This is the answer. Lots of people (myself included) are happy to buy a big, cheap TV, but it's cheap because the manufacturer gets money by paid app placement, ads (sometimes), and selling information about you.
A senior friend has bad vision, so I recommended an inexpensive but enormous TV that they can use as a display, and never let it connect to the network. Unfortunately, every few months the display tries to coax them into connecting to WiFi, and it confuses the heck out of them. But, that's the game.
This is the point everyone misses. It's not just that they are subsidizing the price of the TV. Whenever there is an opportunity to extract more profit, eventually they will do it. The rich are not immune from being targeted by this but they sure like to think that they are when they support this behavior in the companies they control.
I read of this tactic a few years ago. Some mentioned adding a phony static IP/gateway/DNS to avoid it connecting to open wifi(should this tech permit it).
People still bought TV's when they were comparatively more expensive (hell we rented them here in the UK). I don't buy this line that "oh if you want a cheap TV...". No, it's an underhand tactic to try and justify adtech's creepy outreach.
it definitely started that way, like with radio before it. early programs were directly paid for by advertisers and the adds were right in the middle of the show presented by the hosts! (kinda like how yt does it now sometimes but even more so)
its literally why we call the whole genre of soap operas that. they would all be sponsored by soap and cleaning product companies trying to reach stay at home moms as their target market for the ads.
ads were along for so much of the history of tv... its easy to forget because recently netflix made it seem like we could just directly pay for content as just entertainment (like movies always were).
but those days are gone and we are returning to the roots. i dont think a single streamer doesnt have an ad tier and we are starting to lose the ad free pay more options too (disney, amazon)
That it was ok in the past certainly doesn't mean it's ok now. And TV advertising wasn't as sinister as it is now with targeted ads that require a detailed profile of every viewer. Everyone just got the same ads.
If blocking ads won't be possible anymore then I'll just pirate everything. And jailbreaking TVs and other hardware.
ya agree, a targeted ad is a very different beast, its not so much the targeting thats the issue either. id much rather only see ads for stuff in interested in than stuff i really dont need. its HOW they come up with that targeting. scraping stealing tracking all the other bs that makes that targeted ad feel creepy and gross.
and if you think its not gonna get so much worse with ai able to generate 10x the ad variants... or maybe even personalized ad versions.(one day, probably too expensive now)
good thing its never been easier to hack everything, maybe we can also figure out how to hack the legal system enough to make shady stuff like recording you in your house a felony. i feel like we should start with making it so that terms in a eula cant bind you to take specific actions. inal but in the case of 2p consent states if you go to your friends house and he doesnt tell you that his tv's eula said that it'll be recording all the time then he's in trouble, but the company actually doing the recording.. scott free because they said in the eula it was the responsibility of the owner to tell everyone who comes near the tv it might be recording. ...why would you ever click that agreement that you were forced to click to use the thing that you already bought and setup, what is the actual recourse for not saying yes? go return the tv and pay the restock fee? idk that doesnt sound like a reasonable contract/agreement that should ever be enforcable. which would mean its actually the tv companies doing all the wiretapping in 2p states...
hmm.. i know im wrong in many ways but i can dream that the law could be actually reasonable.
Yes I love it when I see mistargeted ads because it means I've been able to stay outside of the dragnet a bit.
I have been watching a bit of prime video and getting ads for cars, baby diapers and gambling sites, all things I have zero interest in buying lol. I've not had a car in 10 years and I'm single and don't even buy lottery tickets. I keep sites isolated a lot in Firefox containers but Amazon of course has my purchase history there (there aren't many other ecommerce options left around here) so I'm surprised they don't have me figured out. But I'm glad.
I'm not really sure about the legal system but I'm in Europe, it's a lot more restrictive for that kind of stuff.
i wonder if the Samsung / LG stuff is how the stock market seemed so "predictable" to some people in early morning trading for a while... imagine having the keys to buckets containing all the plaintext gathered from all the tvs listening in conference rooms on earnings days...
The thing about the facebook is listening to you rumors is that the reality is so much worse than them actually surreptitiously listening to you. Their knowing who you're interacting with and what you're likely to talk about is more alarming. Dismissing facebook listening to your conversations is shortsighted in a way I find fairly repulsive.
Just yesterday I hacked my Samsung Frame tv. The AI (codex) used an off-the-shelf root with Developer Console access (built in). Though root doesn't give you the signing keys to blow everything away and still boot (is my best understanding), but as a workaround you can still change anything you want after boot automatically.
I had it do:
- Stripping ads
- Disabling mics
- Turning off updates
- Leaving root SSH in place (protected) for future access
The key to getting codex to do this was that this is legal under DMCA, but after a certain point I had to get a new session to change all the "hacking" words into synonyms to not trigger false security alarms. Wouldn't be surprised or bothered if my chatgpt account gets banned though.
I can write a blog post and publish the repo if you want
Do a search on X on the topic, the news about Samsung was broken on there by a guy who had rooted his Samsung TV using AI tools and he and others created guides for neutering the stuff out of it
That's why we fight together as best we can. Syndicate. Spread awareness. Do whatever you are able, and damnit, we both know it's more than nothing. If not for yourself, then do it for those you care about most.
Market gets flooded with these devices. Someone notices they are cheap, opens a Reddit thread about what is going on. Google Search picks it up. Now people who search for this TV (new or used) see a hit about malware in this TV. Buyers need to perform due diligence. However, in EU, sellers need to inform buyers of obvious negative sides of a product. Malware appears to be one of them.
There was just a post yesterday about how to root your samsung. I rooted my samsung and removed ads, mics, and my agent is looking into this one as we speak [codex].
I haven't looked into TCL at all, but everything I know on this topic I learned in one day, so if you have even a $20 a month AI subscription and you're passionate I'd say give it a go.
I keep seeing this, and I still think it's a ridiculous ask. Whether you like it or not, the vast majority is not savvy enough to think about this, and they generally just want Netflix to work without an additional service. For a majority of people 600 is expensive, and they don't want to have to spend another 30-100 depending on the device.
The monthly cost of a cellular is pretty high relative to the actual value of targeting ads to the user, especially when most of their customer base is already connecting it to wifi. Sidewalk requires a very cheap module - the EBYTE E220-900M22S is under $3 and and the Wio-SX1262 is $4, compared to cellular connections.
I agree with this. At this point, AI has gotten smart enough that most smart TVs can be hacked (I just did it with my LG), and TV manufacturers haven't caught up yet.
It’s mind boggling that in the UK there’s a law that says:
> “A plank of wood must not be carried along a pavement. It can only be moved if it is being unloaded from a vehicle or taken into a building.”
But big tech cannot be regulated at all.
We used to regulate any minor thing that was annoying enough, but a whole industry spying and prying on the whole population is fine.
We see see two failure modes in the US, and I assume they are universal. On the small scale, enforcers don't enforce, because of resource constraints, and higher up the food chain, the enforcers are the ones breaking the law.
I don't know that this is a discovery issue. It has been widely publicised that all your devices are spying on you for at least a decade now - hard proof was previously somewhat hard to come by, but a suitable regulatory agency could have gone digging at any point.
>It has been widely publicised that all your devices are spying on you for at least a decade now
This sort of equivocation, where any privacy invasion gets rounded off to "spying on you" doesn't help either. Clickbait headlines over android making 100 requests to google gets lumped together with more serious privacy violations like random SDKs selling your location data, causing a learned helplessness where people think "spying on you" is normal and can't be avoided.
The main issue is that the attention economy and social pressure are so hard to break. People keep using WhatsApp because it is convenient and everyone is there. There are no other reasons.
The major other reason is that it is free, and most people are money-constrained.
Personalized advertising is a progressive tax. Because the rich spend more and the poor spend less, Meta et al makes more money from the rich than it makes from the poor, while offering the same service to everybody else. As a result, we get the educated rich upper-middle class complaining about advertising, while everybody else is happy about not having to pay their long-distance charges any more.
Awareness and care is one thing. A unanimous action plan is another. Violation of privacy is not viewed through similar lens as say theft or other forms of crimes.
Journalism is almost dead. And if where it’s not it’s more of a summary of what happened rather than deep investigations. But only a small percentage of the population care about deep investigations anyway.
Actually it is. Around 2005 I was stopped by police at 2am in Hackney and told in no uncertain terms that it was illegal for me to be walking with a 2x4 in my hand
Yeah, today you would stopped and frisked, detained, photographed, fingerprinted, interrogated, and finally jailed… for speaking out against the asshats who the think this is a good law.
It was added as context for why someone might be carrying a wooden plank at 2 in the morning and why police might be concerned. It is my understanding that Hackney has changed dramatically in the intervening years
In the interests of accuracy, the law (the Metropolitan Police Act 1839) actually states
"""
54 Prohibition of nuisances by persons in the thoroughfares.
Every person shall be liable to a penalty not more than level 2 on the standard scale, who, within the limits of the metropolitan police district, shall in any thoroughfare or public place, commit any of the following offences; (that is to say,)
...
8. Every person who shall roll or carry any cask, tub, hoop, or wheel, or any ladder, plank, pole, showboard, or placard, upon any footway, except for the purpose of loading or unloading any cart or carriage, or of crossing the footway:
The plank of wood is one element in a much broader statute, rather than an example of hyper-specificity. And it might have been strictly applied at the time, but that doesn't mean you're definitely going to get into trouble nowadays.
In a similar vein, the UK *does* have laws that affect big tech. UK GDPR places requirements on processing of personal data:
Whether that's properly enforced is (as with the plank) a completely different matter.
In the UK, at least, we don't need new regulations, we need to more effectively apply the regulations we already have in place. But there is also a balance to be made between enforcement through fines and enforcement through changing behaviour: it's much better to work with companies to bring them into compliance than it is to just fine them and without actually changing anything.
> within the limits of the metropolitan police district
It's a local London law. In England such laws are passed by parliament because there is no other mechanism, but in countries with devolved lawmaking states and cities have much crazier laws.
People understand what a plank of wood is and how it works.
People, including the vast majority of politicians, don’t understand our technology at all. It’s magic. Why does a light come on when they flip the switch? Magic. Computers are deep black magic.
How can they write effective regulation? Or tell the difference between proposals that are good or bad written by others?
If politicians regulated big tech more we’d probably end up with a ton of regulatory capture that legislated monopolies for big tech and shut out open source and startups, because who has the money to influence the ignorant lawmakers at scale?
We are now in a world where small groups of high priests understand certain things, and few others. We’ve been there for a while but it’s gotten far more opaque in the last 25 years or so.
Even something like a nuclear reactor or an aircraft is much easier to explain. The last episode of the Chernobyl series did a great job explaining what was wrong with that reactor design to a layperson. But computing… and networks… people who do understand it have forgotten just how ludicrously arcane and inscrutable it is to most.
A big difference too is that by the Church-Turing theorem there is (as a side effect of it) a provably infinite number of ways to perform any computation. Which means you can’t just legislate “don’t do that.” Physical machines are not like that.
The point of having advisors was supposed to be that they would help the elected person make up for lack of knowledge, but it doesn't seem like that pans out in reality. Either the advisors are just as lost, or they are largely ignored.
The need for good advisors is a major point in Sun-Tzu's Art of War.
Surround yourself with good advisors and the surrounding kingdoms will notice and be less inclined to attack. If you have bad advisors, your enemies will perceive that as their opening
We used to solve this problem by embedding experts in government bodies.
We can't do that any more; the people who support tech regulation are so cartoonishly anti-corporate that any suggestion of embedding somebody who understands tech will be met with accusations of lobbying and a careful review of that person's employment history.
It's obvious to pretty much everybody that regulating banks, railroads or phone companies requires people who have previously worked for banks, railroads and phone companies, and have a good understanding of how such organizations work on the inside. We, generally, don't do that with tech.
If your building or other construction is unsafe for the public, the local authority has the right to make it safe, if necessary by demolishing it; if you are insufficiently responsive to a notice that you must make it safe. Maybe tech companies need that kind of incentive before they will care enough not to subject their customers to this kind of abuse.
> There is a counter incentive, the money the companies pay the politicians.
That's disingenuous. The public has been told a beautiful fairy tale about technology for years. There are huge outcries every single time any politician tries to regulate big tech.
Now I know that this isn't because the public is somehow ideologically opposed to regulation. We have been paid off, just as much as the politicians have. When they increase the prices of televisions and say it's because they this new regulation, we show up to support them.
> The public has been told a beautiful fairy tale about technology
He typed, from a tiny device in his hand, from a bed in an air-conditioned apartment millions of miles away. Or perhaps from a jet sailing through the sky, via a satellite in space
The fairy tale is not about the capability of technologies. That part is wonderful. The fairy tale is the techno-optimist "democratization" nonsense. I can recommend reading "Cyberlibertarianism" by David Golumbia if that distinction doesn't make sense to you.
It is not plausible that a company would raise prices as some kind of revenge or play to overturn a regulation. That is not how prices are set in a free market because any company that did that would immediately lose to their competition. Unless we have a cartel of television manufacturers, which would be news to me.
The problem with regulating big tech is the unplacable internet. Who can regulate the internet? Who gets to make rules for the global network?
Politicians are keenly aware that regulation has to be administered, and administration costs money. The internet subsists on low overhead, and per jurisdiction administration would significantly change almost everything about the current internet. The public wont allow that.
If the public actually starts demanding regulation, we will see a fracturing of the internet into national networks. It will become impossible (or at least uneconomical) to run reddit, youtube, or facebook as global networks. They might continue to exists, but they will be sectioned off.
In that scheme, would regulation be based on where the servers are located? What's to stop me from routing American traffic to Armenia, where the laws don't exist? What's to stop me routing it to Russia, where the general legal principle is that illegality won't be pursued if it's no against Russian citizens?
The laws of the country would apply to the objects in that country. If you route traffic from America to Russia, the hosts/clients in America need to follow American laws and the hosts/clients in Russia need to follow Russian laws.
Is that a thing? I ask because I and my best friend have vivid memories of my step dad, who used to be a postman, cycling home from town with 4 - 5m timbers under one arm. This would have been late 80s/early 90s. He’d call out and wave to people he knew with his “free” hand as he passed as well.
If even moving a plank of wood is illegal I can’t imagine how he got away with that, unmolested by plod, for so many years.
It's heavily paraphrased, but close enough I'd say.
> Every person who shall roll or carry any cask, tub, hoop, or wheel, or any ladder, plank, pole, showboard, or placard, upon any footway, except for the purpose of loading or unloading any cart or carriage, or of crossing the footway:
People carrying planks of wood on the sidewalk is obvious to everyone and clear inconvenience. What tech companies do in software is not, and has no physical immediately tangible effect on the world. These things should be regulated, but they're so opaque and disconnected from the eventual negative externalities that it's hard to get legislators to see it.
If a human cannot immediately see a negative outcome on their visual or mental horizon based on the knowledge they have at that moment most of their insights or feelings about what problems will occur will be incorrect.
Talking about AI and data is a good example of this. A bit of data here and there seems useless, but the moment you get enough the pattern of your life can emerge from it and suddenly you can be tracked and manipulated with an amazingly high probability. And it's not a one time thing either. Anything mispredicted gets put back in your profile as another data point.
Big tech isn't being regulated? There's increasingly privacy related laws, both in the US and abroad, that directly affect them. How many times a year do we read about Big Tech being issued 9-10 figure fines? One could state that they're not regulated enough, but to say they're unregulated is just false.
> We used to regulate any minor thing that was annoying enough
Your example is a good reason why that approach was foolish.
Regulation is only as good as enforcement of it is. And it seems 9-10 figure fines are still in the realm of 'we'll deal with the fallout later'.
So no, it's not literally unregulated, but if it was regulated effectively Samsung would be scared shitless to pull stuff like this. They clearly aren't.
Maybe it's time for something like that, a shared baseline standard of "this thing won't spy on you", with huge financial penalties for companies caught lying about it.
Then prime adoption by making it a requirement for anything bought by the government.
That's a nice certification program. I'm glad that it exists and that there's a list of products that comply with it. I've saved it for later perusal.
But it reaches a wee bit further than I actually care about for something like a television:
> All the product software must be free software. The product software includes all software that the seller includes in the product, provides with the product, recommends for use in conjunction with the product, and steers users towards installation in the product.
I don't feel apologetic at all when I say that open-source just isn't very important to me at all when selecting a television. I do not care whether it is open or closed. I just don't want it to spy on me.
Being open does make it more inspectable for spyware, for sure, but as a realistic concept: I'm not going to be inspecting it myself, anyway. A third-party inspection or audit would be fine for me, and that kind of thing can happen without the source being available to me, myself.
The required open-source push seems kind of egalitarian.
I don't need the source code for wireless devices to understand that they've passed FCC certification testing. I don't need the schematics and code for my AV receiver to understand that the UL logo on the back of it means that it has been tested to show that it won't burn my house down or give me an electric shock.
I don't want to be a product certification testing lab when I grow up.
I skimmed through the list. It is a couple of brands, none of it is recent hardware. Talos II (super expensive IBM Power workstation), TPE (not to be confused with TP-Link) networking stuff (old standards, like 1 gbit, 802.11n), some rebranded IBM/Lenovo X200, some old USB peripherals. There's nothing worthwhile on this list. No monitors or TVs (the topic at hand!). No keyboards (even though there is FOSS firmware for keyboards), except for I suppose X200. Not even Stallman's old MIPS laptop (Lemote Yeeloong) is on the list.
Linking this list is like saying you can live in a world without war in some remote cave where you have to eat mushrooms growing in it. Cool that exists (or not); but it isn't relevant. There's nothing worthwhile in the cave. No treasure trove.
Samsung is starting to be a little too much creepy.
I don't know if it's just greed or.
I refused to create an account on their galaxy phone because of the mandatory phone number needed. Yes, I know they can harvest it in other ways, it's just a stand.
Without an account, they don't even allow installs from galaxy store. So their default apps and their security updates are probably contingent on having an account now.
Not much different from playstore but that is also a problem.
The mechanism you are thinking of - optimizing brightness and dynamic contrast, happens in TCON in low level hardware at fraction of a fraction of power
But the next generation of everything will be so much less efficient as the new generation of developers has forgotten how to do anything with low level methods.
I'm not the only one who made note of that behavior, but if i recall sometime before breaking my phone in the last couple months the behaviour ceased. probably after a factory rom update, but at this point i can no longer confirm or deny. but! i did and do have a backup of the potentially offending apk.
Ironically phones are more transparent than TVs (because there's a rooting scene as well as adb access) so I wouldn't immediately extrapolate that they're doing this but even harder on phones.
It's beyond me why people are still buying smart TVs.
I've juist looked on a large EU webshop (bol.com).
You can buy a non-smart, full-HD, 40 inch TV for less than $200.
Why in this world of yours is the only option Android TV?
Even with that, there are plenty of safer distros, or you can even get a cheap mini pc and throw one of the many awesome Linux distros on that have zero tracking and are far more capable/performant.
>All the popular streaming services throttle or block open devices.
This just isn't true. Have never encountered this.
Its effectively impossible to get some streaming services to stream content >720p to a linux device. I know I tried several years ago to use Disney+ and could not find any way to get 1080p content, even on a windows machine. I think now they have an official windows store app, but still refuse to stream full HD or 4k content to a web browser.
More recently I've tried hbo max and it does the same thing. Could not get higher than 720p, even with chrome and whatever DRM options theoretically fix the problem.
All the ad tracking in smart TVs has driven prices down. Tracking and ad data has turned a customer from a one time purchaser to a revenue stream for as long as the device is in use.
If you want a high quality TV for the best price your best bet is either disable/opt out of all the tracking data, or even better just never hook it up to the internet at all and plug an AppleTV or Chromecast on it.
If you look for a Samsung TV without “smart” features you pretty much have to find them under “commercial displays” and you’ll pay a premium for it.
I don’t find a non-smart 4K television on Bol, except for a single 800€ model. Sorry but it’s not 2016, I’m not gonna sit and watch content at a resolution worse than my laptop’s.
But if anyone in Belgium wants my smart Samsung, 250€ and it’s yours. I’d give it away for free in a different economy. We’re never buying Samsung crap again.
Idiots from Samsung also do different DNS tests (sending DNS requests for non-existing domains, malformed requests) and then run the results through a ML classifier, although they just could use a bunch of IFs. Or even better, do no tests at all. I wonder if they have some kind of KPI for using machine learning or are simply dumb?
Gotta love how the phone runs the expensive spying model regardless of consent, purely so that people who withhold consent aren't rewarded with better battery life. As if some % of the battery was still Samsung's property for their own marketing purposes. Stay classy!
196 comments
[ 0.24 ms ] story [ 26.1 ms ] threadA senior friend has bad vision, so I recommended an inexpensive but enormous TV that they can use as a display, and never let it connect to the network. Unfortunately, every few months the display tries to coax them into connecting to WiFi, and it confuses the heck out of them. But, that's the game.
I'm assuming, perhaps incorrectly, that if the TV had a crap connection it would stop nagging.
It would be tricky to implement, but a network tarpit that responds on TCP as if outgoing packets are being accepted and routed might be useful.
1: https://tru-vumonitors.com/21in-to-65in-monitors/
its literally why we call the whole genre of soap operas that. they would all be sponsored by soap and cleaning product companies trying to reach stay at home moms as their target market for the ads.
ads were along for so much of the history of tv... its easy to forget because recently netflix made it seem like we could just directly pay for content as just entertainment (like movies always were).
but those days are gone and we are returning to the roots. i dont think a single streamer doesnt have an ad tier and we are starting to lose the ad free pay more options too (disney, amazon)
If blocking ads won't be possible anymore then I'll just pirate everything. And jailbreaking TVs and other hardware.
and if you think its not gonna get so much worse with ai able to generate 10x the ad variants... or maybe even personalized ad versions.(one day, probably too expensive now)
good thing its never been easier to hack everything, maybe we can also figure out how to hack the legal system enough to make shady stuff like recording you in your house a felony. i feel like we should start with making it so that terms in a eula cant bind you to take specific actions. inal but in the case of 2p consent states if you go to your friends house and he doesnt tell you that his tv's eula said that it'll be recording all the time then he's in trouble, but the company actually doing the recording.. scott free because they said in the eula it was the responsibility of the owner to tell everyone who comes near the tv it might be recording. ...why would you ever click that agreement that you were forced to click to use the thing that you already bought and setup, what is the actual recourse for not saying yes? go return the tv and pay the restock fee? idk that doesnt sound like a reasonable contract/agreement that should ever be enforcable. which would mean its actually the tv companies doing all the wiretapping in 2p states...
hmm.. i know im wrong in many ways but i can dream that the law could be actually reasonable.
I have been watching a bit of prime video and getting ads for cars, baby diapers and gambling sites, all things I have zero interest in buying lol. I've not had a car in 10 years and I'm single and don't even buy lottery tickets. I keep sites isolated a lot in Firefox containers but Amazon of course has my purchase history there (there aren't many other ecommerce options left around here) so I'm surprised they don't have me figured out. But I'm glad.
I'm not really sure about the legal system but I'm in Europe, it's a lot more restrictive for that kind of stuff.
Has this been quantified? Otherwise it's easy to fall for confirmation bias, eg. "facebook is secretly listening to you"
I had it do:
- Stripping ads
- Disabling mics
- Turning off updates
- Leaving root SSH in place (protected) for future access
The key to getting codex to do this was that this is legal under DMCA, but after a certain point I had to get a new session to change all the "hacking" words into synonyms to not trigger false security alarms. Wouldn't be surprised or bothered if my chatgpt account gets banned though. I can write a blog post and publish the repo if you want
How many years is it for 10 million devices?
Happy to post to github if you'd like.
just hack it right after purchase and own the glass
> “A plank of wood must not be carried along a pavement. It can only be moved if it is being unloaded from a vehicle or taken into a building.”
But big tech cannot be regulated at all. We used to regulate any minor thing that was annoying enough, but a whole industry spying and prying on the whole population is fine.
The plank rule just exists, not enforced, so nobody observes it.
Same will happen with the high-tech regulation. In fact, it is already happening left and right where it does exist.
It cannot be regulated because we let dollar/capital rise above political authority.
This sort of equivocation, where any privacy invasion gets rounded off to "spying on you" doesn't help either. Clickbait headlines over android making 100 requests to google gets lumped together with more serious privacy violations like random SDKs selling your location data, causing a learned helplessness where people think "spying on you" is normal and can't be avoided.
Personalized advertising is a progressive tax. Because the rich spend more and the poor spend less, Meta et al makes more money from the rich than it makes from the poor, while offering the same service to everybody else. As a result, we get the educated rich upper-middle class complaining about advertising, while everybody else is happy about not having to pay their long-distance charges any more.
Is that a good law or is it a barnacle? Is it enforced in the UK?
Although it does appear to be true in London https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Vict/2-3/47/section/54
""" 54 Prohibition of nuisances by persons in the thoroughfares.
Every person shall be liable to a penalty not more than level 2 on the standard scale, who, within the limits of the metropolitan police district, shall in any thoroughfare or public place, commit any of the following offences; (that is to say,)
...
8. Every person who shall roll or carry any cask, tub, hoop, or wheel, or any ladder, plank, pole, showboard, or placard, upon any footway, except for the purpose of loading or unloading any cart or carriage, or of crossing the footway:
... """ https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Vict/2-3/47/section/54
The plank of wood is one element in a much broader statute, rather than an example of hyper-specificity. And it might have been strictly applied at the time, but that doesn't mean you're definitely going to get into trouble nowadays.
In a similar vein, the UK *does* have laws that affect big tech. UK GDPR places requirements on processing of personal data:
""" Personal data shall be:
(a)processed lawfully, fairly and in a transparent manner in relation to the data subject (‘lawfulness, fairness and transparency’); """ https://www.legislation.gov.uk/eur/2016/679/article/5
Whether that's properly enforced is (as with the plank) a completely different matter.
In the UK, at least, we don't need new regulations, we need to more effectively apply the regulations we already have in place. But there is also a balance to be made between enforcement through fines and enforcement through changing behaviour: it's much better to work with companies to bring them into compliance than it is to just fine them and without actually changing anything.
> within the limits of the metropolitan police district
It's a local London law. In England such laws are passed by parliament because there is no other mechanism, but in countries with devolved lawmaking states and cities have much crazier laws.
People understand what a plank of wood is and how it works.
People, including the vast majority of politicians, don’t understand our technology at all. It’s magic. Why does a light come on when they flip the switch? Magic. Computers are deep black magic.
How can they write effective regulation? Or tell the difference between proposals that are good or bad written by others?
If politicians regulated big tech more we’d probably end up with a ton of regulatory capture that legislated monopolies for big tech and shut out open source and startups, because who has the money to influence the ignorant lawmakers at scale?
We are now in a world where small groups of high priests understand certain things, and few others. We’ve been there for a while but it’s gotten far more opaque in the last 25 years or so.
Even something like a nuclear reactor or an aircraft is much easier to explain. The last episode of the Chernobyl series did a great job explaining what was wrong with that reactor design to a layperson. But computing… and networks… people who do understand it have forgotten just how ludicrously arcane and inscrutable it is to most.
A big difference too is that by the Church-Turing theorem there is (as a side effect of it) a provably infinite number of ways to perform any computation. Which means you can’t just legislate “don’t do that.” Physical machines are not like that.
Surround yourself with good advisors and the surrounding kingdoms will notice and be less inclined to attack. If you have bad advisors, your enemies will perceive that as their opening
We can't do that any more; the people who support tech regulation are so cartoonishly anti-corporate that any suggestion of embedding somebody who understands tech will be met with accusations of lobbying and a careful review of that person's employment history.
It's obvious to pretty much everybody that regulating banks, railroads or phone companies requires people who have previously worked for banks, railroads and phone companies, and have a good understanding of how such organizations work on the inside. We, generally, don't do that with tech.
That's disingenuous. The public has been told a beautiful fairy tale about technology for years. There are huge outcries every single time any politician tries to regulate big tech.
Now I know that this isn't because the public is somehow ideologically opposed to regulation. We have been paid off, just as much as the politicians have. When they increase the prices of televisions and say it's because they this new regulation, we show up to support them.
He typed, from a tiny device in his hand, from a bed in an air-conditioned apartment millions of miles away. Or perhaps from a jet sailing through the sky, via a satellite in space
Wi-Fi on planes is truly astounding when you think for even a moment.
Politicians are keenly aware that regulation has to be administered, and administration costs money. The internet subsists on low overhead, and per jurisdiction administration would significantly change almost everything about the current internet. The public wont allow that.
If the public actually starts demanding regulation, we will see a fracturing of the internet into national networks. It will become impossible (or at least uneconomical) to run reddit, youtube, or facebook as global networks. They might continue to exists, but they will be sectioned off.
If even moving a plank of wood is illegal I can’t imagine how he got away with that, unmolested by plod, for so many years.
Bicycles are ridden on the road, not the pavement.
Sometimes people ride bicycles on the pavement, but doing so with a long piece of wood would be very dangerous indeed.
> Every person who shall roll or carry any cask, tub, hoop, or wheel, or any ladder, plank, pole, showboard, or placard, upon any footway, except for the purpose of loading or unloading any cart or carriage, or of crossing the footway:
- https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Vict/2-3/47/section/54
As far as the censorship goes UK is trying hard. So follow the money?
This isn't a real thing. It's like the thing about it being legal to shoot Welshmen if they're in York after nightfall, and other such shit.
If a human cannot immediately see a negative outcome on their visual or mental horizon based on the knowledge they have at that moment most of their insights or feelings about what problems will occur will be incorrect.
Talking about AI and data is a good example of this. A bit of data here and there seems useless, but the moment you get enough the pattern of your life can emerge from it and suddenly you can be tracked and manipulated with an amazingly high probability. And it's not a one time thing either. Anything mispredicted gets put back in your profile as another data point.
> We used to regulate any minor thing that was annoying enough
Your example is a good reason why that approach was foolish.
So no, it's not literally unregulated, but if it was regulated effectively Samsung would be scared shitless to pull stuff like this. They clearly aren't.
Are these fines ever paid? Or is it appeal upon appeal and 10 years later they pay a tenth of the fine?
Maybe it's time for something like that, a shared baseline standard of "this thing won't spy on you", with huge financial penalties for companies caught lying about it.
Then prime adoption by making it a requirement for anything bought by the government.
But it reaches a wee bit further than I actually care about for something like a television:
> All the product software must be free software. The product software includes all software that the seller includes in the product, provides with the product, recommends for use in conjunction with the product, and steers users towards installation in the product.
I don't feel apologetic at all when I say that open-source just isn't very important to me at all when selecting a television. I do not care whether it is open or closed. I just don't want it to spy on me.
Being open does make it more inspectable for spyware, for sure, but as a realistic concept: I'm not going to be inspecting it myself, anyway. A third-party inspection or audit would be fine for me, and that kind of thing can happen without the source being available to me, myself.
The required open-source push seems kind of egalitarian.
I don't need the source code for wireless devices to understand that they've passed FCC certification testing. I don't need the schematics and code for my AV receiver to understand that the UL logo on the back of it means that it has been tested to show that it won't burn my house down or give me an electric shock.
I don't want to be a product certification testing lab when I grow up.
Linking this list is like saying you can live in a world without war in some remote cave where you have to eat mushrooms growing in it. Cool that exists (or not); but it isn't relevant. There's nothing worthwhile in the cave. No treasure trove.
Wiretapping is just illegal and should be treated as such.
Part of the problem is (uninformed, false) "consent" being buried in a lengthy and silently-mutating Terms of Service.
I'm not sure it's literal enough.
...... or do you???
I don't know if it's just greed or.
I refused to create an account on their galaxy phone because of the mandatory phone number needed. Yes, I know they can harvest it in other ways, it's just a stand.
Not much different from playstore but that is also a problem.
Their smart TVs are a nightmare, and have been for the last 15 years (at least)
I mean it is probably also used to collect data, but this sounds like it might be more than just that. Maybe?
I'm not the only one who made note of that behavior, but if i recall sometime before breaking my phone in the last couple months the behaviour ceased. probably after a factory rom update, but at this point i can no longer confirm or deny. but! i did and do have a backup of the potentially offending apk.
It doesn't matter whether you run android TV from the TV itself or an external device.
All the popular streaming services throttle or block open devices.
There's no regulation on it, because regulators want locked-down hardware that can only take actions approved by them.
Even with that, there are plenty of safer distros, or you can even get a cheap mini pc and throw one of the many awesome Linux distros on that have zero tracking and are far more capable/performant.
>All the popular streaming services throttle or block open devices.
This just isn't true. Have never encountered this.
https://help.netflix.com/en/node/30081
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39257581
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42685008
Your only options are to sail the high seas or use Android TV.
I remember that being a problem in the past, that you were limited to lower resolutions.
More recently I've tried hbo max and it does the same thing. Could not get higher than 720p, even with chrome and whatever DRM options theoretically fix the problem.
https://www.bol.com/nl/nl/l/42-inch-tv-s-zonder-smart-functi...
This Sony might be an option: https://www.bol.com/nl/nl/p/sony-bravia-professional-fw-55bz...
If you want a high quality TV for the best price your best bet is either disable/opt out of all the tracking data, or even better just never hook it up to the internet at all and plug an AppleTV or Chromecast on it.
If you look for a Samsung TV without “smart” features you pretty much have to find them under “commercial displays” and you’ll pay a premium for it.
are we living in 2010 or something?
But if anyone in Belgium wants my smart Samsung, 250€ and it’s yours. I’d give it away for free in a different economy. We’re never buying Samsung crap again.