Never ever connect your "Smart"-TV to your network, or if you have an incurable impulse to then make sure it's on a firewalled gateway-less VLAN. Take the money you save buying the thing (compared to what a profitable "dumb" version would cost) and buy a surplus corporate mini-workstation system, and slap LibreELEC/Kodi or whatever on it, and use that device as your "smart" device. No good for you can ever come from bringing the TV onto the internet... ever!
I've heard this wisdom before, usually with an apple TV positioned as the alternative, but I've had that setup before and didn't enjoy having to use 2 remotes instead of one.
A better solution would be to root the damn TV and neuter its spyware/adware crap.
This, but LibreELEC or other Kodi distributions suck. They are too limited. Until recently, the best solution was to run a full Linux DE, but now there is Plasma Bigscreen[0] for that. This is basically a DE optimized for couch use with a remote. You can run Kodi as an app, but also stream from a browser, or play games with Steam, etc.
The only time mine were ever connected to the internet was to update the software, and for that the easiest thing I thought was to host a temporary wifi hotspot (using a phone).
I got this a few months ago -- 4k, solid brightness, and ok color.
Is it the OMG BEST? no. But I Disabled wifi, and even the channel display.
I use it with an apple TV with CEC on the TV -- I turn on the apple tv, TV turns on straight to apple interface. I turn off from the apple remote, TV turns off.
>Is it the OMG BEST? no. But I Disabled wifi, and even the channel display.
Why not just get a (presumably subsidized) smart TV instead, and skipping the premium? It'd also be not disconnected from the internet, and despite vague HN/reddit speculation that TVs have cell modems in them, that has yet to be confirmed.
I wanted more control and no UI. The commercial ones do that -- I think this was like $150 more than the "samsung smart ui" one... Never seeing a smart TV interface was worth that for me. YMMV.
I use HDMI on my Smart TV and just disabled wifi because I realized it was downloading more than half my bandwidth (a small amount, in fact). It could have been doing an update but I found no reason to leave it on. Occasionally I'll use YT or Prime since it doesn't have to be tethered to a PC, but overall it's nicer as a monitor than a streaming app.
If you do this, connect it to the internet at least once, because most smart TVs ship with missing features that aren't activated until you do a firmware update.
Were I an enterprising enshittificator, I would certainly make sure to force being online as a prerequisite for basic functionality for any TV that has ever been seen online since that proves that it's capable of connecting. So.. be careful upgrading the shitware, you might get more functionality that you've bargained for. Functionality that you can't downgrade because you don't own the TV.
I have a TCL Roku TV that I use disconnected and with an Apple TV. It still has annoyances here and there, like pausing for three seconds or so on every startup before it switches inputs. I’d pay a mild premium to not have that.
I've noticed that older TCLs are a bit laggier than Samsung smart tvs. Nice to have one that actually has a fast response to the remote. There was an app that was super slow on it- one of the less popular streaming apps. Although when the firmware updated, it might have erased the entire account and started anew. The Google Play store manages the apps, so I would imagine they get purged when they aren't up to the latest requirements. I am not sure how long the Android/Google OS version would get supports though).
We keep our TV dumb, have a laptop behind it running Kubuntu Linux. Stream in everything in Chrome. Use an Air Mouse and wireless keyboard sometimes. Works great.
I've always have a deep, instinctive revulsion for smart TVs, but every year I read of some new mandmade horrors beyond comprehension, and it escalates by a few more points.
This. The only "smart" things allowed in my home are those under my control. This means devices that work over Zigbee, or that that run free firmware natively (like ESP32-based devices), or that can be hacked to run free firmware. Everything is orchestrated via Home Assistant and in its own VLAN. It's surprising how far you can get. For example, I recently set up a voice assistant by wiring together a few Home Assistant components and a small local LLM (Qwen 4B). Response times are basically on par with commercial solutions like Alexa, and all processing is done locally.
The experience with this is so much better. Hacking most Tuya based devices has become extremely easy when you use https://docs.libretiny.eu/ Replacing MyQ with ratgdo was one of the best IoT decisions I have ever made.
Just browsing the list of apps raises eyebrows for even the most non-tech audiences. 99% of it is spam, with maybe 1% being well known apps like YouTube.
The rest are weird IPTV Players, Wallpaper apps. It feels like a portal into 2009 apps, but its not.
2009 indeed. Their app store was an absolute cesspit even in the early, pre-WebOS days and it hasn't changed much since, like, who would install any of this and why? Even the "official" app selection isn't the best. OS aside, they are pretty good TVs and quite popular, so I find this mind-boggling.
In the article they mentioned that Amazon and Roku block apps from using these SDK’s, and specifically after Roku recently made a change to disallow this kind of thing, many of the affected apps were withdrawn from the Roku app store. The implication is that those other smart TVs don’t have the same third-party apps because these apps were specifically created to act as a foothold for these residential proxy networks.
Basically all smart TVs do that. It is how they provide "contextual" features based on the content you're watching, like the names of the actors visible on screen.
Brightdata aka Luminati (they changed their name) the company that basically hacked unsuspecting chrome extension users to become residential proxies.
From the country that claimed "we can see them from their TVs" when referring to the victims of their Holocaust of Gaza in which they spilt an ocean of babyblood.
But apparently we are meant to be impressed by the modern Rudolph Hess Nation's advancements in civil and chemical engineering.
This turned out to be more ethical than I thought. I'd thought there wasn't any consent at all, or the actual mention of proxying was buried in a 20 page EULA.
Yeah, this does seem somewhat reasonable. I get that most users will probably accept it without thinking twice, but if you’re going to do something like this, this is at least a fairly upfront and consenting way of doing it. For the TV platforms where this isn’t allowed, you have to wonder if apps are still doing it but just completely secretly, and trying to hide their tracks as well.
I absolutely adore my 2018 jailbroken LG OLED, although it pains me that everything I love about this TV are features the manufacturer actively discourages and wishes I never had access to.
It's not Smart TV apps specifically, it's all free apps. They have to monetize those somehow, don't they? And you get upset when you see ads, don't you?
Why? The only thing that's vaguely objectionable is the fact the consent screen's wording of "download public web data from the internet" omits important information on what's actually happening and the associated risks. Otherwise I'm not sure how you can come up with a principled justification of the ban beyond just "AI scrapers bad" or "hiding identity". Tor relays and VPNs are basically doing the same thing, except with clearer disclosure about what actually goes on.
Does there need to be a principled justification beyond that? I used to be on the side of the traffic, as in, it does not matter where traffic originates as long as it's not abusive. But the fact is that too many scrapers exist which are, in fact, bad. Their behavior is bad, their programming is bad, and they result in way too high costs for free infrastructure, thus they are morally bad.
I expect AT&T and Comcast to offer a residential proxy service any day now.
This is why I don't run a tor endpoint; possibly objectionable traffic I don't control sourced from my network. All it takes is one horrible request to come from your IP and you're on a list
But if these are popular apps / APIs, then the number of affected households is significant. Authorities / investigators will have to treat IPs as likely proxies and not the geolocation of the human initiating the request.
From the content hosting side (getting reamed by scrapers overloading infrastructure), the problem is that we have to be able to set "reasonable" ratelimits to share finite network uplink and server cpu resources between all of our real users and these scrapers.
When you can identify the nature of the traffic (quickly in realtime, based on simple deterministic rules), you can protect the resources: you can rate/concurrency -limit the AI scrapers in the name of saving resources for the real humans, effectively putting the scrapers in a lower priority band (which is how it generally worked for search engine scrapers before!).
The problem is they're using resiproxies to disperse and whitewash their traffic, making it extremely difficult to tell their requests apart from the legitimate human requests. They're basically lying to us about the origin, and thus denying us the ability to put them in a lower priority band than humans.
They may scrape us at, say, 25K reqs/second, but it's coming from 50K random residential eyeball IPs at an average rate of only 0.5 reqs/second/IP, and then they're intentionally lying with the UA and headers and other fingerprint details as best they can to "blend in" with the humans so that we can't differentiate.
Let's do an analogy: Imagine if there was a neighborhood grocery store you and all your neighbors rely on for food. It's cheap because they keep their margins low, and more importantly the next store down the road is like 50 miles further away. That store 50 miles down the road also charges double the price. Now they've decided to play arbitrage: they load up 100 employees in the back of an air conditioned semi, clothe them to look like local shoppers, park it 3 blocks from your neighborhood store hidden inside a fenced property, and have them all go in and buy out all the inventory in the store over the course of a couple hours. The store just looks like it's having a great sales day at first. All these customers waiting in line, each getting just a few things at a time. But two hours later, the store shelves are empty, the semi is loaded up, and they're headed 50 miles back to double the price and sell it to someone else. You go in to buy some veggies to cook dinner and there's nothing to buy.
We've been playing this game with AI scrapers and resiproxies for way too long, and someone needs to hold them accountable for their fraud.
All the arguments you made applies to VPNs or tor as well. I'm sure rightsholders would be very happy if VPNs are banned, because that gets rid of one avenue for pirating with impunity. Same goes with every ad network ever, which has to fight click fraud.
I'm not sure the adtech is even enough to subsidize the price in a meaningful way.
Google’s global ad revenue equates to roughly $61 per user per year, most TV manufacturers would be unable to extract that much out per user, even with crazy levels of tracking, ads, etc.
I haven't used a modern TV in a very long time, but I can't imagine LG is extracting over $20 in ad revenue/data revenue per year. It might move the needle on <$500 displays, but when LG displays costing over $5,000 still have this spyware its hard to defend.
What makes you think LG would not be hitting the Google numbers (Instagram ad-free is ~$6 / month for example, roughly the same ballpark)? A device that's connected to a high speed internet connection, often allowed to do background tasks and being able to track all data being consumed through it (Streaming services, gaming etc.) is extremely valuable.
It’s exhausting. It’s like every article is written by the same author and that author is also your coworker and personal assistant and also moonlights as Brian, a waiter at Chotchkie’s.
(Also: never paypig, never subscribe!)
A better solution would be to root the damn TV and neuter its spyware/adware crap.
[0] https://plasma-bigscreen.org/
I got this a few months ago -- 4k, solid brightness, and ok color.
Is it the OMG BEST? no. But I Disabled wifi, and even the channel display.
I use it with an apple TV with CEC on the TV -- I turn on the apple tv, TV turns on straight to apple interface. I turn off from the apple remote, TV turns off.
It's effectively "an apple TV" -- I'm happy.
Why not just get a (presumably subsidized) smart TV instead, and skipping the premium? It'd also be not disconnected from the internet, and despite vague HN/reddit speculation that TVs have cell modems in them, that has yet to be confirmed.
$627 - commercial display
~$200 - comparable invasive options
All you gotta do is add an Apple TV and you got everything they would give you. And they make nice margins.
Apple seems to have next to no interest in making displays at all. We are lucky whenever a new one gets announced.
People forget the reasons TVs got cheaper is because smart TVs are heavily subsidized with ads and your watch data.
I have the most "low tech" home of any of my peers, intentionally.
Based on the headline I thought it’s the built-in apps.
Just browsing the list of apps raises eyebrows for even the most non-tech audiences. 99% of it is spam, with maybe 1% being well known apps like YouTube.
The rest are weird IPTV Players, Wallpaper apps. It feels like a portal into 2009 apps, but its not.
1. Desoline (based in Netanya (Israel)
2. Bright Data (based in Israel)
Interesting.
From the country that claimed "we can see them from their TVs" when referring to the victims of their Holocaust of Gaza in which they spilt an ocean of babyblood.
But apparently we are meant to be impressed by the modern Rudolph Hess Nation's advancements in civil and chemical engineering.
Basically it's either this or pay for your apps.
Do you really think somebody would do that? Just go write apps for the love of programming and not to make money?
[1] https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRGIV3u...
And then paid apps show you ads and monetize anyway.
I expect AT&T and Comcast to offer a residential proxy service any day now.
But if these are popular apps / APIs, then the number of affected households is significant. Authorities / investigators will have to treat IPs as likely proxies and not the geolocation of the human initiating the request.
When you can identify the nature of the traffic (quickly in realtime, based on simple deterministic rules), you can protect the resources: you can rate/concurrency -limit the AI scrapers in the name of saving resources for the real humans, effectively putting the scrapers in a lower priority band (which is how it generally worked for search engine scrapers before!).
The problem is they're using resiproxies to disperse and whitewash their traffic, making it extremely difficult to tell their requests apart from the legitimate human requests. They're basically lying to us about the origin, and thus denying us the ability to put them in a lower priority band than humans.
They may scrape us at, say, 25K reqs/second, but it's coming from 50K random residential eyeball IPs at an average rate of only 0.5 reqs/second/IP, and then they're intentionally lying with the UA and headers and other fingerprint details as best they can to "blend in" with the humans so that we can't differentiate.
Let's do an analogy: Imagine if there was a neighborhood grocery store you and all your neighbors rely on for food. It's cheap because they keep their margins low, and more importantly the next store down the road is like 50 miles further away. That store 50 miles down the road also charges double the price. Now they've decided to play arbitrage: they load up 100 employees in the back of an air conditioned semi, clothe them to look like local shoppers, park it 3 blocks from your neighborhood store hidden inside a fenced property, and have them all go in and buy out all the inventory in the store over the course of a couple hours. The store just looks like it's having a great sales day at first. All these customers waiting in line, each getting just a few things at a time. But two hours later, the store shelves are empty, the semi is loaded up, and they're headed 50 miles back to double the price and sell it to someone else. You go in to buy some veggies to cook dinner and there's nothing to buy.
We've been playing this game with AI scrapers and resiproxies for way too long, and someone needs to hold them accountable for their fraud.
https://webostv.developer.lge.com/develop/getting-started/ap...
Why does a TV need security software?
Google’s global ad revenue equates to roughly $61 per user per year, most TV manufacturers would be unable to extract that much out per user, even with crazy levels of tracking, ads, etc.
I haven't used a modern TV in a very long time, but I can't imagine LG is extracting over $20 in ad revenue/data revenue per year. It might move the needle on <$500 displays, but when LG displays costing over $5,000 still have this spyware its hard to defend.
70% AI.
The only content not flagged?
Copy and pasted PR comments.
Invisible Unicode characters, triads, unnecessary markdown.
Good work, obviated by bloviating. Readers dropping off near-instantly.
A company leaving a slop trail behind its wake.
AI DDOSing should be shameful.
https://www.folklore.org/Saving_Lives.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48618246
I still do not know how the damned thing got internet.