I imagine the thinking is that if the TV is not connected to any WiFi, it might try to connect to something public or non-password protected neighbornet so it’s better to connect it to something non-functional rather than unconnected. Of course, the TV could just lie about what it’s doing anyway...
It'd be safer to do firewall blocking, since the TV could fall back to a well known public resolver (i.e. 8.8.8.8) or even do DNS over HTTPS to a known Samsung IP.
Though blocking is a little harder if you want to use built-in apps of the TV (i.e. Netflix) while blocking it from sending viewing data to Samsung or its affiliates.
Though if you really want to keep the TV from spying on you, the easiest thing to do is to just not connect it to the internet (which is still an option in these pre-5G days, not sure that will always be the case in the future, the TV may have a built-in 5G modem that it can use to talk back to the manufacturer)
And what do you do if the screenshots get uploaded to the same domain as the other API endpoints needed for smart TV functionality? At that point your only option would be to disconnect from the internet directly.
How did we go from a country that made it a crime to share video rental records to one where everything you watch is constantly monitored and monetized?
It's not even a free problem, it's general pricing. Companies constantly seek ways to increase profits, while customers constantly seek bargain basement pricing.Electronic privacy is not a problem people have dealt with at large, I think. People also often view the competency of corporations much higher than the HN crowd typically does.
I think this is the same for any category of information though. Informed people will heavily advise against things that the public just has no idea on. Health is a big one.
My question is what can we do aside from running around in panic? It feels hopeless.
Consumers don't care about these schemes because they largely don't know the details.
There should be clear, tobacco-esque disclosure requirements of this sort of thing on the product packaging.
If Samsung et al. want to data mine their customers in exchange for lower pricing, they're welcome to do so. What should not be legal is doing so and appearing the same as a company who does not do so.
I think it would make a difference if some TVs came with large stickers mandated on the box, advertising, and included within, that said:
"THIS TELEVISION MONITORS ALL OF YOUR VIEWING HABITS AND THE DATA IS SOLD FOR PROFIT. ANY TIME IT IS USED, THE PROGRAM BEING WATCHED IS SENT TO THE MANUFACTURER. IF YOU DECLINE TO BE MONITORED, YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO RETURN IT FOR 30 DAYS FROM DATE OF PURCHASE AT NO CHARGE TO YOU."
I apologize for being dense. Are you saying that informed people will advise against health? I think you meant something different but I’m too dense to understand.
Nah, I just brought up Health as a general topic - one that has a deep pool of knowledge, more than a typical person even remotely knows, and also one that the experts in it's subfields advise against all sorts of things. What to eat, how much to drink, how much to exercise. My step mother didn't even know what a carb was, which I thought was basic understanding on food intake. So I used health as an example of a field where:
1. there is a lot of knowledge
2. the ramifications of not knowing things in that field are fairly high.
3. is a common source of experts advising the public do things differently. Eat less, exercise more, etc.
Which I think is somewhat the case here with Privacy and Information Tech. It's a problem that affects the public to some degree of severity, but "they" seem largely unaware of it.
Nothing to hide mentality ignores why America has a Bill of Rights. Becuase the moment you give a government too much control you have no rights. We are slowly working towards this. Little by little our rights are taken away.
It’s really hard for people realize the effects of something that could potential harm them in the future. Future self Vs present self, present always wins.
Nothing is free. People don’t realize that google being free is because, let’s say, Samsung pays Google for ads. And Samsung passes it on to customers. Lo and behold, your phone purchase pays for Google. (This is simplistic but I’m using it as an example of hidden costs. Advertisers could potential still spend the money elsewhere or keep it as profits)
I pay for a ton of products and services that still siphon my private data and serve me ads. The problem is that companies will try to squeeze as much value as they can out of their customers, whether they pay or not.
> During debate over his nomination, Bork's video rental history was leaked to the press. His video rental history was unremarkable, and included such harmless titles as A Day at the Races, Ruthless People, and The Man Who Knew Too Much. Writer Michael Dolan, who obtained a copy of the hand-written list of rentals, wrote about it for the Washington City Paper.[36] Dolan justified accessing the list on the ground that Bork himself had stated that Americans had only such privacy rights as afforded them by direct legislation. The incident led to the enactment of the 1988 Video Privacy Protection Act.[37][38]
Somehow it will. Not sure when. I tire of Amazon giving me ads to things I already bought. Like someone told me they bought something you usually only buy one of like... Random example: a new toilet or something... No I dont need another one the replacement one was fine enough thank you!
Or worse, you’re looking to sell something that you’d only need once in your life (eg: a PS4), so you list it on eBay, but now you’re getting non-stop ads to buy one.
Given everything amazon has on offer in the way of machine learning etc. is their algorithm for promoting items you might want to buy as simplistic as "I see you bought a pair of running shoes! Perhaps you might want another pair of running shoes?".
What's worse is the blatent lie of "frequently bought together", where they tell you that people frequently buy three different models of the same item, often different brands. It's like, Amazon thinks that people are completely gullible idiots. Then again . . .
It takes a little longer every time someone implies ad blockers are “stealing” or that it’s all ok because “it’s the model”. I completely refuse both of these ideas.
If "their day comes" and we still don't have a cultural shift that involves paying anyone for content except the largest tech companies (e.g. Netflix), then we'll be even worse off.
Though, that Patreon has any traction at all suggests that a shift is happening or at least becoming feasible.
I'm not sure what the alternative is. You can pick up a newspaper for 20p,or a "quality" newspaper for 50p (UK rates). Would I pay 50p a day to browse a news site? At the moment, no, because I can get my news for free elsewhere, with similar political alignment. I feel like I would pay something for really, really good curation and aggregation of news I'm interested in. But not all the time.
It seems subscription is the only alternative to free and I don't want endless subscriptions to news (be it tech news or what's going on in the world). Because it all adds up. I want to be able to buy stories/news etc. ad hoc as I do/did a newspaper rather than being committed to a month subscription where I may not take advantage of it all the time.
Spotify is an example of a service I use frequently but probably don't use it every day and as such I sometimes unsubscribe from it. I'd love to be able to subscribe to it when I'm using it. Say 25p/30c a day (or less ideally).
Sure it may end up coming out costing me more than a monthly subscription but some months it wouldn't because I don't use it all the time.
I'm all for paying for content but all these subscriptions add up.
AWS has got it figured out, to a degree - more so than media companies. Charge for usage.
Except this is the case where users have made a large cash purchase, and so have the realistic expectation that they are the paying customer and not a pair of eyeballs to be sold to the highest bidder.
It depends on whether they are able to cement their "right to exist" as a business model through regulatory capture and other sorts of bullying as is the case with for-profit medical insurers and car dealerships and likely many other things I'm not thinking of.
The Samsung TV is a physical object that you purchase. It might be true that you don't own the software running on the TV, but you at least own the TV.
After I've moved to Firefox and installed lots of ad-blocking plugins, enacted privacy settings and GDPR options everywhere available and uninstalled mobile native apps (ie. FB, Twitter), I felt like I had defused the whole data-collection-to-advertising lifecycle. By not seeing ads, no matter what Samsung collects, I would be safe or at least disruptively useless for them... until Samsung showed me a small, targeted ad through their TV UI. Resistance is futile.
No, laws are not made by convenience. They are made by lawmakers who in turn are influenced by lobbyists. That is why it was illegal to share video rental records and that is why it is not illegal to monitor and monetize your private data.
Fair enough, that's another good name for it. Lobbying is legalized corruption in many ways, especially in those fields where the politicians of today are the industry captains and lobbyists of tomorrow and vice-versa. This incestuous relationship is the root of much that is evil.
Correction: if you want a regulatory law of any kind, you'll have to compromise a congressman to a greater extent than existing foreign and corporate interests have already compromised said congressman.
I suspect someone will hack together a WiFi-derived radar, combine it with a bunch of laser microphones, and point the result at the homes of politicians to get pose, heart rate, breathing rate, and room-by-room sound recordings.
Slight correction; it was John Tower, a potential Defense Secretary nominee whose nomination was scuttled when a local paper got hold of his video rental records. He wasn't in congress at the time.
Actually Robert Bork, and I misremembered : not actually compromising, but worse, a reporter being a smart Alec. Bork had asserted that there was no right to privacy so a reporter set out to demonstrate that invading his privacy would upset him.
I don't know the specifics of this case... but back then, video rental stores did big business renting porn. That definitely could ruin a career or two, especially in those days.
Until recently, Supreme Court nominees tended to sail through congressional approval even when the President who nominates candidates was different from the majority party that approves them. Bork was the first one in a long time who was rejected by the Democrats.
But note that Bork was not a mainline candidate -- he had some significant baggage and was well outside the legal mainstream in his opinions on privacy. It was that latter thing that sank Bork, who held that there is no guarantee of privacy.
The baggage was related to Watergate. When it became apparent to Nixon that Watergate was going to sink him, Nixon tried to get the special prosecutor dismissed. Nobody would do it, except Bork:
> Richard Nixon ordered Attorney General Elliot Richardson to fire independent special prosecutor Archibald Cox; Richardson refused and resigned effective immediately. Nixon then ordered Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus to fire Cox; Ruckelshaus refused, and also resigned. Nixon then ordered the third-most-senior official at the Justice Department, Solicitor General Robert Bork, to fire Cox. Bork considered resigning, but instead carried out the dismissal as Nixon asked.
Slight correction; it was not John Tower (and I'm curious how you mistook the two), it was Robert Bork. He was nominated for the Supreme Court by Ronald Reagan. His video rental history was obtained by Michael Dolan. His nomination was rejected by the Senate, but it wasn't necessarily over his video rental history because the videos he rented were entirely unremarkable. However, it brought up questions of privacy and resulted in the Video Privacy Protection Act of 1988.
EDIT: I should add that accessing his video rental history was used as an example and a counter to Bork's own anti-privacy position, which is probably the real reason his nomination was rejected (although I can't say for sure since I'm no expert in this stuff and this all happened before I was even born)
You'll find the info at the following link under the "U.S. Supreme Court Nomination" section:
No problem! I went to the wikipedia article you linked and didn't see any mention of the video rental records, so I got curious and tried to look it up and couldn't find anything until I looked up the privacy act, which led me to Bork. That was the only reason I was curious how the two were mistaken as I am not knowledgeable in the slightest about these things. I just like to trek down the rabbit holes others provide and try to pay it forward with any corrections I stumble upon.
Huh, I was thinking that it was going to reveal porn or some-such... but nope
>During debate over his nomination, Bork's video rental history was leaked to the press. His video rental history was unremarkable, and included such harmless titles as A Day at the Races, Ruthless People, and The Man Who Knew Too Much. Writer Michael Dolan, who obtained a copy of the hand-written list of rentals, wrote about it for the Washington City Paper.[36] Dolan justified accessing the list on the ground that Bork himself had stated that Americans had only such privacy rights as afforded them by direct legislation. The incident led to the enactment of the 1988 Video Privacy Protection Act.[37][38]
>To pro-choice rights legal groups, Bork's originalist views and his belief that the Constitution did not contain a general "right to privacy" were viewed as a clear signal that, should he become a justice of the Supreme Court, he would vote to reverse the Court's 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade. Accordingly, a large number of groups mobilized to press for Bork's rejection, and the resulting 1987 Senate confirmation hearings became an intensely partisan battle.
Borks also the origin of the term “Borked” since he was candid in his answers about constitutional policy and this cost him nomination and is now why Supreme Court nominees are more opaque with what they say vs what they think.
I think carrying out Nixon’s Saturday Night Massacre to cover up his numerous watergate crimes was a bigger factor in the failed nomination.. but he certainly did turn into a focus of a lot of grievance.
> Obstruct (someone, especially a candidate for public office) by systematically defaming or vilifying them.
> Origin
> 1980s from the name of Robert Bork (1927–2012), an American judge whose nomination to the Supreme Court (1987) was rejected following unfavourable publicity for his allegedly extreme views.
It would seem strange that a political etymology had a specific impact on the computing world. But the mistype of broken as "borken", and further mis-grammaring to borked would seem consistent with the humour of computing people IME.
The use in computer circles is also just one of "generally broken" (or utterly broken, perhaps) rather than "politically discreditted". I think they might be just coincidental homonyms.
I mean, that's pretty much how the system is _supposed_ to work, right? You want a law passed, you convince one of your duly elected representative to propose the law, get it passed through both houses and signed by the president.
Now maybe actively attacking members of congress isn't the most forthright way of convincing them that a law against that specific attack is a good idea, but assuming you can do it legally (such that the only way any future such attacks could be prosecuted would be if a new law were created to make the attack illegal) it does seem like like a rather effective approach.
You don't really need to do anything illegal. Just wait for the next data leak from hacked Samsung servers and the member of congress' data may just show up among millions of records on a torrent site.
That's the clear and present danger here, not that businesses and their data scientists are having a field day with your personal life, but that they are sloppy and you, your data and your community are vulnerable to irreparable damage being inflicted by bad actors downstream.
Tasks versus goals, same as always. It's exactly the same as the question of why it was once recommended to carry a rifle for safety when traveling from St. Louis to Portland, and now it's recommended you leave it at home.
The goal was always to make corporations money. The task necessary to accomplish this goal just happened to flip.
You can disable this feature, but of course you have to trust the manufacturer that it’s actually disabled. And if the manufacturer were trustworthy, they wouldn’t be doing things like this to begin with.
> In computing, a firewall is a network security system that monitors and controls incoming and outgoing network traffic based on predetermined security rules. A firewall typically establishes a barrier between a trusted internal network and untrusted external network, such as the Internet.
> I was trying to joke here. The untrusted network in our case is the internal network. In that sense.
Sure, and I'm sorry to miss the joke; but I think that it's nothing new that the internal network is untrusted. Before one ever had connected and untrusted smart appliances, one still had untrusted software running on one's general-purpose computer, and it was (and remains) often desireable to fence off that software from the outside world. Little Snitch (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Snitch), for example, was designed around exactly that idea.
Isn't it third party from the tv vendor? I think that was the implied context. Although If you consider yourself as the vendor who built the device (did you really?) that would be first-party I guess.
If I do banking on my TV via an HTPC I've hooked up, e.g. lots of setups that have a TV as an external monitor, I don't want those being screenshot. TVs are used for a lot more than strictly TV.
Unlikely, because the third-party box probably uploads screenshots or does something equally noxious as well, if not today, then in the not-too-distant future.
Maybe? Depends on whether some Apple exec ever decides they need the revenue or not. For comparison, even Google's "Don't be evil" reputation only lasted about a decade or so.
Sure, Apple makes most of their money from the hardware, currently. When times get tough for Apple and they're in a situation where they need to look for more revenue (remember the MS bailout back in '97?), well, we'll see...
Stuff like this is the reason I don’t connect smart TVs to the internet. If I need web content on the TV, I can connect my laptop with HDMI. The TV should be no more than a display and speakers with a tuner.
But you could plug in a Roku or a Fire TV, right? The TV can't proxy through those. It's maybe cringeworthy to say, but I probably trust those companies more than I do Samsung.
This is not an argument, like not at all, it's just a distraction from the issue: Trampling all over user-rights because somewhere in hundreds of pages of ToS/EULA legal-speak there's a clause hidden supposedly justifying it all.
Here's some reality: "You’d Need 76 Work Days to Read All Your Privacy Policies Each Year" [0] and that was back in 2012. Since then ToS, EULA, Privacy Statement and whatnot have only expanded in scope, people use even more services these days and thus accept even more terms.
You'd need a dedicated law team doing all the reading and interpreting for you if you want to realistically stay informed about all that consent you've given, without having to give up large parts of your productivity just checking and tracing what weird things you supposedly agreed to [1].
There need to be some well-established limits that won't just rely on users supposedly hand-waving all their privacy away, that way the USG might actually even go back to honoring the Fourth Amendment [2].
Is a Windows PC really under your control nowadays? And if you connect your phone to the TV, you don't really even own those, even if you paid $1000 for your "phone". The manufacturers are the true owners unless you root them which is not always easy.
"The content I consume". When the fuck did people start actually talking about themselves like this, it sounds like it's straight out of a dystopian sci-fi novel from the 80s.
Can't confirm this myself, but in previous threads about similar topics, people noted that some of those "smart" devices probe every open WiFi they find and use that without your explicit consent. So it's not always possible to disconnect them.
That’s a legit concern. If Samsung made a deal with, say, Comcast to connect to the ever-present “xfinitywifi” SSID, then it wouldn’t matter if you’re blocking the sly TV from your own network.
That's a very valid concern, especially since most consumer-grade ISPs are in bed with the media industry and would be very interested in the tracking data from these TVs.
How does that solve anything? Your WiFi should already be password protected anyway. It's other people's routers with open networks you need to worry about.
The antenna will probably be inside the TV case and very difficult for the "average" user to try. They'd be too-scared to do so. Heck, I'd wager that a good chunk of electrical-minded individuals, even trained ones, would be scared of doing anything to their expensive device that requires them to open it.
Oh, it surely is. I'm lucky enough to be one of those trained people who can and does do such things (one reason my technology (laptops, TVs, etc) is old is because I continue to repair old stuff instead of getting new shiny).
With the exception of coffee shops and big box retailers, there aren't many unsecured networks left in even dense residential areas, so I'm unsure of how much impact this has.
Correct thing is to "connect" them to the internet but blackhole them so they cant actually talk to anything. It's what I've done and so far it's blocked a lot.
people noted that some of those "smart" devices probe every open WiFi they find
Given that this would potentially expose them to criminal liability under unauthorised access laws in various places, I have always been sceptical of this claim, and I have yet to see any convincing evidence that it actually happens. Does anyone know definitively that it does?
I've also found smart TV systems, especially Samsung's (this was quite a few years ago now), to be quite terrible. I would constantly have connectivity issues and app crashing issues. Now I have so many external devices (Apple TV, Roku, Chromecast, PS4) with all of the streaming apps that I will never buy a smart TV again.
Not only are the built ins awful. Their lifespan is very short. I had my Samsung for about a year before it would let me know that “XYZ service was ending in one month”.
Disconnected that thing from WiFi and have never hooked it back up. Xbox/PS are just far superior smart devices.
Soon enough, failure to connect your TV to the internet within, say, one month will void your warranty (and the TV will refuse to work in two months after that).
I run pi-hole and have a Samsung smart TV. How do I know that the Samsung DNS servers are being blocked? What prevents Samsung from registering new meaningless-sounding DNS names and continually pushing out TV software updates peddling “Security and bugfix” release notes?
Forget the Pi-hole, just don’t connect your TV to the internet. I have yet to see a smart-tv which work well enough and fast enough to be of any use anyway.
This is the exact reason I didn't buy a Samsung smart TV 2 weeks ago. My wife reminded me about ads, so I looked into using Pihole. It wasn't guaranteed to work, so I went with a brand that won't run ads on a TV I paid for. That is a big pet peeve of mine. I hate ads, and refuse to watch them if I pay. I don't pay for the privilege of viewing ads.
>How do I know that the Samsung DNS servers are being blocked?
Would have to know all of the domains that the TV connects through, that they're in one of pihole's blocklists, and the TV actually respects the DNS setting entirely and doesn't have any hard coded IP addresses
>What prevents Samsung from registering new meaningless-sounding DNS names and continually pushing out TV software updates peddling “Security and bugfix” release notes?
Nothing.
The real solution is to not connect any smart devices (especially stuff like TVs) to the internet as most are inherently untrustworthy.
Maybe a whitelisting system on a firewall would be more appropriate than a blacklisting system on something like pihole.
I made the mistake of buying a Samsung TV a few years ago. I created this guide[0] which gained some traction.
Also, I'm pretty sure they do upload something recognisable because one time (2-3 years ago) I accidentally pressed the 'social' button on the remote while I was watching premier league football on Sky Sports (via a separate satellite box) and the TV started showing me relevant tweets about the match.
Same issue. Once you enter subjective territory of what is good and what is bad, you are looking for troubles, especially if a for profit company is behind providing such a service. An obvious conflict of interest arises.
Most ISPs are also content providers, so they may not be able to based on contract agreements they have (e.g. to get the nbc app preinstalled on a roku, they cannot block xyz domains on any of their corporate networks)
They're either old stock (which means you wouldn't get new features like HDR, etc) or really low quality ones (which means you're compromising on display quality, reliability, etc).
> Just disconnect it from the network and keep a box plugged into HDMI1.
One would assume it'd be as simple as that, but apparently it ain't because many SmartTV's will jump trough quite a few loops to get online, like using nearby open Wifi.
At least there's been a bunch of stories like this in past HN discussions around SmartTV's.
There’s been plenty of discussions on HN about the possibilities of SmartTVs doing nefarious stuff but not a lot stuff in the wild.
Last time this came up someone was telling me the TV could get Ethernet from an HDMI cable via an AppleTV or Xbox etc. Stackexchange said the tech was dead and no one really adopted it. You can’t find a TV or even a cable that supports it.
Where do the discussions on HN, and Reddit [0], come from if it's not a thing in the wild? Granted: It's hard to search for because Google will bury any relevant results between a ton of support requests about people not being able to get their Samsung TV online.
Some functions of "smart" TVs are impossible to turn off, unfortunately. I personally don't like the FPS smoothing most modern TVs do, and for many there is no option to turn it off completely.
Motion smoothing was the first thing I turned off on my new LG TV when I got it this month. It’s a nice feature for sports, but it sucks for basically everything else - especially animation where everything turns into a hot mess.
This is a pet peeve of mine, walking into the house of a family member, business lobby, etc. and see awful looking video on the screen because they didn’t turn this garbage off.
Smart TVs are already cheaper. If you don’t connect it you are basically getting the rebate you should get because your information is sold, but without uploading your information. If this becomes common manufacturers will need to ensure this hole is closed. I suspect TVs will soon be sold with big rebates that can only be redeemed ON the tv itself once it’s been internet connected for some time.
On this note, I would suggest never connecting it to your network (it could secretly remember your wifi password). Maybe it's just a bug, but once in a while the my Samsung TV's usb connection is listed as the last used source. I've never connected anything to the usb connection and it's wall mounted above my desk (where my kids and wife would not be able to reach it so I know it's not them using it either). It could be a coincidence, but I have also not seen it do this since I changed the wifi password in the access point.
Needless to say, when I bought a new TV recently I never connected it to the network at all.
I’m sure the antennae will be impossible to physically disconnect as well. I really hoped we’d never get to Fahrenheit 451 but the wall to wall TVs that watch you are pretty close at hand.
Why terrible? Your own wifi would still work inside the cage, would it not? As would your Internet uplink over cable/fiber/DSL/whatever. The only downside would seem to be cell phone service, but you could just use VoIP and Wifi for that while inside the house.
The real downside of course would be the cost. Shit, maybe I'll need to get a real job again after all...
I'd like for just one of these people offering the "solution" of turning our homes into faraday cages to show us that they've actually done this with their homes.
Montag awakens ill the next morning. Mildred tries to care for her husband but finds herself more involved in the "parlor wall" entertainment in the living room – large televisions filling the walls.
Beatty recounts the history of how books lost their value and how the firemen were adapted for their current role: over the course of several decades, people began to embrace new media (in this case, film and television), sports, and an ever-quickening pace of life.
What makes 5G so much different than an LTE modem for this type of application? If they were going to do this why wouldn’t it already be happening with LTE.
While the higher frequencies (shorter wavelengthS) dont penetrate as well, they’re less likely to be impacted by obstructions because of narrower fresnel zones.
In other words, you don’t need your antennas to be as tall to get around curvature of earth (or that building in the way) with higher frequencies.
So one tall tower and a bunch of receivers on the ground in the desert: 5.8ghz is probably a better choice than 2.4.
Funny enough, 5G is not much better than 4G other than 1000x device density. There is no 1000x increase in population on the horizon, but IoThieves is around the corner.
Everyone is all hyped up about 5G and its "potential" for IoT which means carriers could offer cheaper plans making it viable for these devices to come with a cellular connection out of the box.
But I agree, on a technical level, 5G isn't necessary for this. In fact, given the low data rate and non-interactivity of it (it doesn't really matter if the screenshot takes 10 minutes to transfer) they could even get away with GPRS or EDGE.
The slower protocols usually get the more penetrating frequencies since they’re better optimized for getting a link in the first place.
I think the real push for 5G is that it could replace physical infrastructure and regulators only have policies for forcing availability of physical infrastructure. At least in Canada anyway.
I've literally never had a TV break or stop working. Ever. Especially with the new mass produced panels, what sort of Diagnostics or remote analysis could they POSSIBLY be doing?
That's sarcasm and/or corporate-speak, just like every software nowadays has telemetry and diagnostics and yet the quality of it is much lower than a decade ago before any of this BS. Just that if they called it by stalking and/or marketing tracking there would be an outcry, so "diagnostics" it is.
One of my TVs would regularly lock up when trying to decode a particular iffy signal over the air. In theory, a core dump could have helped fix that. In reality, that tv got zero updates.
Another tv had some bad joints on the panel, but remote diagnostics weren't going to help with big giant vertical lines.
With more than a hint of irony, the only TV I had 'break' was when Sony's telemetry server went down, and my Bravia TV failed to turn on. It wasn't until I happened to unplug the Ethernet cable that it suddenly started working again.
My dumb Samsung did way back in 2011. It was a POS and I vowed never to buy another Samsung TV ever again. This gives me further reason to hate Samsung.
I have a ham radio license. If/when this happens, I eagerly look forward to using what I’ve picked up to figure out how to kill this with fire. In all likelihood, a piece of thin metal plate taped to the case in the right place will probably be all that’s needed.
And then the next generation will have signed firmware that doesn't allow the device to start until the spy packets go out and the response is received.
We need to kill these companies and their business models. As fun as it is for smart people like us to perform one-off lobotomies, it doesn't solve the problem.
> And then the next generation will have signed firmware that doesn't allow the device to start until the spy packets go out and the response is received.
Some Chromecast products already won't function unless they can talk to Google DNS servers[1].
This assumes a certain (low) level of malicious intent. A fully malicious TV will connect to open WiFi nearby or use even more exotic methods to exfiltrate data.
In that case, the only hope you have is play the cat and mouse game and hope they give up before you do. Realistically though, they probably won't bother escalate past this point because the people who would go to such lengths are a tiny minority, and going after them don't make business sense.
>If you've got logic to connect to nearby open Wi-Fi, why wouldn't you also use it as a fallback if the primary Wi-Fi is down?
One idea to counter this would be to use something like this[1] to deauth the TV instantly, or spam a bunch of open networks so it gets stuck trying to connect to those rather than actually working ones.
The problem is that putting up with this doesn't actually send a message to the manufacturer that this is not OK, so they'll just keep doing this and perfecting their malware-like techniques until it's completely unblockable without some military-grade signal jamming equipment.
Even if it can be blocked, I don't recommend anyone buy these and look for alternatives (commercial displays, old second-hand ones, https://ironcast.tv, etc)
Getting a projector is a good option these days. They're cheap and can give you a home theater experience with easily twice that size. Just measured my setup and it ends up at ~130" diagonally.
There are limitations in the room you can use (not too bright, big white wall, good place to place the projector). But if you can manage it I strongly suggest it.
A TV whose "dumbness" is a selling point and not a drawback. Basically a monitor in a TV form-factor with a reasonably price (it's actually pretty cheap for its size and feature set) - at the moment the only other alternative to this is a commercial display which are priced at several thousands for this size, and even then I'm not sure any of them would offer 4k and HDR (since it's not really relevant for outdoor digital signage applications).
If your plasma dies, and it's not a problem with the panel itself, open the back and look at the various boards. Most flat panel TVs have 2-4 circuit boards in the back that are relatively easy to access and replace.
I had a top end 4K TV die last year just after the warranty ran out. It was going to be almost $100 to have the company repair guy look at it, then parts and potentially additional labor to fix it. I opened the back, did a bit of research and made an educated guess about which board was the problem (which was pretty easy based on the symptoms) and it turned out to be a $130 part that I found on ebay for $25 and I swapped it out within a few minutes.
It turns out there are half a dozen companies that strip down broken TVs and sell off the boards that are still good. That board had actually been through a few revisions since the original one I had, so now it runs even better than new. hehe
That's a really good question, as it is qualified by the '4k' requirement ...
It's very easy and relatively inexpensive to buy a 1920x10280 commercial display unit, such as the NEC p461, which you have probably seen 10k times in airports.
However, there is not much demand for 4k panels for videowalls since ... the videowall grows to larger than 4k resolution anyway just by virtue of being a wall of panels.
So, at this time, in 2019, it is difficult and very expensive to buy a commercial display panel (that is what you would search for) that is 4k.
If I had to find one I think I would probably get that Dell 43 Ultra HD 4K Multi Client Monitor (P4317Q) with the caveat that it is "only" 43 inches in size.
Unfortunately, the image quality of computer monitors pale in comparison to modern TVs. I recently switched from a Dell P4317Q to an old Samsung Q7 for my gaming monitor, and the quality (contrast, colors) improvement is profound, even without any HDR content. When we’re talking about HDR, they’re not even on the same playing field.
And that’s an old Samsung TV. On top of that, Samsung’s current flagships are among the worst TVs right now vs the competing major brands’ flagships (because all the best are now OLED, and Samsung is the only hold-out).
Even the improvement from a Samsung Q90 (which I had for a few weeks) to LG C9 OLED has to be seem to be believed. On some content, the improvement is drastic.
The technological progress of modern OLED TVs vs LED LCD is practically magical, when viewing good HDR content. If you go for an old panel for the sake of privacy, you’re either going to be sorely disappointed or blissfully ignorant of what your missing.
I would much rather buy a modern model and figure out how to disable the radios, if I was this worried about privacy.
I would lean the opposite direction. I switched from a Vizio TV to a 144hz ViewSonic monitor and the difference in gaming is night and day. It's not only a better image with better colors, deeper blacks, better looking sharpness and stronger brightness where it counts, but the ability to render up to 144hz is a gamechanger.
I never realized that 1080p60 would look better on a 144hz monitor than a television but everything is so crisp and smooth in games, it's honestly breathtaking with the right scene. I didn't realize that having a panel that can handle 144hz means that vertical sync is pointless, and for the games that I can actually render at 144hz, the effect is magical by comparison.
I find myself replaying more cinematic games (like say Witcher 3) on the new panel and it's like experiencing the magic of these scenes all over again for the first time.
I couldn't ever imagine going back to a television for gaming.
Sure, a bottom of the barrel TV vs a highly rated PC monitor is going to have a different outcome - no surprise, since that’s not a fair comparison.
Compare high end models in similar price ranges (as I have) and you’ll see what I’m talking about. For example: Compare an LG OLED in a dark room to any modern PC monitor, and I would be surprised if you were anything but blown away by the OLED, and appalled by how expensive these gaming monitors are compared to what a similarly priced OLED is capable of (especially now that LG OLEDs are capable of 120hz and variable refresh rate with input lag lower than many gaming monitors).
Of course, the main reason we don’t see everyone using OLED PC monitors are concerns about burn in effects from long term use. But for most people for TV and movie viewing, it’s not a concern. My 3 year old LG B6 OLED is still going strong with no signs of burn in, and has picture quality that still puts the best of the best non-OLED TVs to shame.
My experience with PC displays is almost the complete opposite... its the computer display that has the most accurate colors -- all the TVs I've played with ride the contrast waaay too hard, and if all the extra processing isn't disabled the picture looks worse
By any chance is your experience with TVs from Samsung, or bargain brands? Among the top tier brands (LG, Sony, Panasonic, Samsung) only Samsung is notorious for intentionally bad out of box calibration (because oversaturated colors is a cheap a easy way to impress, though in extended use you will tire of it quickly). I don’t know about the bargain brands like Vizio but I heard their latest stuff is pretty capable, though I don’t know if they have good calibration by default like the above mentioned brands do (minus Samsung).
Color calibration isn’t everything BTW. The contrast ratio modern TVs are capable is pretty much unrivaled by any modern computer monitor until relatively recently, and even now the only ones that come close cost many times the price of an equivalent TV.
But no monitor on the market can hold a candle to the image quality experience of an OLED TV for HDR movies and TV shows. This is not really under any dispute btw among audio video forums: virtually everyone admits that emissive technology like OLED has inherent quality advantages. The main debate centers purely around whether or not OLED burn in is likely to occur for various use cases.
If you haven’t experienced modern HDR content on a flagship TV (particularly OLED), you are missing out on something really special. No current PC monitor can even come close, except those that cost >2x the price of a modern 55” OLED TV.
Color accuracy is more important for me, I guess, and I have 99% sRGB coverage desktop LCDs to prove it. As for TVs I had a mid-tier 2013-ish Vizio 42" and a newer mid-tier 2017-ish Samsung 60" and both of them required a lot of tuning to get the color right. The Samsung does HDR and it does look nice, but again my priorities are color accuracy, low latency, and good contrast ratio (I do a lot of photo editing) and don't watch many movies or much TV.
I'm curious as to how a 10-bit display measures up, isn't HDR just a fancy standard for high-bit-rate color? Other than the backlight I imagine they'd still be superior.
I'd still prefer a giant computer display over a TV, if anything to avoid the various "smart" features and other value-adds, but to each their own I guess. I'll check out OLED TVs when I can but the demo reels they play are almost always blown-out contrast-wise and I can't stand images that feel like the saturation is set to max.
Yeah it’s hard to know how amazing modern OLEDs are from Best Buy demo reels, sadly. It’s something you have to experience in a dark room at home with good content to appreciate to the fullest.
BTW I highly recommend you do some research into HDR, and color gamut. I don’t think you know just how much you’re missing in terms of HDR, color gamut, contrast ratio, etc, that comes with modern TVs. Color gamut goes way beyond sRGB. Modern HDR TVs are far, far more than just “10 bit color”, and allow an express-able color gamut and color volume far beyond sRGB. A LG C9 achieves sound 99% DCIP3 color gamut and 75% REC2020.
To make a crude example, it’s kind of like 150% sRGB coverage, over a range from perfect black to extremely bright for each pixel individually, with enough precision for smooth gradients across these colors. These TVs can display colors that your sRGB monitor is physically incapable of reproducing, and they can display pixel by pixel contrast radios that allow realistic details and specular highlight brightness levels that cannot be done on regular LCD monitors or TVs. And it all absolutely shows in the picture quality when viewing recent movies/TV that are mastered well.
P.S. Stay away from Samsung if you care about color accuracy as I do. Sony and LG and Panasonic all have excellent color accuracy, and likely will be better than any PC monitor within twice it’s price. But Samsung not only comes out of box with horrible defaults, but actually CANNOT be correctly calibrated due to always-on tone mapping. Among videophiles, it’s well known that Samsung is not the way to go. But please don’t let Samsung’s overly flashy demos turn you off to the amazing technical abilities of modern TVs in general. Just because Samsung made arguably greedy marketing-driven design choices that cheapen and destroy the artistic accuracy of the content does not mean everyone else does too. Only Samsung does this as far as I’m aware, among the top brands.
If you want color accuracy, picture quality perfection, superior color gamut, contrast, HDR, AND low latency (0.1ms response time and overall input lag on par with dedicated gaming monitors), LG OLED is THE way to go.
Someone here mentioned recently that there are many dumb TVs sold as business/commercial displays. Haven't got one, but maybe that's something you can look into.
Walmart Online is selling a Spectre dumb panel (with good specs!) for $219 for 55” and $279 for 65”. Otherwise I love my LG OLED, which acts as a dumb panel until you accept the overbearing privacy policy (you can still play local DLNA/USB sources without accepting, but can’t run any apps including web browsers so no captive portals)
I went for the 55 and mine just arrived. technically speaking it's better than the TCL and HiSense I was looking at. can't complain for the price, it's bright and fast response. its not future proof, so don't expect 120hz and there's absolutely no features to write about (I don't think even HDMI-CEC volume control works :\)
but hey $219 got me a big ass panel that won't report my porn habits to the mothership
CDW still sells non smart TV versions of the latest and greatest from the manufacturers for environments that don’t want Samsung coming on the network.
Then they add some kind of display connectivity DRM like HDCP and suddenly all older dumb monitors are unable to connect to a newer device until someone figure out a way to break it.
DRM were never about protecting the content, it's all about control.
https://ironcast.tv maybe? I want to buy a new TV in the next few weeks and I'm really tempted, but worried about this being a Kickstarter project and the display quality not being up to par.
I'm looking for a new TV and I started with looking for a dumb TV but I came to the conclusion that 4k HDR isn't supported by Nvidia Shield for Youtube and Netflix.
Only option to get that is to use the built in smart features of the TV. So even using external boxes you don't get all the latest hardware support for video codecs.
As much as we want a Dump TV on HN, in terms of general market I would doubt even 5% of people are willing trade cheaper pricing, integrated Software experience for privacy.
Didn't you just answer your own question? The market for $5k+ televisions is pretty small, especially when they're unlikely to be better on paper than what you'd get for half the price from another brand.
Because Apple can command a premium. Something that very few brand ( if any ) does as well as Apple. At the same quality and price of high end high margin TV, you could bet Apple will sell more than Samsung or Sony.
I can't agree more, but the choice in dumb TVs is limited. In the end the best option seems to be a video projector, but I really dislike the image quality v.s. a panel.
You can try looking into commercial TVs (aka digital signage). These are displays with usually few smarts in them, and also designed to be on 24/7. You'll likely pay more than a regular consumer TV.
OK. I switched TV two months ago. I considered purchasing the biggest PC monitor and work it from there but the size threw me off. Ended up buying an LG TV because it seemed that WebOS was the best choice when it comes to performance. I use to have an expensive Sony Bravia TV powered by Android TV and that was the slowest experience I have had on a device since the 'bad Windows PC era' of ~2000 - ~2010.
If anyone in the TV industry is reading this, there is a market for dumb TV panels. Happy to pay a premium for that the same way I was happy to pay a premium to have 4k early on!
I think I read that Roku does this as well, and it does cause a lot of strange traffic on our network, which is why I want to get rid of our Roku. I'm considering replacing it with an Apple TV when a new version hits the streets.
At least Roku can only capture screenshots of content it's serving from itself. Not that I'm defending this practice in any way, but it's significantly less disturbing than my TV doing the same thing.
What if I'm using my TV to watch [homemade] porn, or browsing sensitive personal data on a PC connected to the TV, or something like that? Sounds like Samsung will get screenshots of all my content, regardless of what it is or which input it's coming through.
People like subsidized stuff. People who subsidize things like to do it only when they are paid more than the subsidies they give and they are paid based on who they subsidize because the people who are paying the subsidizers must go to the subsidized people and take their money for the subsidies.
It's a rock-solid business model with a requirement to know your customers, it's not going away unless a better alternative is invented.
This is specifically about privacy, which relates to targeting and tracking, not all ads. Most user data is completely useless to advertisers, but there is a mania for it right now. Perhaps it will end when ML people from CS backgrounds learn Bonferroni.
How I see it is an optimization problem about paying a downpayment to get your device and after that paying instalments through purchases of unrelated goods and services down the line.
The advertisement agencies are the creditors and the debt collectors and they try to optimize for accuracy of targeting. The more accurate they are the ticker is their margins.
Businesses don't leave money on the table. "Smart" features don't subsidize the purchase price, they just add to the margin. If companies tacitly collude to keep dumb TVs off the market, surveillance is a tide that will lift all of their boats.
But consumers are not being informed that they’ve bought a subsidized tv. For example, Several salespeople have told me in the past few weeks that none of their TVs serve ads. Looking deeper into the TVs the salesperson was clearly wrong. Few consumers even know to ask the question. Even fewer know that the sales guy is wrong.
And because these things will connect to any open WiFi network, you have to open them up and work over the networking components with a Dremel. Only then can you be really sure it doesn't fuck you over.
My Samsung asshole tv started showing banner ads overlayed on hdmi signals, already in... 2017 or so?
I bought 2 smart TVs recently and was able to turn all this BS off by simply not accepting the privacy policies during setup. Of course this means you can't use the built-in netflix apps or check for software updates or whatever but that's fine by me. I left both on my network for a period of time as well to check (via DPI) and indeed neither one was actually doing anything on the network other than pinging a software-update server every few days.
Thanks for sharing this! I had to go disable this "feature" on the "Smart TV" my family has. Turned off "Viewing Information Services" and "Interest Based Advertising". It was on by default!?
It is simple. Never ever connect the TV to the internet. Use a third party box (or computer) you trust to handle the streaming connection. Apple has fairly reasonable privacy policies for Apple TV. Other boxes may as well.
Related anecdote. My TV needed an update via internet. I noticed that there was no way to delete a wifi password, meaning once connected it was game over. The only solution was to setup temporary wifi credentials, do the update, then change the router credentials again.
The TV also asks for wifi credentials to show you help pages. So, enable help and game over for connectivity and privacy. Nice.
How could it possibly know it needed an update? And what could your advantage be letting it update, considering it would otherwise be forever air-gapped?
So who is going to start the FOSS smart TV firmware alternative that I can use as a replacement for Samsung firmware? Or do DRM requirements for apps like Netflix make that impossible?
I initially thought it is anti-piracy measure, but then I slowly recognized that I live in a world where my proclivities are captured, measured, and then sold to whoever thinks they call sell me stuff. I never thought I would say it, I liked previous regime better. At least there was a clear distinction.
Information we may collect automatically includes information about:
access code , advertising IDs , apps and features you use , app usage information , clickstream data , connections to certain Services , connections to other devices , current software version , device model , device settings , Google Ad ID , hardware model , IMEI number , IP address , log information , MAC address , MNC , mobile network operator , non-persistent device identifiers , Personalized Service ID , referrer pages , sales code , search terms , serial number , subscription information , use of third-party websites , web browser characteristics , web pages you visit
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 327 ms ] threadPi-hole would be able to implement a DoH server, providing similar functionality as today.
Pi-hole like solutions are not working when DNS requests are made from the application, ignoring local resolvers configuration.
I would hear that all the time when I was a kid. I don't think I've heard it in public in decades. Or maybe I was just a nosy kid.
Though blocking is a little harder if you want to use built-in apps of the TV (i.e. Netflix) while blocking it from sending viewing data to Samsung or its affiliates.
Though if you really want to keep the TV from spying on you, the easiest thing to do is to just not connect it to the internet (which is still an option in these pre-5G days, not sure that will always be the case in the future, the TV may have a built-in 5G modem that it can use to talk back to the manufacturer)
Also, people like “free” stuff.
I think this is the same for any category of information though. Informed people will heavily advise against things that the public just has no idea on. Health is a big one.
My question is what can we do aside from running around in panic? It feels hopeless.
Consumers don't care about these schemes because they largely don't know the details.
There should be clear, tobacco-esque disclosure requirements of this sort of thing on the product packaging.
If Samsung et al. want to data mine their customers in exchange for lower pricing, they're welcome to do so. What should not be legal is doing so and appearing the same as a company who does not do so.
Then the market can make up its own mind.
I couldn't point to one IoT / internet-enabled appliance that I would say is transparent about its adtech to non-technical users.
"THIS TELEVISION MONITORS ALL OF YOUR VIEWING HABITS AND THE DATA IS SOLD FOR PROFIT. ANY TIME IT IS USED, THE PROGRAM BEING WATCHED IS SENT TO THE MANUFACTURER. IF YOU DECLINE TO BE MONITORED, YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO RETURN IT FOR 30 DAYS FROM DATE OF PURCHASE AT NO CHARGE TO YOU."
and some did not.
1. there is a lot of knowledge
2. the ramifications of not knowing things in that field are fairly high.
3. is a common source of experts advising the public do things differently. Eat less, exercise more, etc.
Which I think is somewhat the case here with Privacy and Information Tech. It's a problem that affects the public to some degree of severity, but "they" seem largely unaware of it.
Nothing is free. People don’t realize that google being free is because, let’s say, Samsung pays Google for ads. And Samsung passes it on to customers. Lo and behold, your phone purchase pays for Google. (This is simplistic but I’m using it as an example of hidden costs. Advertisers could potential still spend the money elsewhere or keep it as profits)
I pay for a ton of products and services that still siphon my private data and serve me ads. The problem is that companies will try to squeeze as much value as they can out of their customers, whether they pay or not.
Just wait until you see how white collar crime is punished compared to street crimes!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Bork
> During debate over his nomination, Bork's video rental history was leaked to the press. His video rental history was unremarkable, and included such harmless titles as A Day at the Races, Ruthless People, and The Man Who Knew Too Much. Writer Michael Dolan, who obtained a copy of the hand-written list of rentals, wrote about it for the Washington City Paper.[36] Dolan justified accessing the list on the ground that Bork himself had stated that Americans had only such privacy rights as afforded them by direct legislation. The incident led to the enactment of the 1988 Video Privacy Protection Act.[37][38]
Surely even they know their day will come.
It will, won't it?
Given everything amazon has on offer in the way of machine learning etc. is their algorithm for promoting items you might want to buy as simplistic as "I see you bought a pair of running shoes! Perhaps you might want another pair of running shoes?".
Come on amazon!
Though, that Patreon has any traction at all suggests that a shift is happening or at least becoming feasible.
It seems subscription is the only alternative to free and I don't want endless subscriptions to news (be it tech news or what's going on in the world). Because it all adds up. I want to be able to buy stories/news etc. ad hoc as I do/did a newspaper rather than being committed to a month subscription where I may not take advantage of it all the time.
Spotify is an example of a service I use frequently but probably don't use it every day and as such I sometimes unsubscribe from it. I'd love to be able to subscribe to it when I'm using it. Say 25p/30c a day (or less ideally).
Sure it may end up coming out costing me more than a monthly subscription but some months it wouldn't because I don't use it all the time.
I'm all for paying for content but all these subscriptions add up.
AWS has got it figured out, to a degree - more so than media companies. Charge for usage.
> In a word: lobbying.
can i simplify this as "laws are made by lobbyists" ?
FTFY.
If you want a TV privacy law, you'll have compromise a congressman.
Most of us have no reasonable ability to compromise a congressperson.
I suspect someone will hack together a WiFi-derived radar, combine it with a bunch of laser microphones, and point the result at the homes of politicians to get pose, heart rate, breathing rate, and room-by-room sound recordings.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Tower
https://web.archive.org/web/20071009150938/http://www.theame...
But note that Bork was not a mainline candidate -- he had some significant baggage and was well outside the legal mainstream in his opinions on privacy. It was that latter thing that sank Bork, who held that there is no guarantee of privacy.
https://schoolworkhelper.net/robert-borks-the-right-of-priva...
The baggage was related to Watergate. When it became apparent to Nixon that Watergate was going to sink him, Nixon tried to get the special prosecutor dismissed. Nobody would do it, except Bork:
> Richard Nixon ordered Attorney General Elliot Richardson to fire independent special prosecutor Archibald Cox; Richardson refused and resigned effective immediately. Nixon then ordered Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus to fire Cox; Ruckelshaus refused, and also resigned. Nixon then ordered the third-most-senior official at the Justice Department, Solicitor General Robert Bork, to fire Cox. Bork considered resigning, but instead carried out the dismissal as Nixon asked.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturday_Night_Massacre
EDIT: I should add that accessing his video rental history was used as an example and a counter to Bork's own anti-privacy position, which is probably the real reason his nomination was rejected (although I can't say for sure since I'm no expert in this stuff and this all happened before I was even born)
You'll find the info at the following link under the "U.S. Supreme Court Nomination" section:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Bork
So thanks for the rabbit hole!
>During debate over his nomination, Bork's video rental history was leaked to the press. His video rental history was unremarkable, and included such harmless titles as A Day at the Races, Ruthless People, and The Man Who Knew Too Much. Writer Michael Dolan, who obtained a copy of the hand-written list of rentals, wrote about it for the Washington City Paper.[36] Dolan justified accessing the list on the ground that Bork himself had stated that Americans had only such privacy rights as afforded them by direct legislation. The incident led to the enactment of the 1988 Video Privacy Protection Act.[37][38]
>To pro-choice rights legal groups, Bork's originalist views and his belief that the Constitution did not contain a general "right to privacy" were viewed as a clear signal that, should he become a justice of the Supreme Court, he would vote to reverse the Court's 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade. Accordingly, a large number of groups mobilized to press for Bork's rejection, and the resulting 1987 Senate confirmation hearings became an intensely partisan battle.
> informal US
> Obstruct (someone, especially a candidate for public office) by systematically defaming or vilifying them.
> Origin
> 1980s from the name of Robert Bork (1927–2012), an American judge whose nomination to the Supreme Court (1987) was rejected following unfavourable publicity for his allegedly extreme views.
from OED https://www.lexico.com/definition/bork
It would seem strange that a political etymology had a specific impact on the computing world. But the mistype of broken as "borken", and further mis-grammaring to borked would seem consistent with the humour of computing people IME.
The use in computer circles is also just one of "generally broken" (or utterly broken, perhaps) rather than "politically discreditted". I think they might be just coincidental homonyms.
Here's a [not particularly] interesting prior use: https://archive.org/details/Florida_Flambeau_1959/page/n221?... someone borked the pronounciation in Russian of beetroot soup ("borsht", Russian "s" is with a "c" shaped letter).
Now maybe actively attacking members of congress isn't the most forthright way of convincing them that a law against that specific attack is a good idea, but assuming you can do it legally (such that the only way any future such attacks could be prosecuted would be if a new law were created to make the attack illegal) it does seem like like a rather effective approach.
That's the clear and present danger here, not that businesses and their data scientists are having a field day with your personal life, but that they are sloppy and you, your data and your community are vulnerable to irreparable damage being inflicted by bad actors downstream.
The goal was always to make corporations money. The task necessary to accomplish this goal just happened to flip.
> In computing, a firewall is a network security system that monitors and controls incoming and outgoing network traffic based on predetermined security rules. A firewall typically establishes a barrier between a trusted internal network and untrusted external network, such as the Internet.
Sure, and I'm sorry to miss the joke; but I think that it's nothing new that the internal network is untrusted. Before one ever had connected and untrusted smart appliances, one still had untrusted software running on one's general-purpose computer, and it was (and remains) often desireable to fence off that software from the outside world. Little Snitch (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Snitch), for example, was designed around exactly that idea.
Their high priced, medium product quality, lots of advertising is a red flag for any consumer.
If you ask your friends, they likely had terrible experiences with everything from TVs, appliances, phones, and SSDs.
Online and offline their marketing presence rivals Apple and Nintendo.
Here's some reality: "You’d Need 76 Work Days to Read All Your Privacy Policies Each Year" [0] and that was back in 2012. Since then ToS, EULA, Privacy Statement and whatnot have only expanded in scope, people use even more services these days and thus accept even more terms.
You'd need a dedicated law team doing all the reading and interpreting for you if you want to realistically stay informed about all that consent you've given, without having to give up large parts of your productivity just checking and tracing what weird things you supposedly agreed to [1].
There need to be some well-established limits that won't just rely on users supposedly hand-waving all their privacy away, that way the USG might actually even go back to honoring the Fourth Amendment [2].
[0] http://techland.time.com/2012/03/06/youd-need-76-work-days-t...
[1] https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/10-ridiculous-eula-clauses-agr...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_doctrine
Care to explain why? It looks like both roku and firetv spies on what you watch.
https://www.consumerreports.org/privacy/how-to-turn-off-smar...
Given that this would potentially expose them to criminal liability under unauthorised access laws in various places, I have always been sceptical of this claim, and I have yet to see any convincing evidence that it actually happens. Does anyone know definitively that it does?
Disconnected that thing from WiFi and have never hooked it back up. Xbox/PS are just far superior smart devices.
Would have to know all of the domains that the TV connects through, that they're in one of pihole's blocklists, and the TV actually respects the DNS setting entirely and doesn't have any hard coded IP addresses
>What prevents Samsung from registering new meaningless-sounding DNS names and continually pushing out TV software updates peddling “Security and bugfix” release notes?
Nothing.
The real solution is to not connect any smart devices (especially stuff like TVs) to the internet as most are inherently untrustworthy.
Maybe a whitelisting system on a firewall would be more appropriate than a blacklisting system on something like pihole.
Also, I'm pretty sure they do upload something recognisable because one time (2-3 years ago) I accidentally pressed the 'social' button on the remote while I was watching premier league football on Sky Sports (via a separate satellite box) and the TV started showing me relevant tweets about the match.
I'm definitely not buying a 'Smart TV' next time.
[0] https://gist.github.com/peteryates/b44b70d19ccd52f62d66cdd4b...
I'm surprised ISPs aren't providing this service already. Just run a virtual PiHole for your customers.
1. You have control over bullshit like this
2. You can make them smart by attaching the external box
3. You don't have to throw the TV because your Software is now old, just change the box.
4. There's new format which requires hardware support (av1 is coming), change the box.
5. Want to add new hardware? Upgrade the box.
One would assume it'd be as simple as that, but apparently it ain't because many SmartTV's will jump trough quite a few loops to get online, like using nearby open Wifi.
At least there's been a bunch of stories like this in past HN discussions around SmartTV's.
Last time this came up someone was telling me the TV could get Ethernet from an HDMI cable via an AppleTV or Xbox etc. Stackexchange said the tech was dead and no one really adopted it. You can’t find a TV or even a cable that supports it.
Any source about the auto connect to open WiFi?
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/bpr6xs/if_you_choo...
Apples to oranges feature though.
funny thing: i did not know the name of it and i couldn't not understand why "Avengers: Infinity Wars" was so upsetting to watch.
took me literally 20min of poking around to find out the option and turn it off (it's called "TruMotion").
What’s crazy to me is that some people can’t see it! Or think they line it... or the lunatics that actually do!
Once you see it; I don’t think it can be unseen.
This is a pet peeve of mine, walking into the house of a family member, business lobby, etc. and see awful looking video on the screen because they didn’t turn this garbage off.
On this note, I would suggest never connecting it to your network (it could secretly remember your wifi password). Maybe it's just a bug, but once in a while the my Samsung TV's usb connection is listed as the last used source. I've never connected anything to the usb connection and it's wall mounted above my desk (where my kids and wife would not be able to reach it so I know it's not them using it either). It could be a coincidence, but I have also not seen it do this since I changed the wifi password in the access point.
Needless to say, when I bought a new TV recently I never connected it to the network at all.
The real downside of course would be the cost. Shit, maybe I'll need to get a real job again after all...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrenheit_451
Montag awakens ill the next morning. Mildred tries to care for her husband but finds herself more involved in the "parlor wall" entertainment in the living room – large televisions filling the walls.
Beatty recounts the history of how books lost their value and how the firemen were adapted for their current role: over the course of several decades, people began to embrace new media (in this case, film and television), sports, and an ever-quickening pace of life.
It’s wider bandwidth and faster nitrate so it should be cheaper.
All things equal with both factors above it should take less power (if for nothing else radio is on shorter time).
If not part of the spec itself, it likely will coincide with from the get go.
I have to agree that IoT (bleh. Coming from someone with an in-development connected device) will only become bigger with 5G.
I'm pretty sure this is exactly the opposite: the shorter wavelength signals in 5G are line of sight, much more so than 4G.
Its slightly subtle, but not so much, in the commercials - but you can see that its there - and I believe its a CYA thing.
Now imagine when 5G is mature, and coverage is blanketed AND the Drone ID legislation is passed.
Until regulators force them to become dumb pipes; as they often have for physical infrastructure.
In other words, you don’t need your antennas to be as tall to get around curvature of earth (or that building in the way) with higher frequencies.
So one tall tower and a bunch of receivers on the ground in the desert: 5.8ghz is probably a better choice than 2.4.
Of course there are other factors.
Hah, love it! I’m buying a TV today actually, I’ll use this when I have to convince the Micro Center guys that a dumb TV is really what i want
But I agree, on a technical level, 5G isn't necessary for this. In fact, given the low data rate and non-interactivity of it (it doesn't really matter if the screenshot takes 10 minutes to transfer) they could even get away with GPRS or EDGE.
I think the real push for 5G is that it could replace physical infrastructure and regulators only have policies for forcing availability of physical infrastructure. At least in Canada anyway.
Just reinserted them all back in and voila.
The LEDs or drivers sometimes die, but replacements are usually available from ebay or aliexpress.
Funny how one of the repairers found that his 120V only LCD TV had a 120/240 power supply board nonetheless.
Another tv had some bad joints on the panel, but remote diagnostics weren't going to help with big giant vertical lines.
This was a little under ten years ago.
We need to kill these companies and their business models. As fun as it is for smart people like us to perform one-off lobotomies, it doesn't solve the problem.
Some Chromecast products already won't function unless they can talk to Google DNS servers[1].
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19170671
But the fact that doing so is severely limited to those with the technical knowledge and ability means it's still not a forgivable situation.
It also scares me as to what the future holds when such devices are hard coded with a DNS server using DoH.
I've dug into this, and this is true for certain models and firmware versions, but not for others.
Connect to your own wifi and block any traffic?
Even if they don't do this yet it's only a matter of time before the manufacturers catch on and start doing so.
>If you've got logic to connect to nearby open Wi-Fi, why wouldn't you also use it as a fallback if the primary Wi-Fi is down?
One idea to counter this would be to use something like this[1] to deauth the TV instantly, or spam a bunch of open networks so it gets stuck trying to connect to those rather than actually working ones.
[1] https://github.com/spacehuhn/esp8266_deauther
Even if it can be blocked, I don't recommend anyone buy these and look for alternatives (commercial displays, old second-hand ones, https://ironcast.tv, etc)
There are limitations in the room you can use (not too bright, big white wall, good place to place the projector). But if you can manage it I strongly suggest it.
I have a $80 one off Amazon with 4000 4.5 star reviews. Gives about a 8'x6' pic on my bedroom wall. Has all the inputs.
Eighty dollars!
https://ironcast.tv/
- HDR
- analog volume “puck”
- more hdmi connections
Also - source code is at least claimed to be open.
Nothing really like this on the European market to be found.
I had a top end 4K TV die last year just after the warranty ran out. It was going to be almost $100 to have the company repair guy look at it, then parts and potentially additional labor to fix it. I opened the back, did a bit of research and made an educated guess about which board was the problem (which was pretty easy based on the symptoms) and it turned out to be a $130 part that I found on ebay for $25 and I swapped it out within a few minutes.
It turns out there are half a dozen companies that strip down broken TVs and sell off the boards that are still good. That board had actually been through a few revisions since the original one I had, so now it runs even better than new. hehe
That's a really good question, as it is qualified by the '4k' requirement ...
It's very easy and relatively inexpensive to buy a 1920x10280 commercial display unit, such as the NEC p461, which you have probably seen 10k times in airports.
However, there is not much demand for 4k panels for videowalls since ... the videowall grows to larger than 4k resolution anyway just by virtue of being a wall of panels.
So, at this time, in 2019, it is difficult and very expensive to buy a commercial display panel (that is what you would search for) that is 4k.
If I had to find one I think I would probably get that Dell 43 Ultra HD 4K Multi Client Monitor (P4317Q) with the caveat that it is "only" 43 inches in size.
And that’s an old Samsung TV. On top of that, Samsung’s current flagships are among the worst TVs right now vs the competing major brands’ flagships (because all the best are now OLED, and Samsung is the only hold-out).
Even the improvement from a Samsung Q90 (which I had for a few weeks) to LG C9 OLED has to be seem to be believed. On some content, the improvement is drastic.
The technological progress of modern OLED TVs vs LED LCD is practically magical, when viewing good HDR content. If you go for an old panel for the sake of privacy, you’re either going to be sorely disappointed or blissfully ignorant of what your missing.
I would much rather buy a modern model and figure out how to disable the radios, if I was this worried about privacy.
I never realized that 1080p60 would look better on a 144hz monitor than a television but everything is so crisp and smooth in games, it's honestly breathtaking with the right scene. I didn't realize that having a panel that can handle 144hz means that vertical sync is pointless, and for the games that I can actually render at 144hz, the effect is magical by comparison.
I find myself replaying more cinematic games (like say Witcher 3) on the new panel and it's like experiencing the magic of these scenes all over again for the first time.
I couldn't ever imagine going back to a television for gaming.
Compare high end models in similar price ranges (as I have) and you’ll see what I’m talking about. For example: Compare an LG OLED in a dark room to any modern PC monitor, and I would be surprised if you were anything but blown away by the OLED, and appalled by how expensive these gaming monitors are compared to what a similarly priced OLED is capable of (especially now that LG OLEDs are capable of 120hz and variable refresh rate with input lag lower than many gaming monitors).
Of course, the main reason we don’t see everyone using OLED PC monitors are concerns about burn in effects from long term use. But for most people for TV and movie viewing, it’s not a concern. My 3 year old LG B6 OLED is still going strong with no signs of burn in, and has picture quality that still puts the best of the best non-OLED TVs to shame.
Color calibration isn’t everything BTW. The contrast ratio modern TVs are capable is pretty much unrivaled by any modern computer monitor until relatively recently, and even now the only ones that come close cost many times the price of an equivalent TV.
But no monitor on the market can hold a candle to the image quality experience of an OLED TV for HDR movies and TV shows. This is not really under any dispute btw among audio video forums: virtually everyone admits that emissive technology like OLED has inherent quality advantages. The main debate centers purely around whether or not OLED burn in is likely to occur for various use cases.
If you haven’t experienced modern HDR content on a flagship TV (particularly OLED), you are missing out on something really special. No current PC monitor can even come close, except those that cost >2x the price of a modern 55” OLED TV.
I'm curious as to how a 10-bit display measures up, isn't HDR just a fancy standard for high-bit-rate color? Other than the backlight I imagine they'd still be superior.
I'd still prefer a giant computer display over a TV, if anything to avoid the various "smart" features and other value-adds, but to each their own I guess. I'll check out OLED TVs when I can but the demo reels they play are almost always blown-out contrast-wise and I can't stand images that feel like the saturation is set to max.
BTW I highly recommend you do some research into HDR, and color gamut. I don’t think you know just how much you’re missing in terms of HDR, color gamut, contrast ratio, etc, that comes with modern TVs. Color gamut goes way beyond sRGB. Modern HDR TVs are far, far more than just “10 bit color”, and allow an express-able color gamut and color volume far beyond sRGB. A LG C9 achieves sound 99% DCIP3 color gamut and 75% REC2020.
To make a crude example, it’s kind of like 150% sRGB coverage, over a range from perfect black to extremely bright for each pixel individually, with enough precision for smooth gradients across these colors. These TVs can display colors that your sRGB monitor is physically incapable of reproducing, and they can display pixel by pixel contrast radios that allow realistic details and specular highlight brightness levels that cannot be done on regular LCD monitors or TVs. And it all absolutely shows in the picture quality when viewing recent movies/TV that are mastered well.
P.S. Stay away from Samsung if you care about color accuracy as I do. Sony and LG and Panasonic all have excellent color accuracy, and likely will be better than any PC monitor within twice it’s price. But Samsung not only comes out of box with horrible defaults, but actually CANNOT be correctly calibrated due to always-on tone mapping. Among videophiles, it’s well known that Samsung is not the way to go. But please don’t let Samsung’s overly flashy demos turn you off to the amazing technical abilities of modern TVs in general. Just because Samsung made arguably greedy marketing-driven design choices that cheapen and destroy the artistic accuracy of the content does not mean everyone else does too. Only Samsung does this as far as I’m aware, among the top brands.
If you want color accuracy, picture quality perfection, superior color gamut, contrast, HDR, AND low latency (0.1ms response time and overall input lag on par with dedicated gaming monitors), LG OLED is THE way to go.
I think you win the thread.
Cheap, dumb and large. (reminds me of my ex's)
but hey $219 got me a big ass panel that won't report my porn habits to the mothership
https://cdw.com/content/cdw/en/products/monitors-projectors/...
You don’t need an agreement or anything to buy from them.
https://ironcast.tv/
I’m not affiliated in any way, I just like what they’re doing.
Quite annoying, as I had hoped that codec support would improve over time.
DRM were never about protecting the content, it's all about control.
Only option to get that is to use the built in smart features of the TV. So even using external boxes you don't get all the latest hardware support for video codecs.
As much as we want a Dump TV on HN, in terms of general market I would doubt even 5% of people are willing trade cheaper pricing, integrated Software experience for privacy.
Any recommendations?
If anyone in the TV industry is reading this, there is a market for dumb TV panels. Happy to pay a premium for that the same way I was happy to pay a premium to have 4k early on!
What if I'm using my TV to watch [homemade] porn, or browsing sensitive personal data on a PC connected to the TV, or something like that? Sounds like Samsung will get screenshots of all my content, regardless of what it is or which input it's coming through.
If it's my content and they're taking a copy and you're living in a place where clickthrough EULAs are illegal, they're violating copyright.
It's a rock-solid business model with a requirement to know your customers, it's not going away unless a better alternative is invented.
The advertisement agencies are the creditors and the debt collectors and they try to optimize for accuracy of targeting. The more accurate they are the ticker is their margins.
Most people simply don't care enough. For those who care, there will be a niche premium market.
It's a simple fact of corporate greed and lack of regulation.
If you have specific examples, I'd be interested in learning about them.
But that is not a long term solution. It is only a matter of time before devices start shipping with their own sim card that you can not turn off.
I don't know what else to do but to focus on manufacturers that don't do this in the first place. If there are any.
My Samsung asshole tv started showing banner ads overlayed on hdmi signals, already in... 2017 or so?
Fuck these practices.
I was hoping it mentioned consoles. Does anyone know if PS4 does this and if there is a way to turn it off?
Related anecdote. My TV needed an update via internet. I noticed that there was no way to delete a wifi password, meaning once connected it was game over. The only solution was to setup temporary wifi credentials, do the update, then change the router credentials again.
The TV also asks for wifi credentials to show you help pages. So, enable help and game over for connectivity and privacy. Nice.
It tries to connect to api.segment.io every 30 seconds.
How could it possibly know it needed an update? And what could your advantage be letting it update, considering it would otherwise be forever air-gapped?
I know rejecting it on my Samsung TV just reset the wizard
That right there is the problem!
Information we may collect automatically includes information about:
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In that respect, all ad-supported revenue for a phone is extended to the smart TVs.