was before Android TV and also a massive failure.
Could you not simply turn off WiFi on your smart TV and use an external device anyway?
...you should turn that crap off and replace it with a Roku, Apple TV, Fire TV, or anything else external. The Amazon app on our Vizio was so out of date that it literally couldn't connect to Amazon's API. Later updates fixed Amazon but enabled some flat-out 1984 level spying: https://consumerist.com/2015/11/09/vizio-smart-tvs-are-watch... . That's when I hard reset the TV, banned its MAC from our Wi-Fi, and started treating it exclusively as a dumb display for other devices.
Under no circumstances would I give any smart TV Internet access. It's not that I have great trust for any of the settop box manufacturers (although Apple's been doing a great job here), but I actively distrust all TV manufacturers.
I totally agree, though my only exception is for Roku TV devices. They're essentially a flat-panel LCD with a Roku permanently stuck in the case with software that supports different inputs as "apps." I've been doing some packet sniffing and, so far as I can see, my TCL Roku TV doesn't do anything different on the wire that my Roku Premiere does.
Just from a couple months ago: "And that’s where streaming TV company Roku comes in. Today, the company is introducing a new measurement suite called Roku Ad Insights that lets brands and agencies measure how effective their marketing is on OTT in four ways."
You really should assume that any app you run on any device is gathering data about what you are doing. Could be used in house and/or sold to third parties.
Serious question: so what? Lots of things don’t benefit me. Lots of things benefit corporations only. Why am I supposed to get outraged by this?
Samba.tv is... Something else. It has nothing to do with us.
>"Infringement may occur when one party, the 'infringer', uses a trademark which is identical or confusingly similar to a trademark owned by another party, in relation to products or services which are identical or similar to the products or services which the registration covers"
this basically means that in order to have an infringement case, you need to show that both the name/brand/logo are confusingly similar, and also that the product/service/domain are close enough to each other. I don't know that "software" is a sufficiently narrow category to count.
(I'm imagining an a scenario in which an elderly version of myself becomes confused...
Me: "Honey, I think we should watch a movie over the samba!".
My elderly wife: "Did you mean the samba on the smart TV, or the samba on the PC?"
Me: Dag Nabbit!)
"Oooooh, some sort of media centre software based on samba? Count me in. Oh, wait ... :("
Admittedly, a few seconds of thinking made me realise they'd never do that... but it's easy to see why people are getting confused, which is EXACTLY where Trademark stuff comes in.
(BTW, I do really appreciate all the work done on samba over the past few decades, so thanks!).
If nothing else my SEWER VLAN has a very strange view of DNS (thanks pfBlocker) and a rather limited view of the internet as a whole.
Squid docs on Bump etc: https://wiki.squid-cache.org/Features/SslPeekAndSplice
In what way do they force you to use it?
2. I can not fathom why anyone would connect their "smart" TV to the network at all.
By opting out of our service, we will no longer collect your TV viewing information, and our functionality we’ve built to enhance your TV experience – like content recommendations – will be disabled.
We believe there is a need for more guidance to discover new shows or be notified when a new season of your favorite shows come out. We also believe there is a need for better insights to guide the media industry, which is stuck with an antiquated system of measuring TV broadcasts. Our apps may not be for everyone, so when you disable Samba TV, your viewership data is not used in our media research or ad targeting offerings.
As far as advertising, we like the privacy model Apple has for iOS: If you want to continue using the functionality, but prefer your data not be used for advertising, you may reset your advertising ID and/or choose to limit ad tracking at any time through your TV settings. Your Samba TV advertising ID is a device ID used to serve targeted ads. By resetting this advertising ID, we will remove the link between your Samba TV advertising profile and the content you previously watched, so interest-based advertisements will not be served based on such content. Limiting ad tracking will opt your Samba TV Advertising ID out of receiving targeted advertising based on your TV usage.
I actually will probably trust Facebook again once they have been suitably thrashed over past deeds and have had time to reflect on what went wrong.
Both companies will eventually become privacy conscious by necessity and have the resources (hopefully) to enforce it internally.
If they don't then the next revelation or the one after that might be their death knell.
What Facebook and Google lose in (pretty much entirely self-imposed, for now) regulations, they gain in the ability to index against all of your other activity, everywhere.
The scrappy startup has only one data point on you, and has to work with others to make it useful (which, with GDPR will be a lot harder to do).
He is basically asking to be spied in a different way, just like his cellphone does.
The doomsday scenario is if we have tons of little pop-up 3rd party data collectors that fail at infosec and produce datasets that become public knowledge via leaks and can be cross-referenced for all eternity.