Samsung TVs May Upload Screenshots for Automatic Content Recognition | Hacker News Reader

Samsung TVs May Upload Screenshots for Automatic Content Recognition

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1,246 pointsaritmo688 comments

I'm getting ready to go full Battlestar Galactica in all of my appliances. It's now difficult to find high end washers and ovens without these features.

At least right now we can choose not to connect the devices, but what happens if iot LTE connections get cheap enough that the choice is removed altogether, like with Tesla and other high end modern cars?

I don't think I'm just being a Luddite. This really seems like a bad idea. We need some way to assure security and limit data collection.

privacy legislation like the GDPR is a good start. In the US at least California seems on their way to come up with stronger privacy legislation and hopefully it'll spill over.

Thankfully it isn't quite that simple for electronics in the US. If it is sold commericially, it has to be registered with the FCC.

In this way, you at least know if it has WiFi, LTE, etc, and can see the module that is installed on it. This makes it much easier to go into the device and physically disable the radios on it.

Heck, maybe that is something like iFixit could do, have a how to to completely remove radio capabilities.

The average consumer won't be able (or even know) to disable built-in telemetry. As you can see from Facebook, invasive ads, DNA kits, and Alexa, most won't even care.

We've lost this battle. Our warnings weren't strong enough to win over those interested in convenience.

Well if they aren't doing anything wrong, they have nothing to hide...

For those downvoting I’m assuming this is sarcasm :D

Here's a joke that's just as good: you know what happens when you assume, don't you?

And those pesky opt-outs are irrelevant anyway: we’ll just interpolate them from the available data.

I disagree. See the CA privacy law (CCPA) and the successor that will be on the ballot in November. Those give us the chance to establish meaningful defaults.

> We've lost this battle.

I think you could look at the battle/war from a different perspectives, and come up with different conclusions.

In the mainstream (whatever that is?) it appears that convenience wins. And hardware/software vendors seem to make the assumption that customers won't complain if their data is harvested. I think that's where you're coming from?

On the (privacy) enthusiast things, the horizon looks much better. We've got great software that makes self-hosting easier: FreeNAS, Nextcloud, Docker, Plex, NixOS, etc. We have more choice in phones: we can still use "dumbphones", or use open source operating systems, or choose manufacturers with better privacy track records. I'm not familiar with consumer electronics as much, but buying low end/dumb devices (TVs, appliances) is still viable. And the open source home automation movement keeps getting traction with hardware and software.

> We have more choice in phones: we can still use "dumbphones", or use open source operating systems, or choose manufacturers with better privacy track records.

There are zero options on the market right now that come close to a modern smartphone.

PinePhone? Librem? Even freed Android phones are actually very close.

Dumb TVs are not available anymore. I would gladly buy one with decent image quality if such existed.

So just buy a large display. And sit closer.

Also makes it easier to watch DVDs and torrented stuff.

They do, they just don't call them TVs. Look up commercial digital displays, exact same brands with the same screens as the consumer model but no tracking and bloatware. Of course, without the subsidies from selling your data, they're going to run you an extra 30-50%

it's not just that, they're generally rated for 24/7 usage and feature much higher build quality - often with ultra thin bezels to allow them to be used in tiled arrangements.

whether that usage rating is related to any actual difference in the hardware is something i've pondered, but it is something they do specifically mention.

I wish it was only a 30-50% premium though as my experience is that they are an integer multiple of the equivalent consumer TV.

>I wish it was only a 30-50% premium though as my experience is that they are an integer multiple of the equivalent consumer TV

You weren't kidding, just had a quick browse for some, they were between $5000-$17000 for sizes equivalent to home TVs.

generally we get around this by using rentals for a lot of things, the only people purchasing them (in my realm) are production rental houses like PRG or VER, or permanent installers where the cost is just another line on the buildout of a space.

I'm very happy with my current dumb 65" 1080p screen, but have thought about whether I would pay signage screen prices if the only other option was something with its own rogue computer - smart TVs really are terrible in every iteration I've seen. Eventually I may desire more resolution or size, or my screen may have an irreparable failure.

Having modded thinkpads to use better / higher resolution panels, and having disassembled a number of consumer TVs, I do suspect that the next best option is going to be getting a dumb driver board to accept HDMI and turn it into the LVDS / EDP / whatever interface is needed to directly drive the panel (as well as a backlight driver, and something to spit audio from the HDMI to some speakers). As it gets harder to buy a quality large screen without crapware (without paying signage prices) I hope enough of us will pursue this route that there can be a known process and BOM to make it a straightforward project. I would imagine you could have your cake and eat it too by pairing up a quality dumb driver board and a high quality screen that is not available in dumb form.

At that point we could consider interesting modifications like a teensy with ethernet to allow remote control over LAN with a protocol like OSC, or some lightweight hardware to decode an NDI stream to allow creating "channels" coordinated by a centralized media server / NAS. One could accomplish interesting things that would be concerning if not under local-only control, like video calling that hops between screens in the house as you change rooms, shows that automatically pause if you get up for a restroom break, gesture control for when you're watching a cooking video while cooking and have dirty/wet hands, and so on. There is a ton of smart home functionality around screens that is compelling and useful when not paired with creepy companies or unknown data exfiltration.

I wonder if you can buy reasdonbly priced OEM replacement boards from the commercial (dumb) display and switch the guts out?

> [privacy] [Plex]

Plex forces centralized Internet authentication for your locally-hosted server, and uses a variety of centralized services that have access to your served files' titles and other metadata. Furthermore Plex collects a variety of usage information statistics. I don't think it's possible to entirely opt out of these services or collection, or indeed use Plex at all without Internet access.

Although Plex claims to "care deeply" about privacy in its privacy policy, there is no blanket statement guaranteeing the privacy of your data and usage habits, or at least none without weasel words.

TIL... Thanks for highlighting this.

This is the main reason I prefer UMS to Plex.

I dunno. I just installed Plex server on my not internet connected Windows 10 NAS and it works fine locally.

As someone who held out on smart phones until 2 months ago, nah, not having a smart phone isn't an option any more. Many jobs, even if not explicitly, require you to have a smart phone. Otherwise you can't read or see what your boss sends, you can't use their dumbass apps, you can't take and send pictures of customer complaints or problems, and ive even found places that requires you to have a smart phone just to sign up for their job application submission software.

Not having a smartphone is turning into luddite territory and you are looked down upon as less valuable in much of the modern world if you don't have one.

Being looked down on by someone who voluntarily carries a state-approved surveillance appliance, I can live with that.

> have a how to to completely remove radio capabilities.

We have no guarantee these devices would continue to work after such operation.

Like Zune's DRM (luckily before Zune died they let purchasers download MP3s). I wonder what funny failure scenarios we'll see in the future.

On the topic of Samsung, their "smart" Fridge had issues when Google changed its API: https://support.google.com/calendar/forum/AAAAd3GaXpEWgy9gKk... , but at least that's some stupid feature and not a fridge's main feature...

Games have been becoming unplayable due to DRM servers shutting down. IoT devices are becoming bricks when they go out of support.

DRM and internet dependency are the ultimate tools in capitalisms planned obsolescence toolbox. You no longer have to wait for a product to fail, you can simply remotely destroy it so the customer buys a new one.

While topics like privacy and DRM are important, framing the discussion in those terms de facto obscures/distracts from the issue of property rights. Using someone's property (to e.g. to spy on them) after they purchased it is usually some sort of crime: trespassing, theft, vandalism, etc. If "intellectual property" is "property", then destroying someone's property (with DRM or other remote control) is a crime such as vandalism. The manufacturer lost their rights at the first sale of the good to the customer.

This is why tech companies have been pushing to reframe the sales of their goods as a service. They abuse[1] copyright by claiming yu need to license the software/firmware. This is like claiming when you purchase a book it isn't your property because they only "licensed" the book's story. However, trying to extend copyright (which only grants rights related to making more copies) into property rights is a misuse of copyright[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_misuse

> DRM and internet dependency are the ultimate tools in capitalisms planned obsolescence toolbox.

They are also the ultimate tools in authoritarian government’s toolboxes. Nothing like the ministry of truth having the ability to prevent the citizens from seeing unapproved “harmful” content that might disrupt society’s harmony.

As the sibling points out, the real issue here is the devaluation of property rights (more specifically your control over your own devices). These type of controls should be fought even in non-capitalist environments.

Sorry should be more clear. I mean how to physically remove such capabilities.

I interpreted as: we have no guarantee that they won't need an internet connection to operate.

Not saying a manufacturer might not think about making a TV that must be connected to the internet but, even leaving aside privacy etc. issues, that's a huge minefield. Not everyone has internet everywhere that they might care to install a TV.

And it wouldn't take much for Best Buy or Walmart to stop carrying your product after one too many customers return it because it wouldn't work.

People made this argument about Steam, Battlenet, game DRM, etc. But it happened anyway.

Yes, but those are things you install. Some services require an Internet connection and people accept that. You can’t use Netflix without an internet connection either (although you can download to watch offline). That’s different from taking a TV home and it not working even as a dumb display because you don’t have an internet connection.

Ahh, I misunderstood! I would say that is when it gets returned if I need internet to operate my TV.

Can there be a balance? I'd love to remotely control and view the status of my appliances without sending the telemetry to the OEM. Physically disabling all the radios would prohibit this functionality.

I reckon that, given enough time, it’ll go the same was as everything else. Either you pay a subscription to remote it (and the inevitable ads that will appear), or you pay a premium for something without that functionality.

I don’t see how this stops. Advertisers will stop at nothing to invade your life, and businesses are more than happy to facilitate them if they get some more money out of it.

Agreed. Adding to this, consumers in general are failing to quantify the cost of giving up their personal data.

Even more, how do we quantify the price of our attention and our lives? You can use Facebook for free but as well as having hyper-targeted adverts thrown in your face, they are also vacuuming any single point of individuality you might possess, because everyone in the industry is brokering the data like a private commodity that we can never actually know anything about. IMO, Facebook is not worth the price of that level of pervasive, perverse, surveillance. Neither is Google.

Things like GDPR absolutely help but they're not retroactive, and chances are there is no way of clearing all of that up given how many millions of servers might have a trace of it.

Our current situation is where technology is leeching from humanity but humanity is okay with it because they get stuff for free.

I mean, yes? People want free stuff. The cost has to be paid somehow. If that is eyeballs and data then so be it.

Root + alternate ROM

Is there much of a community for installing alternate ROMs on IoT devices?

yes, the first example I know from the top of my head is all the sonoff stuff.

They run a popular ESP8266 chip which people reflash.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=sonoff+reflash&t=canonical&ia=web

Not sure it quite compares to the phone custom ROM community in size but there is an active community. I've reflashed cheap wifi IoT devices which otherwise wanted to phone home with Tasmota[0] which seems like a relatively active project. There are other similar efforts too. You could also consider eg home assistant, openhab or domoticz to form part of this type of community and they're very active.

0. https://github.com/arendst/Tasmota

Not sure how active it is but there is a community for installing open firmware on Samsung TVs:

http://www.samygo.tv/

And I really have to think that the more companies add these misfeatures, the more effort is going to put into alternate ROMs/firmware for more consumer electronics.

Won't this create an opportunity for someone to enter the market with a TV that uses no ads or telemetry? Surely it is obvious there are millions of people who don't want smart TV's you would think a company offering a dumb TV would thrive. Are we just not at that point yet?

I guess part of the problem is brand recognition. 95% of a TV is the screen, and Samsung, LG, Sony and perhaps a couple of others own that market between them.

I see neither Samsung, LG, nor Sony getting on board, so you'd have to be buying their panels and do a good job with the electronics for people to but then.

That's fine in the ultra-premium space, the price to the consumer will cover the R&D, but mainstream, you'll just be Hannspree or something that has good panels but nobody knows our cares about you.

> This makes it much easier to go into the device and physically disable the radios on it.

Wouldn't opening the device void the warranty?

Nope!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/04/11...

That's for removing a sticker. Not for removing a whole module or messing with wiring.

The law quoted states a manufacturer cannot invoke a void warrenty for modifications unrelated to the warrenty claim. For example, if I replace the radio in my car, the manufacturer cannot said i voided my warrenty if the engine has problems (unless the modification did damage it).

So I would argue yes, if i disable the radios and something unrelated is damaged, then the warranty is still valid.

No doubt it's a judgment call for the court, but your car radio is farther from the engine then your TV wifi module is from the TV receiver. Your TV is all likely to be on the same DC circuit, maybe even all soldered together on one board.

Why are people so worried about preserving the warranty on their electronics? If it lasted 30 days and you don’t break it while futzing with it, it’s likely to work through the warranty period anyway. If it doesn’t, buy another one. TVs are ridiculously inexpensive now.

I see people online waiting years (perhaps 5% of their life) to mod their cars or electronics for fear of losing the warranty.

Side note: Magnuson-Moss in the US prevents manufacturers from failing to honor their warranty because of totally unrelated modifications (or for opening a device without damaging it). “Warranty void if sticker removed” is almost certainly inaccurate legally.

> If it doesn’t, buy another one. TVs are ridiculously inexpensive now.

If you buy a mediocre one, sure? Good OLED TVs today still cost thousands. They are a big ticket purchase for most buyers. Hesitance in breaking them open is entirely sensible.

And "ridiculously cheap" is still a few hundred dollars in most cases. Which is still a decent chunk of money for a lot of people.

I'd say TVs, like mobile phones, are the sort of thing people spend beyond their means on, this makes it an even more expensive purchase, and a lot of people probably don't have the tools, the knowledge or the experience to crack open a flat panel TV without damaging it.

More of an issue is that the devices will be single SoC and soldered together so removing a part risks frying the whole thing.

I was talking to a few people in a slack channel the other day about the potential market for a whole set of "dumb" appliances. At the end of the day, we came to the conclusion that it wouldn't be a able to reach mass market because the mass consumers seem to care more about price than security.

Well, I would be interested. Also, I don't like HDMI, and I don't need such a big TV set. For TV and VCR and some stuff like that, if it uses computer system (many kind of appliances should not need any kind of computer code), having the rights provided by GPL3, and also wired IMIDI (and perhaps also IMIDI-over-IR, with a switch to disable IR entirely). And, the software should be simpler and not so slow, not so much fancy animation or otherwise bad UI (e.g. requiring you to push the arrows to select an option, even if just one button (such as a number) should do) either!

Would it be possible to build an adapter that could filter out Ethernet-over-HDMI?

There are basically zero consumer devices right now that actually support that functionality. It's not useful as a selling feature when TVs all have wifi now anyway.

If you could get the price down to a comparable point, you might be able to market against the price-vs-security crowd, but I think you'd find yourself up against another large percentage of consumers that care more about features than security, which seems a lot harder to compete with when you're pitting dumb devices against smart devices.

Yeah, this is pretty much what a few people brought up. Consumers seem to actively want to give their data away for "features" which usually aren't worth the data they are giving up.

1) I'm one of the consumers that often actively want to give my data away for "features" that I think are worth the data I'm giving up.

2) I've seen enough comments on HN with the opposite (valid) mindset to think there's a nonzero audience of people that are also willing to pay for privacy over features.

Both groups of people seem to feel the other group is wrong and seem biased to think the world would be a better place if everyone in the other group converted to their own, but if you promote privacy over features there's definitely a market out there for you. :)

Make cars too, please.

Manual transmission (actual stick and clutch, not silly paddles), minimal ECUs, disableable seatbelt chime, cigar lighter, and so forth. You know, less cyber.

Wouldn’t that make it almost impossible to meet emission regulations? I’m not a fan of how opaque cars have gotten, but I’ll accept some loss of control for cleaner air.

Automatics are still too dumb to keep the clutch engaged while braking.

Officially automatics and manuals are a wash for mileage, but I think driving style can make manuals the winner.

All that kinetic energy getting dissipated by brakes instead of turning the engine and all of its accessories in autos.

I’m quite surprised auto manufacturers haven’t implemented engine braking for émissions, reducing brake wear, and quicker « free » cabin heat in cold conditions.

Typical automatics have comfortably passed out manuals for mileage on average, some time in the 2010s. Driving style "can" theoretically still make a given manual more efficient, but it requires an unusual attention to mileage by the manual driver and/or an unusually aggressive driver on the automatic.

> but I think driving style can make manuals the winner.

Everything you can do, a machine can do better.

In theory. But I don’t have a much faith in auto transmissions (effectively a mechanical computer that has to handle many scenarios, probably none perfectly).

My hybrid's auto actually does a pretty good job (2013 V60 D6; diesel front, electric rear axle). And it's a simple 6 gear box, not a fancy 8 or 11 gear twin clutch. Picks a good gear, no hysteresis and the overall control intelligence seems to properly decide when to enter neutral and recuperate (on wildly shifting loads [steep uphill slopes] that "overall intelligence" sometimes tends to be too aggressive with shutting down the diesel altogether, but that's not the transmissions fault).

Most importantly: Your gearbox works the same regardless of your state of mind, regardless of you caring about mpg or not, regardless of you being focused on driving or not. It will just deliver.

Sure, a good driver in the manual version of a car might achieve better mpg than the auto version, but that requires skill and focus and effort. And realistically, a human driver won't deliver 100% of the time, so the auto version will beat the manual version over the long haul, no matter the driver.

I've never understood why it seems meaningful that an automatic can get a tiny bit better mileage. There are a lot of ways to reduce fuel use and/or the overall environmental impact of car operation. Using public transport, biking or walking 1/n trips would accomplish the same goal, and n probably wouldn't have to be very low. There's also the life cycle considerations of manufacturing and disposal of cars. Blahdy blah.

The reason to drive a stick is to drive. Anyone who's never tried it, try it! You become an essential part of the experience, both hands and feet involved and synthesizing related tasks, while you look ahead, anticipate, plan, breathe. You don't need music or the phone or a fridge in the glove box. It doesn't have to be a sports car, anything with a stick will do.

We are in a privileged moment. How long ago was it that cars didn't even exist? How long since they have been really excellent, dynamic, safe(er), powerful, reliable? I'd argue late 80s to about now is the entire window. Already, 2/5 of our appendages are useless to the task, and soon it will be 5/5.

Smoke 'em if you've got 'em!

> I've never understood why it seems meaningful that an automatic can get a tiny bit better mileage.

It used to be an argument for stick shifts, that they had better mileage. When I got my license 7 years ago, that "fact" was part of the course. Eco-driving is a mandatory part of both the written test and the practical test, so the "correct" answer if you wanted to pass the test was that you should prefer a stick shift over an automatic, because of fuel economy. Also, if you do your practical test with an automatic, you get a mark on your license saying you are not allowed to drive manuals.

These days, it's factually wrong, so driving students get told wrong things, and spend time learning and doing useless bullshit, and get told to buy the wrong type of car. That pissed me off like no other.

> The reason to drive a stick is to drive.

I agree. That's an honest argument for stick shift. The feeling of driving one. Even though a modern automatic will accelerate faster than you can ever do driving a stick shift. Because everything you can do, a machine can do better...

If that was true, you wouldn't be behind the wheel at all.

The transmission can't see the road ahead and prepare in advance.

Whenever there's an article here on Hacker News about self-driving cars, do you just... skip over them? Your eyes glaze over, and you're not seeing that part of the technological landscape? What do you think all the computer vision tech is doing in self-driving cars?

Sorry, I'm not as enlightened as you. Which self driving car do you own?

I think they do keep it engaged, at least while coasting.

I know you said braking but I've seen it in both my 2002 and 2015 automatics when coasting.

If I'm coasting up to a red light I'm pretty sure I can brake lightly and still be coasting with no fuel consumption, and then it will only turn the fuel back on when it needs to creep.

I'll check it on the live MPG display next time I'm driving.

My 2005 car will use engine braking to control hill descent speed automatically, and will downshift in some cases to assist braking.

Automatics disengage the driveshaft to save wear on engine parts. It's an active decision, not being "too dumb". Wearing out brakes is cheaper to fix than wearing out your brakes, and people like longer lasting, cheaper to fix, cars.

I figured they disengaged because they can’t know if you’re wanting to coast or wanting to brake when you step off the accelerator.

If they always assumed you wanted to brake, that would really hurt mileage.

And it would have to disengage anyway at some point to avoid stalling.

Engine braking is more RPMs in aggregate, but nothing particularly bad for an engine.

Automatics don't use a traditional clutch for transmissions, so it wouldn't actually stall, but your other points could be true.

Replying to myself here because I can't edit it after someone has responded?

I meant wearing our brakes is cheaper to fix that engine parts.

Put an automatic in "low gear" (I still remember when it used to be called "grade retard" on some cars, which was to be used for braking only and not acceleration) and you'll get engine braking.

and quicker « free » cabin heat in cold conditions.

Engine braking won't heat the engine much over just idling, in fact it may even cool it off more because the governor will cut off fuel completely.

It’s a good question re:heat that seems to be unanswered. While it is compression and decompression, it’s not 100% efficient. And in a gas car, it’s releasing hot compressed air throughout the system, including the cat converter. I figured enough heat during compression would radiate to the engine. Plus more RPMs = more stuff warming up.

I mean, the energy has to go somewhere, and the engine itself makes the most sense.

We’re doing the opposite of acceleration (sometimes faster), so that’s gotta be a lot more energy turned into heat than necessary to keep an engine idle.

If brake pads get to several hundred degrees while braking...

Normal engine braking (and even the compression-release "Jake brakes" on diesels, while more effective) doesn't develop anywhere near as much force as the wheel brakes. You're right that it does generate heat, but it's not a lot --- instead of purely compressing and releasing the compressed air, the engine is just acting as an air pump; the air gets compressed (and hotter) during the compression stroke, but instead of igniting, what would be the power stroke merely expands the air again to the same volume it had before, and then the exhaust stroke pushes it out with little restriction. I would bet that even if it's just idling, the heat of combustion will be far greater than whatever friction losses contribute to engine braking.

Reciprocating mass (pistons, rods, and valves constantly changing direction) is where a great deal of the energy is sunk when engine braking. It doesn't all go to heat. Accessories are also doing useful work like the alternator charging the battery and the water pump circulating coolant. Friction is significant and increases with rpm and oil pressure, but you aren't heating it nearly as much as when it's burning fuel.

Naw, diesels do all of that too and their engine braking is minimally effective without modifications. Trucks will have "Jake brakes" installed, but diesel cars get minimal effects from engine braking.

Gas vehicles effectively engine brake without modification, but dunno where all the energy is getting converted.

I do wish alternators would detect engine braking and ramp up electric cabin heat though.

Oh yeah, diesels suck air all the time whereas gas engines are creating a strong vacuum, which is a lot of effort. They turn at higher rpm than diesels, too.

> Automatics are still too dumb to keep the clutch engaged while braking.

Automatics don't have a clutch though. They have a torque converter, which is not the same thing.

There are still plenty of brand new cars using old school 4 speed autos which are significantly worse for efficiency than a manual.

Somebody should buy the tooling for early 90's Camry's/ES300's and sell them indefinitely. You could get a reliable, brand new car for a couple grand.

Sort of like the original VW Beetle sales model.

They wouldn't be legal to sell in the US for a variety of reasons. Vehicle safety laws are updated pretty regularly.

Off the top of my head, they probably wouldn't meet:

FMVSS 126 (ESC), FMVSS 111 (rear camera), FMVSS 138 (TMPS), FMVSS 226 (occupant ejection mitigation)

Although, like the beetle, you could sell them in countries with lower safety standards. I'm pretty some joint ventures in China are/were actually done with old tooling from western automakers.

You’d still have a better car if you took modern drivetrain with 90s knobs.

The touchscreen revolution in cars is a dumpster fire. Literally every aspect of the controls on my last couple of cars has been a regression.

I'll just settle for any car without a screen in the dash.

Oh wait, they made that illegal starting MY2015 (in the US, at least).

OK, how about just without a touchscreen, then?

Well, Mazda deliberately avoided using touchscreens in their 2019 line of 3s and CX-30s.

Apparently they're not selling well in US.

The seat belt chime might be a requirement, depending on where you live. Also, the complicated ECU helps with fuel efficiency (and thus lessens environmental impact). How about ESP and similar safety tech? Matrix light (forbidden in the US?) is nice when driving through forests since the high beam can stay up, but involves a lot of high tech as well. I can live without, but a rear camera is damn handy.

Most important: This is completely detached from the manufacturer spying on you, or preventing cheap repairs by not selling you necessary parts or withholding information.

perhaps a pihole of some sort can be built

my major concern is that the digital parts may be connection dependent for function

I'm not sure this is a counterargument, but if a company did this in an open way I could trust, I would buy EVERYTHING from them. Fridge, washer, dryer, dishwasher, televisions, small electronics, cars, whatever. You name it I'd buy it. I don't have enough information to determine how many people are like me, but the profit you could make on me as a customer would be ridiculous. You'd get the kind of platform loyalty that Amazon and Google dream of. I'd probably even be happy to share some personal information with you in a way that I controlled that you could turn around and sell. The sense of autonomy, privacy, and control is that valuable to me.

100% this. I would be another loyal customer buying everything from such a company.

I place high value on not fucking over fellow human beings, and I'd happily put the money where my mouth is, but the market seems essentially devoid of ethical companies these days. I'm sure there is many more people like us - perhaps enough to sustain a company.

(FWIW, if you extend this past issues of ads and privacy, and into making good products and just selling them for money - I'm not sure how long such a company would last these days. Being ethical means no planned obsolescence, or otherwise churning out new variants of the same thing to keep sales up. It could have a problem with a continued revenue stream - but then again, I'd probably happily pay an extra subscription to an ethical company that cut away all this bullshit, just for the privilege of being able to then buy products from them.)

> Being ethical means no planned obsolescence, or otherwise churning out new variants of the same thing to keep sales up.

If you buy "TV as a service" instead of as a product, the effect is basically that the company providing the service will do the opposite of planning for obsolescence.

Perhaps this is the kind of company you are looking for?

This is my only argument for "subscription culture" in much better words.

That's a fair point, and arguably a good side of products-as-serivces. I'm still generally against them, though, for two reasons.

One: in practice, -as-a-Service businesses tend to quickly devolve their business models to include user-hostile, unethical aspects. Requiring Internet access, telemetry, ads, remote bricking, etc.

Two - and this is more of a gut feeling than a properly thought-through objection: I don't like the risk curve. Services require a steady cash flow. Have a financial hick-up, and you have to start sacrificing some of your services. Whereas with ownership, you can keep using the goods you own regardless of how much money you have - and with proper care and maintenance, you can get a lot of mileage out of the things you buy. Poorer people tend to be good at it by necessity. The same poorer people would end up trapped if they depended on everything as services.

I also like the fact that, if for some reason you prefer monthly installments to lump-sum purchase, you can turn almost any product into service by getting a bank involved. It has a nice, Unixy feel to it.

But, as I said, I haven't really made up my mind about this just yet.

Have you purchased one of Purism’s products (phone, laptop, etc)? That’s their entire shtick. I could see them developing into the kind of company you describe with a wide range of privacy respecting products.

As of now, in the UK, LG’s TVs are fairly up front about automatic content recognition, and it’s off by default.

But I agree, we need a consumer-electronics company that uses privacy as a competitive advantage the way Apple does for phones.

There are dozens of people like you, maybe even thousands or tens of thousands. In other words, not do worth paying attention to.

Also, you're probably not telling the truth to yourself, since you get your news from HN instead of paying for journalism.

Be aware that there are existing markets for a whole set of appliances which are very, very "dumb" indeed. Take a look at Lehman's, based out of Ohio Amish country: https://www.lehmans.com/

It's hard to install spyware on something that doesn't run off electricity.

Maybe we should just ddos these endpoints, they don't deserve anything better.

Interesting. Rather than restricting what is sent could one just spam them with garbage so they can't distinguish what's real from what's fake?

I’m worried by how much I like this idea

Would it note be relatively trivial for the manufacturer to just filter incoming requests by whitelist of registered ids of their appliances?

Not really - either you send the ids unencrypted and they're trivial to falsify, or you send them securely, in which case it takes a lot more power to decrypt each request for filtering than it does for the attacker to send each new request.

DDoS protection is surprisingly challenging - usually it's relegated to a CDN provider, but that would be more difficult when the actual consumers are the same people most likely to be hosting botnets.

Be careful, when you mess with corporate America you're basically going head on with momma bear US government.

Assuming the aren't well programmed, it might be preferable to spoof them with junk data.

Is anyone MITM-ing and publishing the data these devices are sending? It would be nice to reverse engineer and document their APIs. Somebody needs to be watching the watchers.

>what happens if iot LTE connections get cheap enough that the choice is removed altogether.

Narrowband IoT is the target market for that. T-Mobile has a plan where a certified module costs $5 (There is a min order to get that price, but for a large vendor that's not going to be an issue) then $6 p/year as long as you can keep below 12MB per year. But you can keep bw down by shipping the fingerprinting software with the TV and only sampling a small section of the screen (Other TV Vendors have done done this in the past too) and create the matching fingerprints in your server farm (So no need to send a full screenshot to fingerprint the show.

The question is then would $25 added to the BOM cost per device be worth it to the manufacturer (Cost of the module plus 3 years of NB-IoT coverage). Though you could reduce that by getting a custom deal with the carrier where you only pay for data if you actually activate it, then only activate the module if the TV has been in use for X hours without phoning home using the customers own connection.

From a cost perceptive I think we are pretty much already there.

I think we’re safe from that because enough people put their smartTVs on the network anyway.

We’ll lose some precision in the data because it’s biased against grandma, but good enough to sell the reports.

It may be $25/unit, but if 9/10 put their device on the network anyway, that’s $250/useful outcome.

But that $25 is if every module is activated. If the Customer connects the TV to their own network anyway then you just cancel (if even activated anyway) the data plan for that TV.

My argument is more that from a cost point of view we are pretty much at the point it could be done, Not that I think it will happen any time soon (Reg's about data collection around the world are beginning to tighten up, personally I think getting the lawyers to draft up the paper work for an always connected TV for data collection alone is gonna be more the sticking point then the cost of the equipment/data to do so).

Sounds like the trick will be to convince my TV that I’m in EU.

The TV would know where you are by knowing what phone masts are in your area. But if you are in the US then ain't California pushing for tighter data collection regs?

But I get what your trying to say. Time to spin up a Software Defined Radio and start faking cell towers so your TV thinks it's in the EU :-P

Hopefully we can just tap into the serial interface.

A lot of them has started even locking down the serial interface. Hell even the boot logo on most LG TV's these days are signed.

EDIT: One thing that "might" work is a repair remote / repair menu. On the LG TV's in my house the repair menus allow you to change things like what HDMI mux the TV is expecting (I can't recall if the WiFi Module was included in such menus, but if it is you could change it to something its isn't and hopefully break connectivity. I'll have to dig out my repair remote and play around in the menus again).

There’s so many inputs, I’m sure there’s piles of vulnerabilities.

IR interface buffer overflows anyone?

i've never been so happy to not have a smart tv...

might is not a smart tv. I will need one sooner or later, so i am going to look at corporate televisions. Like in meeting rooms, and hotels that dont have this smart cack into them. Just a good panel, with honest HDMI ports on them!

Yep, the other good ones are for "commercial signage displays". No one wants to pay for smart garbage on those, so they're usually just good panels with ports.

all i want is a good panel with ports!

No wonder that even when it’s explained to them, people just shrug their shoulders. If the alternative is to go full guerilla war against your own [0] appliances, no wonder many people just give up.

[0] I expect any day now we’ll get “subscription TVs” (as in, the actual hardware). We’re already there with headphones. https://www.channelnews.com.au/nuraphone-launch-subscription...

Roku does it now... you have to register the 'Roku TV' before using it (even if it's not network connected). TV generates a code, punch it into their network, get counter code.

I can totally see a month to month plan for getting a TV (the 50" is $260, so you could do a $20/month and come out ahead after the first year).

No, when setting up the TV, if you choose not to have a network connection, there is no need to link. There wouldn't be a way to link, as the TV can't reach the Roku servers.

I saw a subscription PC on the Dell website a few days back.

Doesn’t GDPR apply to EU citizens, regardless of geography? I know that at my place of work, I have to get consent from EU citizens to email them, even if we are talking in the US

Legally it does

From the privacy policy:

"If you are located in the European Economic Area (“EEA”) or Switzerland, with respect to transfers to the U.S. of certain personal information collected in connection with your use of Samsung Smart TVs, Samsung Electronics America, Inc. and its subsidiary Samsung Research America, Inc. are certified under the EU-U.S. and Swiss-U.S. Privacy Shield frameworks developed by the U.S. Department of Commerce, and the European Commission and Swiss Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner, respectively, regarding the transfer of certain personal information from the EEA and Switzerland to the U.S."

Which basically means that Samsung pinkie swears that they won’t do anything bad, and the EU is powerless to do anything anyway.

I don't understand how this works.

If you're not in the EU, the EU doesn't have jurisdiction, period. They can say whatever they want but it doesn't mean anything. I'm sure China would love to enforce their laws worldwide too, but it doesn't work that way.

Tell that to the US and US tax laws

Those are enforceable via extradition treaty because tax evasion is a crime in every nation in the world; if you want to extradite someone, the act in question must usually be a crime in both nations. The GDPR imposes regulations which have not parallels in other nations, so extradition is not an option. The Europeans are, however, free to arrest those who enter their nations, so it's still worth following for most people.

In case with Samsung, EU authorities can forbid selling their products in EU.

China does try and succeed, I’d like to remind you of the NBA fiasco and the Blizzard catastrophe.

If you want to do business in, or travel to, the EU, then you obey their laws.

You’re free to ignore the GDPR but don’t be surprised if they arrest you if you ever visit.

You should only have to convince it that you're an EU national.

> But that $25 is if every module is activated. If the Customer connects the TV to their own network anyway then you just cancel (if even activated anyway) the data plan for that TV.

Sounds to me like connecting it once, then resetting WiFi password will do the trick?

We’ll lose some precision in the data because it’s biased against grandma,

That will single handedly kill ratings for CBS.

$25 is hugely expensive. This is an industry that removes $0.02 bypass capacitors by trial and error to save a few pennies.

It is also the same industry that grossly overvalues ads.

In their mind $25 is a steal.

Normally I would agree (The race to the bottom is huge) but in a market where the cheapest Samsung 32" TV in the UK on Amazon is £183 (~$240), The brand carries some weight for "quality", the data the module would generate can be sold on to generate income and you would be in a fine position to sign a custom deal with the carrier where you only pay for data if the customer didn't connect the device to their own connection the extra module itself is gonna cost $5. The extra $20 is only in data charges if they chose to exploit it.

Samsung could throw in the cheapest caps they could find from Shenzhen Markets, but they usually come with a decent brand (at least in the TV's I've taken apart in the past couple of years).

Sneaking in the extra cost of the modulke to the customer (if its as low as $5) will be pretty easy as long as the rev generated from the data collection is more than the data charges they are billed for (omitting the cost of dev'ing the FP'ing software and generating the FP's in your server farm).

EDIT: The 3 years of service was just a random number plucked out of the air. A length of time that could be used to study to see if the costs would be worth it (and a number I picked from experience with updates / new features no longer being pushed to smart TV's). If they found its not worth it, they could drop the service 12 months in and not have to pay for the 2 years left on the experiment (thus reducing the cost again).

The manufacturers have the numbers (number of units sold vs the number of units phoning home) to know if it would be a worthwhile endeavour. Just making the point that we are pretty much at the point where the costs of such connectivity is not a huge sum in the grand scheme of things.

True, but bypass capacitors don't produce ad revenue.

... yet.

Found "Mad Man" Muntz's HN account

Amazon will knock $20 off the price of a kindle if you get the version with ads. And those only display static grayscale ads, advertisers may be willing to pay more for something more invasive. Extracting $25 of value from spyware on televisions doesn't seem out of the question.

Amazon doesn't make that Kindle $20 cheaper, it makes the ad-free version $20 more expensive, or at least, that's how I see it. That's more about market segmentation than the actual value of ads.

Even if we assume ads are nothing more than an annoyance with $0 value, the "with ads" version may still be beneficial to Amazon. That's if people with a lower budget tolerate ads and those with a high budget don't. If they only sell the expensive ad-free version, they will lose the low-budget customers, if they sell the ad-free version at the with-ads price, they lose money from people who are ready to pay more. Ads here are just a market segmentation tool. Just like it is common for low end products to be the same as their high counterparts but with disabled features.

What about your experience on the Internet leads you to believe a company would value ads at $0?

Can you point to another Amazon produced product where they achieve segmentation by making the same product and then disable features on the cheap one?

> Can you point to another Amazon produced product where they achieve segmentation by making the same product and then disable features on the cheap one?

Prime video, amazon fresh. i believe the latter is no longer available outside of Prime. I think Prime shipping itself also counts here, given the changes over the years.

Edit: spelling

Hulu more than doubles their subscription price to hide ads. Do you really think that they're making less net revenue per subscription from ad-viewing users than ad-free ones?

If you're getting $26 from the ad agencies, then it's $-1 on your BOM. Done deal.

But is individual data worth that much? I mean isn’t “my” Facebook data is worth less than $0.20US/year?

Facebook had 20 USD per active user revenue in 2018. So it is somehow worth more than that.

I bet they count API hits (FB app checking in but not being used) in that. If it was based per interacting user I bet it's much higher.

User revenue isn’t the same thing as what the user data is worth. What would their revenue be if they did nothing more than IP geolocation ads without any other user data?

It's only "worth" that little because of FB's pricing, which also includes their signaling on how worthless they want people to think their data is, overall.

Advertisers pay Facebook a total of $100/yr/user in USA.

So that wifi chipset is worth $-275, given a three year lifespan.

And that’s why you have 50” LCDs selling for $300 in the USA.

"individual data" is what makes all the difference here. Once you have the individual tv viewership data you can build products like - - tv to digital re-targetting - tv ad to actual sale/visit attribution - ad campaign performance analytics - in-tv targetted ads - show/ad ratings - and many more reports

you can sell these products to broadcasters, brands, ad agencies, tv show producers and even to election campaigns !!

$6/yr is early adopter price. With a little competition and multiple spy devices per home, that will drop to bulk rates of $1/yr/device or less.

Additional requirement for modern media room:

Faraday Cage

Eldest Child: "DAD!!!! Why doesn't the WiFi work in the media room!!!!"

Thinking about it, That is an added bonus... ;-)

have you looked into commercial variants? you can get dumb display panels geared toward that use, I'm sure the same is true for fridges, dishwashers, ovens. Aesthetics may be an issue.

For now. Just wait for the manufacturers to realize they can add "as a Service" to those commercial display panels. Business customers will like it because opex > capex, the vendors will argue that they need the telemetry to provide a better service, and then you won't be able to buy them as individual anyway, because there will be contracts involved.

Jammer is an option. Breaking the antenna too.

Or a tiny IMSI catcher that’ll just constantly report: « Network Unavailable: Natural Disaster ».

It’ll be fun to see which devices bricked themselves.

I wouldn't be surprised if the devices will be bricked if they can't phone home to prevent things like this and DIY mods.

Depending on how devious you're prepared to be (Perhaps to prove a point?) it may be possible to be more subtle than that and send them well-formed rubbish? (as in, by modifying the hardware - the reverse engineering probably wouldn't be too bad if you had access to high speed logic analyzers etc.)

Then again, the manufacturer may program them to recognise that by making the device phone home with some kind of authentication.

> what happens if iot LTE connections get cheap enough that the choice is removed altogether

Just like what happens when any product you like gets discontinued. You either accept the drawbacks of the alternatives and pick the next best choice or you do without it altogether.

If this really becomes TV with LTE or not TV, you’ll quickly see how little people truly care. Think back to 2008-2010 and the anti-smartphone people. How many of them are still holding out?

Surprisingly many, as market for dumbphones and burners show. You can still buy a dumbphone.

I sort of wonder how dumbphone sales split out between:

- I don't need/want to pay for/know how to use a computer in my pocket. A phone is all I need.

- My kid just needs a phone for emergencies. A smartphone will be a distraction

- An actual burner phone for whatever purpose.

Also the too poor crowd. I think the only reason they still exist is because 3rd world countries use them. Although even 3rd world countries are getting upgraded to smart phones as cheap low level ones enter the market. I give it maybe 3 years until they're no longer being offered.

I'm not sure I'd bet against you but, so long as they remain the best way to communicate by voice/text more or less anonymously (in a world where pay phones are mostly no longer an option), I expect they'll remain as a niche for illegal, quasi-legal, etc. use at least.

I suppose that smartphones can in principle be equivalently anonymous but, in practice, it's probably harder and there are more opportunities to leak identity.

81% of American adults own a smartphone. Not surprisingly the 50+ demographic is least likely to own one. You’re correct that the non-smart phone market currently exists but pretty soon it’s going to be down to one or two choices at most.

https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/mobile/

The market for 'dumbphones' is living on borrowed time; once all the remaining CSP's have Refarmed 2G/3G spectrum and allocated it for other uses such as IoT/M2M and diversified into adjacent digital services, it will disappear sooner than you think. Next up, 4G ─ whose demise will be far more easier to orchestrate.

https://1ot.mobi/resources/blog/a-complete-overview-of-2g-3g...

Well, you can, but only 2G dumb phones. So they'll stop working wherever 2G networks get shut off for good. If you want a more future-proof 4G phone, even the "dumb" phones are actually pretty smart. Most of them come with Linux-based KaiOS [1] which even includes an app store out of the box.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KaiOS

Nope, you can buy LTE capable dumb phones. My local Walmart has them.

Can you please provide some more information regarding these phones? I skimmed through Walmart's online store, but couldn't find any dumb 4G phones there. I'd be really interested to learn if they sell 4G capable feature phones not running KaiOS.

It's been a while ago but I think it was either a Kyocera, or one of those Samsung dumb phones.

Otherwise there's also the 3310 refresh, although that's 3G.

3G phones are unfortunately no better choice than 2G phones, because the 3G networks of most operators will be not running much longer than their 2G networks. Here in Europe operators often even plan to shut down their 3G networks prior to their 2G networks.

Kyocera indeed seems to have some 4G "dumb" feature phones: https://www.kyoceramobile.com/phones/?filter=type:basic#

That's quite interesting. Thanks for the pointers.

Once people learn how much they can do without, they tend to find it quite liberating. I haven't seen the numbers, but I've heard from a reputable source that a significant portion of the populace does not own a mobile phone.

When a product I like (because it improves the quality of my life) gets discontinued, I look for a quality replacement. If I can't find one, I briefly mourn that and move on. Crap is crap (much of modern tech is nothing more) and there's plenty of quality to be found outside of paying for crap.

Life without products is actually possible. So was life without breakfast, before General Mills spent a fortune promoting it as an essential.

> The vast majority of Americans – 96% – now own a cellphone of some kind.

https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/mobile/

> but what happens if iot LTE connections get cheap enough that the choice is removed altogether

It’s worse then you think. Read dredmorbius’ comment in its entirety.

> Which means that peel-and-stick computing is well within reach, if not a present reality.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21873388

maybe HOAs can establish community rules and set up some sort of neighborhood firewall that blocks IOT data exfiltration

An HOA is the last sort of organization I'd trust to run a firewall for me. Those orgs are magnets for petty tyrants, bored stay-at-home control freaks who want to flex on the neighborhood. How many would decide to turn the internet off after 8pm "for the children" or something equally inane?

If my fridge is hardcoded to phone home at 2am, it works for me.

I kid.

I already did, over a decade ago. I tell friends "No cloud services on this ship!". They've bought into it too, buying more CD's, records and dumb only TV's.

My current setup is an old 1080P Bang & Olufsen setup. Looks and sounds great. Similar with audio - B&O did airplay back in the 80's called master link. So each room in the house can play music from anywhere else.

The only things networked are actual computers and phones. That's more risk than I want to handle, no need to add more. Similarly I've passed over smartwatches for good quality Swiss watches that'll still be worth something in 18 months time. I swear I'm not some character from a William Gibson novel.

I expect at some point old school offline stuff will make a comeback like Vinyl has. Society lags a good 10-20 years behind the frontrunners. Sometimes more.

A guy in /r/buyitforlife posted a palm pilot (Tungsten C), and it got me thinking about heading back down this road (further than I already have.)

For portable audio, I'm using a souped-up iPod video. I'm thinking 2020 will be the year where I take another step in this offline direction -- at least with hardware.

I had bad luck with iPod hard drives... I’m surprised you’re is still working, or was there an SSD video iPod that I’m forgetting?

You can easily retrofit flash memory into at least some of the older iPods.

I assume by “souped up” they mean they modded it. You can go onto Amazon and get adapters to retrofit HDD-based iPods with flash, and a replacement battery too as long as you’re cracking it open.

I did this with an old 5G video iPod and it was a 15 minute job. Worked better than new because there wasn’t the lag in switching songs from waiting for the HDD to spin up.

yeah, the 5.5 is the best. Such an easy mod, too. Combined with Rockbox and it's a near-perfect media player.

yup! You I replaced it with an iFlash Quad [1] -- it takes up to four micro SDs.

I also replaced the battery with a 2000mAh and keep it all in the 30gb case. I also replaced the headphone jack and lock switch so they were black.

Modding iPods is a breeze, too. Just be gentle when you're disconnecting the battery.

[1] https://www.iflash.xyz/store/iflash-quad/

I think similary, I had a moment of weakness when I bought my house and bought some cheap IoT things to make my house 'smart' but this was followed by a moment of clarity so I decided not to use any of it.

I do however, use a running watch from Garmin. That's only used for when I'm excercising though, other times I'm wearing my automatic which is much nicer and doesn't try and track me.

I use my iPod video for music and Podcasts (big shoutout to gPodder and Rockbox for making this easy!). I do not buy and rip CDs though, as I don't like having to store them. I do by all my music from Bandcamp which gives me DRM free copies I can backup.

I use Insteon for all of the switches and fans in my house. Those are combined with an isy99 for automation. My thermostat is a Venstar T7900 which is WiFi connected, but doesn't need to connect to the internet and has a local API that can link into the rest of my HA setup. My home security system has a local network interface via an EyezOn module for integrating all of those sensors into the HA system. I also have an RPi running Home Assistant for tying a lot of these things together.

None of this _requires_ an external network connection. I have a hard rule that my automation needs to operate without a connection to the outside world.

That being said, I can easily connect this setup to Google Home or Alexa to add in voice control (which I have done). If a viable offline voice assistant comes along I'll 100% add that to my local setup.

I'm somewhat the same way, but I've been looking at 4K TVs for ages and cannot seem to find a single one that isn't "smart". Maybe one day I'll find a good one that is dumb!

I only had luck searching for monitors. There are 43" 4k monitors[0] (probably larger as well but this fit my use case).

[0]: https://smile.amazon.com/AOC-U2790VQ-3840x2160-Frameless-Dis...

Hm nice, thanks. Yeah I have also heard that displays intended for big advertising installations are a good option, but those often have low refresh rate or long image persistence (or whatever the term is), so they're not very suitable for movies and gaming.

Also: many, many thousands of dollars.

> high end washers

Consider Speed Queen. Best buy (pun intended) I've made in a while.

Stop with Samsung and LG - all they do is chip things.

I've thought about getting Speed Queens next time around. As it stands though, I have the cheapest XL washer/dryer Whirlpool makes and they've held up fantastic over 5 years of heavy use. The washer is loud and makes the lights flicker, but I think that's kinda par for the course for those.

I'm not sure what a high end samsung would offer over a low end whirlpool that makes it worth spending 3x more.

Edit: I feel even more strongly about that and refrigerators. I definitely 100% don't want an internet connected fridge that requires security updates lol.

They'll find some way to make internet required to use these devices.

Something I was impressed with recently is LG and their opt in collection policies. I was able to not opt in to most of their advertising and data collection policies and only the features that required that data collection were disabled, everything else worked fine. Samsung isn't like this and I just keep my Samsung "Smart" TVs off the network. I have a Roku (just slightly better) that handles the smart part.

I thought LG got busted ignoring these preferences on TVs...

I know they didn't offer a way to turn off in-UI advertising.

I recently went to but a new range/oven. In the price range I was looking at (1-2k) it was impossible to find something that didn’t have a touchscreen with some smart feature (WiFi, Bluetooth, whatever). You had to jump up to the $3-6k range to get a “pro” model that comes completely stripped of (apparent) electronics.

Okay, I just did a Google Search for "oven range" which led me to Best Buy's website. Literally the first one I found:

https://www.bestbuy.com/site/ge-5-3-cu-ft-slide-in-gas-range...

No wifi. No bluetooth. No touch screen. USD $860. It does have a basic digital display, for oven temperature, with well-defined buttons. USD $860.

Did you not want those buttons either?

https://www.homedepot.com/p/Unique-Prestige-24-in-2-3-cu-ft-... $980

Maybe your price range is too high.

Faraday cage your house somehow. Stick to land-line and ethernet.

Wireless emissions are not the problem. No one really cares about you enough (no offense), to spy on your proximity. It's the devices in your home with outside connection. Through your ethernet.

You can firewall your internet connection. But what can you do when these devices start using their own embedded cell modems?

> full Battlestar Galactica

This is a truly marvellous turn of phrase.

So say we all!

I've watched the show (only once, for now) and I love it but didn't understand the reference :|

It refers to the human's cybersecurity technique of banning inter-computer communication. The ship Galactica survives the initial cylon attack because it's too old to have networked devices onboard.

More than that, the captain specifically insisted that it NOT be upgraded with networking, despite the benefits, because of the security risks.

My wife's CPAP machine has LTE and phones home her sleep patterns to her doctor and presumably insurance company. Whole thing makes me really uncomfortable.

If it's a ResMed Airsense 10, you can put it on airplane mode. I checked with an RF meter and it has zero emissions afterwards. Now, the data is within your control and not sent to ResMed and other unknown parties.

If your insurance company wants usage and compliance information delivered to your sleep doc, put in a SD card and hand it over the old fashioned way.

Once the machine is out of warranty (or you just want the radio gone) remove it using these instructions:

http://www.cpaptalk.com/viewtopic/t104578/Semipermanently-di...

Just wrap all your appliances with tinfoil. Problem solved!

What you're looking for is a law. Those strictly dominate technical capabilities, and can set useful baselines that remove the need for a consumer to deeply inspect the policies of every single device or white good they buy.

As Maciej points out, we don't teach people how to perform botulism tests to eat safe food; we regulate it. We desperately need something similar for privacy.

We absolutely need consumer protection laws for this.

The problem is that capitalism doesn't permit companies to simply succeed by being profitable. They must grow too. So the people who run the business are ultimately forced to squeeze every conceivable revenue stream from their products. The March towards forced online IoT and printer ink cartridge obsolescence models for everything is inevitable.

Appliances used to last forever and you'd get a guy to come fix them. My dad gifted me a 40 year old jigsaw that works better than any new jigsaw I've used.

Infinite expansion with finite resources. What could go wrong?

"We'll have it figured out before we run out of resources" - every generation, forever

And even intelligent people respond to that problem with, well we've always managed to have unbridled growth before, as if there are no absolute physical limits in the World.

How does Capitalism force capitalism to grow? There's nothing wrong with a stable company that distributes it's profits via dividends.

How my devices configuration look (all their mac addresses banned on router level, they dont have access to internet):

- tv, not connected to network, using raspberry pi 4 for kodi, connecting outside trough squid proxy limiting domains it can connect to. Was never connected to internet

- roborock vacuum cleaner, rooted, software disabled, replaced by open source version

- android deviced moved to microg lineage, armored with xprivacy lua and netguard, by default on spoofing/blocking everything and disabled on case by case basis. If application demands private informations it doesnt have access to internet

- 100% self hosted, sftp for files, dns server, own mail server, squid proxy with custom scripts, blocking from domains to rewritting requests, customized searx, running on custom build freebsd

- browser on all devices, heavly armored firefox

- only linux and freebsd devices except android in phone (it is going to be replaced by linux/sailfish when released - cosmo communicator)

- each new device bought is evaluated before buy and returned after buying if it cant be rooted/blocked from internet.

- no device is bought with connectivity if not needed, following "no internet of shit principle"

There are lots of details around that, ask if interested.

Survailance capitalism? No thank you.

The post you're replying to suggests that an independent LTE connection will be bundled into every device, so that none of the interventions you've listed will work. Good luck maintaining your bubble.

Sorry, but this is the device I will not buy. The tv I have bought was a mistake, it is my last smarttv, next one will be a monitor.

Anyway, why would companies bother to install LTE module, when 99.999% of people will just plug the device to the internet? It would be hugely inefficient. This just wont happen. I have seen chips beeing replaced by another ones due to be 50 cents expensier (and hugely more capable) and the LTE claim would go for even higher costs and logistics (signing the contract with mobile provider in small country like mine? Yeah right.) for trivial number of additional coverage? You are joking, right? My bubble stands as it is. It is your ass on the line, while I will renovate the appartment in next few years and adding tin foil within insulation layer into walls (to kill the wifi disturbancens from neibours) is already planned. 534 euros of additional cost is not that much compared to 60k that it will cost in total.

And dont forget about GDPR.

When the value of the data they mine from you becomes worth more than the incremental cost, it will become ubiquitous and you won't have a choice.

Adding RF insulation in your walls might be effective, but I think you will come to regret not being able to get or make phone calls in your home.

Who makes phone calls anymore? Plus, you could either get a landline, VoIP phone, or soft client VoIP for your cell.

I’m curious if there is some kind of paint we can use to block transmission. Too bad lead is so bad for you.

Actually, "voice over WiFi" is a thing. Seems like it uses the SIM for auth, but transmits the voice data via IP (similar to VoLTE).

I think tin foil in the walls could do the trick, but I'd be wary of potential moisture build up. I'd stay with "just buy stuff that doesn't phone home".

What resources did you use to root and install open source software on your Roborock?

It is actually crazy. Their firmware update is as lame as it gets, they have an image (which you can mount on linux), encrypted with aes and password rockrobo.

I tend to behave like you do, but it's a lot of work.

> At least right now we can choose not to connect the devices, but what happens if iot LTE connections get cheap enough that the choice is removed altogether, like with Tesla and other high end modern cars?

This is the point of “5G” everywhere. If the underlying phys and chips are cheap, low power and licensed appropriately a lot of “dumb” stuff will suddenly become smart whether you like it or not.

Except for a TV, and I wanted a great plasma, I just do not buy new appliances.

Tons of used ones, many easy to service, parts available online for a song.

Have saved serious money over the years. Have no plans to change.

I hate all the extra, useless features. Just do not need any of this garbage.

For the TV, it never goes online. Whatever it does, stays home.

Samsung always seem to be the worst, whether it is recording stuff, to getting on fire. Not too hard to avoid them.

I have a cpap machine that uses LTE (or some sort of mobile data). I had no idea that it would automatically upload my data until I logged in to their portal one day and saw a bunch of stats before realizing "Hey.. I never gave that thing my wifi information" and looked it up.

It is frustrating that everything has to be connected. Pretty soon toasters will need updates before toasting. Maybe ads will be burned into the toast?

For a "TV" I think I'll just get the biggest computer monitor I can and do without an actual television tuner. Most times I watch YouTube or Amazon Prime Video, more and more less Netflix and broadcast TV. Even with that setup a Pi Hole is a must.

You'll have to buy the monthly subscription fee to have your toast without ads.

Just buy a projector. Those have none of the connectivity features TV advertize nowadays and size does matter for displays.

Surely people can just buy used dumb-TVs?

I have a much older LCD TV(admittedly Samsung, but it was a gift) from around 2011, no smart features, but it's still perfectly good and works with all my HDMI devices. If there are millions ditching their dumb-TVs for Telescreens, that must mean that there are plenty of dumb-TVs for sale on eBay and Craigslist.

That’s what I did, bought a dumb Samsung TV in 2016 off new egg.

But those eventually break and the supply dries up. Not all panels are equal, so good luck finding a decent 2019 era 4k HDR monitor in 2029 or 2034. If the LCD and control board don't give up, you'll be swapping LEDs, caps and FETs sooner or later. And that's assuming HDMI will not be superseded.

So, let's hope that free-market thing actually works and at some point a "dumb display" product will be available again.

When you are no longer in control, you don't own the product. It's a redefinition of ownership and eventually things come to own you.

> what happens if iot LTE connections get cheap enough that the choice is removed altogether

Seriously troubling if the only reason preventing TV manufacturers from making their devices send your data via LTE is the cost of moving the data to them. Soon you'll have to put your TV into a faraday cage or remove the LTE antenna or whatever if you appreciate any notion of privacy.

I think it's safe to say once we're at that stage the tv's simply won't work unless connected to the network.

>what happens if iot LTE connections get cheap enough that the choice is removed altogether.

Tinfoil or an ESD bag over the transmitter or MB should do the trick. It'll be the new version of putting a sticker over the camera on your laptop.

>> I don't think I'm just being a Luddite. This really seems like a bad idea. We need some way to assure security and limit data collection.

Don't buy a TV. Buy a "monitor" and plug it into a device over which you have proper control. Use a computer as a media player, a computer with appropriate privacy safeguards. Even samsung would never dare place a LTE connection on a monitor.

> It's now difficult to find high end washers and ovens without these features.

Look for quality antique appliances. They also look better and likely are better for the environment than buying new.

"It's now difficult to find high end washers and ovens without these features."

Don't buy high-end consumer units, buy industrial units instead. They won't have any fancy features like automatic program selection or whatever, but they will wash your clothes and cook your food for decades, and can stand up to uneven loads and abuse, and they can be repaired if they ever break.

I refuse to let any additional "smart" things into my life. I want buttons and manual controls, no internet connections.

I don't even want any program buttons on my microwave oven, I want exactly two knobs, one for power and one for time.

My whole country has been blanketed in public WiFi access points as they were included in all but the most high end tiers of consumer broadband installations by all ISP's. Any device with WiFi can already get to the Internet regardless of your own network firewall settings using these.

> what happens if iot LTE connections get cheap enough

Hey, look what I found under your kitchen cabinet...

https://en.battlestarwikiclone.org/wiki/Cylon_transponder

The old Soviet Russia and Orwell jokes have taken on a whole new meaning in these "modern times"... 6 years ago it was discovered --- through packet inspection --- that LG TVs actually did something similar:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6759426

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6778397

Now I bet they're all using TLS and won't let you trust your own certificates, making it even more difficult to MITM it and verify what exact information it's sending.

For those who don't mind a bit of DIY, you can "lobotomize" a smart TV by replacing the main board with a dumb one of the type used in computer monitors --- there are many online sellers of these, just search for "LVDS board" or "scaler board". You will need to know the model of the panel, and the seller should be able to help with that since the board needs to be programmed with the correct parameters for the panel it's driving. Something like this: https://www.aliexpress.com/i/32860791745.html

It’s hard to believe Samsung has any customers outside of their Korean hegemony.

Samsung hasn’t proven themselves as a trustworthy smart electronics vendor in the past, be it smart TV, smart watch, or smart phone:

2015 - https://www.cnet.com/news/samsung-changes-smarttv-privacy-po...

2015 - https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/06/new-e...

2015 - https://www.cnet.com/news/samsung-lg-smartwatches-yield-pers...

2015 - https://www.techhive.com/article/2881944/samsungs-latest-sma...

2016 - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/oct/19/samsung-g...

2018 - https://betanews.com/2018/07/03/samsung-messages-photo-bug/

2018 - https://www.consumerreports.org/televisions/samsung-roku-sma...

That’s not to mention they’ve been found price fixing, astroturfing, embezzling, and bribing.

Vote with your dollar.

I agree, Samsung doesn't deserve our money. I boycotted Samsung after they destroyed my perfectly good Galaxy s5 with software updates. Sadly, the Pixel I got next wasn't much better.

They dominate certain RAM markets though, and that's kind of unfortunate.

I had an S5 too, and actually still have it in case I ever need a backup (e.g. last week when _my_ Pixel started getting caught in an infinite boot loop!) Though I hadn't noticed the S5 being destroyed by software updates - the only reason I stopped using it is because they stopped updating it and it was locked from custom ROMs, which was a sad conclusion because it had still decent hardware. Could you elaborate on the villainous updates you encountered?

My personal S5 experience leads me to believe that there was some trickery afoot from Samsung's end.

When I realised that my S5 was starting to get a little bit dodgy (having owned it from April 2011 until around December 2018) I went and bought 8 of them. Surprisingly, they were still available for purchase on the Samsung website over 7 years after they were originally released, although they quickly ran out of stock and I needed to go trawling through mobile phone stores asking them to check their store rooms.

From here I noticed that every time I updated my phone to the latest software version, deleted all the extraneous bloatware that actually made no sense to have pre-installed, and go to using a device: it would start to behave weirdly within weeks. Apps that had previously run just fine (like, as an example, google maps) were laggy and constantly crashed.

After going through 6 of the 8 phones in just over 3 months (the rate of failure seemed to have more to do with the fact that they were S5's in 2019 than anything I was doing to them) I eventually just gave up and bought an S10+ (because I honestly just wanted to see what the hell one would do with a terabyte of Storage on their phone - turns out it's absolutely nothing, but the possibilities initially intrigued me, but I guess I'm not really creative enough to come up with something worth doing with all that storage space).

Now I'm still bitterly using the aforementioned S10+ waiting for someone to release a phone that I perceive to be as good as the S5....

So no hard data, just my experience with a large amount of S5's that all seemed to become unusable based on the date rather than actually being broken....

There are recent updates from LineageOS for the S5 (multiple variants).

https://download.lineageos.org/

Anecdata, but my S5 is still working after...6-7 years I guess. My brother also has one and his works. My charging port broke so I have to remove the battery to charge it, but I have three batteries that I rotate between so this isn't a big deal. However it hasn't received a software update since 2017 (I am on T Mobile), so there are probably all kinds of security issues lurking.

It will, however, be the last Samsung phone I buy.

Unless you got an exceptional price for those GS5s, I'm missing why you prioritized that particular model, which was five generations old by 2018.

I had two. One bought new, one bought off Ebay. Never had trouble with either, but I had abandoned them by 2016ish. I rooted one (to get around mobile hotspot limits), later unrooting it when Tmobile stopped treating tethering/hotspot punitively.

The GS5 was the last of the line with removable battery. The GS6 was the last with an IR port.

One impressive aspect of the Galaxy S has, for me, been reliability. Mine have dropped to hard surfaces many, many times with no damage (aside from cracked glass, with which it still performs fine).

I had the same happen on my Nexus 7, after aggressively disabling apps, including things like the Google app.

It's the Google services that do the slowing down.

> It’s hard to believe Samsung has any customers outside of their Korean hegemony.

You could say the same about Facebook for the same reasons, and yet here we are. I was just at a Christmas party where a cybersecurity professional told me that he didn't care if his TV spied on him. I think that's how most of America thinks.

Are we friends with the same person?

It's quite upsetting to see cybersecurity professionals say they don't care their TV spies on them.

> It’s hard to believe Samsung has any customers outside of their Korean hegemony.

No it's not. Most people have no clue and might no even care [now].

I bought a $3000 top-end Samsung TV in 2015. The experience made it the last product from Samsung that I'll ever buy.

Their top of the line 4K HDR-UHD TV (for flat TVs, their highest was curved) was delivered with bright corners that were whitish all the time. Samsung claimed that this was within normal standards for a $3000 TV, and told me they would not repair it (after going around with them for a week or so). Luckily, the local retailer agreed to exchange it. Their denial of responsibility has cost them a lifetime of purchases.

As a Canadian taxpayer, my tax dollars fund Samsung.

A Canadian company, AdGear, won[1] a contract with the Government of Canada to be the official advertising technology provider in 2015. That was all fine and good, until Samsung acquired AdGear in 2016 [2].

Now Samsung is distributing official bulletins for the government, as well as running ad auctions on the national news outlet, CBC. These same ad auctions would presumably use all the data harvested from Samsung TVs and other consumer electronic equipment.

I have been unable to find more details on if/when this contract was renewed, I know the original contract was for a term of three years, with two optional one-year renewal periods.

One thing's for sure: The whole thing stinks.

[1]: https://www.newswire.ca/news-releases/the-government-of-cana...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AdGear#History

What’s a better company to buy from? Samsung is the only company getting brand recognition in your post.

Vizio is much better about privacy, almost entirely due to https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/blogs/business-blog/2017/02/... .

Eventually the FTC (or a state AG) will get tired enough of Samsung's anti-consumer shenanigans to run with it and see what happens, and/or Samsung will do something that they don't clearly and fully disclose and step into the FTC's world.

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?

Slowly, and then all of a sudden.

Too many people saying, “I have nothing to hide.”

Also, people like “free” stuff.

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.

Mandate transparent disclosure.

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.

Transparent disclosure doesn't mean shit when the company can honestly say what it's doing and there's zero repercussions for it.

Are there?

I couldn't point to one IoT / internet-enabled appliance that I would say is transparent about its adtech to non-technical users.

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."

and some did not.

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.

Americans are so afraid of the government/socialism that it has sold itself to corporations. This is one of the prices you 'll have to pay.

Convenience. Even always using the private mode when browsing the web is a hassle.

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)

> Also, people like “free” stuff.

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.

Except these are expensive TVs and not "free".

It was the common man who shared video rentals yesterday, while it's businesses who monitor and monetize today.

Just wait until you see how white collar crime is punished compared to street crimes!

Let me guess. Mostly ignored.

Basically encouraged would be more accurate.

OP was talking about rental records. That would be Blockbuster telling a marketer which videos you rented, not you lending a rented video to a friend.

This is why we have the video rental privacy law:

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]

This is just ... sad.

indeed. This turn of events continues to blow my mind.

Ads, baby. Everything you do online is for sale.

The Internet needs to be better than being almost entirely propped up by the advertising industry.

Surely even they know their day will come.

It will, won't it?

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!

You're more optimistic than I. Hard to overthrow the industry that specialises in manipulation.

Except they're clearly bad at it. Their biggest success is the hype about how effective their methods are with absolutely no proof.

Advertising's entire model since the beginning has been -- your competitors are doing it, can you afford not to?

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.

You and me both.

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!

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.

Displaying content on your television isn't something you do online. It's something you're doing at home. Samsung is spying and putting it online.

You don't own your Samsung TV. You lease it. It's therefore Samsung's screenshots, not your private ones.

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.

It was the natural outcome absent privacy legislation like GDPR. Why not create a two-sided market out of everything?

In a word: lobbying.

In a word: convenience.

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.

>They are made by lawmakers who in turn are influenced by lobbyists.

> In a word: lobbying.

can i simplify this as "laws are made by lobbyists" ?

Corruption.

FTFY.

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.

From the Department of Redundancy Department.

The video rental records were used to compromise a congressman from the ruling party. That's the only reason there is a specific privacy law for them.

If you want a TV privacy law, you'll have compromise a congressman.

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.

Maybe bring them to your island and secretly record them doing something illegal?

So basically, if you're the common man or woman, and unable to afford an islend, you're SOL.

Most of us have no reasonable ability to compromise a congressperson.

For now.

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.

Then you'll just be suicided in a cell.

have a handy note always tucked away into your body saying you are not a suicide risk, and don't intend to do so.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Tower

What in the hell was he renting that ruined his career?

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.

https://web.archive.org/web/20071009150938/http://www.theame...

It's great when sanctimonious fools like Bork are hoist by their own petard.

Bork was an originalist so I doubt invading his privacy would change his stance. Kind of a dumb move by the reporter.

Except that it worked...

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.

The chains like Blockbuster had no porn, at least none that I ever saw. Maybe the independent stores did?

Yes, I remember a 21+ section in the rental store as a kid, in a small room next to the kids section and partitioned by a ribbon curtain.

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.

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

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:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Bork

I stand corrected thank you! (Perhaps I was confused as they were both rejected nominees around the same time?)

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.

So thanks for the rabbit hole!

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.

I'm fairly certain the word existed and was in use before 1988. Do you have a reference for this incident causing the creation of that word?

> VERB

> 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

They seem like they might be parallel and unconnected etymologies -- https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bork#Etymology_2.

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).

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.

Wait who would recommend making that journey unarmed today?

Anyone who would prefer that there be fewer armed jackasses in our midsts.

Few reasons why I prefer dumb TVs, just a flat LED panel:

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.

Exactly the same list of reasons why manufacturers now only want to sell you smart TVs, and dumb panels are so hard to find.

I just need to go to the local Media Markt store to find a couple of dumb ones.

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).

Not the ones I usually see on sale.

Philips Momentum monitors...

Reviews are saying burnin is really bad with the 43" model.

What's to prevent you from doing the same with a SmartTV in the future? Just disconnect it from the network and keep a box plugged into HDMI1.

> 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.

Any source about the auto connect to open WiFi?

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.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/bpr6xs/if_you_choo...

Your link is just as much hearsay as HN posts. TVs are connecting to WiFi yet no one provides any evidence.

I believe the suggestion is that in a 5G world the TV would have its own prepaid 5G connection home that you can’t turn off or audit.

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.

I’ve never personally seen a TV that can’t have the soap opera effect turned off, but I believe you they are out there.

Apples to oranges feature though.

it was the first thing i turned off when i bought my LG tv.

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").

Yea, it’s usually something with Motion or Smooth in it.

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.

Most TVs have a "game" mode which turns off the smoothing.

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.

6. Want to turn down the volume? You can do so instantly, instead of waiting 20 seconds for your TV's operating system to finish booting.

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.

> Just disconnect it from the network

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.

Wait until 5G rolls out into mass adoption where an IoT modem is built into every TV for “diagnostics”

This is the only thing that mildly concerns me. Now I can just not connect. In the future, it may simply not be an option.

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.

One terrible but effective solution is to turn your home into a Faraday cage.

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.

I would do it. I get cell service over WiFi. It has absolutely no downsides for me.

They'll be traces in a PCB, you will probably be able to cut the trace (and fry the transmitter).

Fahrenheit 451? That was book burning. I think you mean 1984, and its telescreens.

No, those are present - part of the commentary of the book:

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 also a plot point in how they hunt the protagonist down, iirc. He wasn’t as engaged to the programming as he was supposed to be engaged.

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.

The signal should travel through walls better.

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.

> The signal should travel through walls better.

I'm pretty sure this is exactly the opposite: the shorter wavelength signals in 5G are line of sight, much more so than 4G.

I think this is why there is a decidedly specific marketing push talking about how 5G is going to really bring high speed to rural areas.

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.

I think the reality is that 5G could would enable telecoms to bypass physical to the home infrastructure entirely, further locking you into them.

Until regulators force them to become dumb pipes; as they often have for physical infrastructure.

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.

Of course there are other factors.

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.

> IoThieves

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

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.

Exactly

Had one fail: a flex cable went loose.

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.

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.

This was a little under ten years ago.

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.

Curious; How to test and verify it is working?

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].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19170671

It's possible to redirect DNS requests to a server of your own choosing in order to get around this.

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.

> It's possible to redirect DNS requests to a server of your own choosing in order to get around this.

I've dug into this, and this is true for certain models and firmware versions, but not for others.

"License check failed. Please contact an authorized service center. Shutting down.."

But sir, I’m on a ship!

SpaceX is working on a solution for that...

Which dumb 4K TV(s) should I buy?

Buy any 4K that fits your budget. Just don't connect it to your WiFi.

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.

>A fully malicious TV will connect to open WiFi nearby

Connect to your own wifi and block any traffic?

You're still assuming it won't detect this and periodically phone home from an open network.

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?

Even if they don't do this yet it's only a matter of time before the manufacturers catch on and start doing so.

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.

[1] https://github.com/spacehuhn/esp8266_deauther

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)

It might be better to buy a dumb computer monitor

They don't have those in 70" sadly.

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.

Want to vouch for the projector route if you aren't a total definitionphile.

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!

Yes, I know someone who did that, although for a different reason (to reduce lag).

Don’t. Good panels and quick onboard logic correlates strongly to being a “smart TV”. It’s better to buy a smart one and just not connect it.

Shouldn't your question be 'which 4K TVs are still dumb'? I cannot find a single TV at Best Buy that isn't a Smart TV.

I’ll go for this one when my plasma dies:

https://ironcast.tv/

I don't understand what this brand is trying to sell?

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).

I submitted this as a link a few weeks back, and since then ironcast have basically added/updated every point of concern fellow HN posters had:

- 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 really hope they deliver. I'm definitely getting one when I'm in the market for a TV.

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

"Which dumb 4K TV(s) should I buy?"

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.

I might be in the market for a large screen soon. Any recommendations for good dumb panels? I assumed they'd be difficult to find.

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)

They have a 75" for frikin $599 and its NOT smart.

I think you win the thread.

Cheap, dumb and large. (reminds me of my ex's)

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

The brand name is actually Sceptre, for those who are searching for it.

my 55 came in. it's seriously a panel. there are better panels out there (love my LG OLED), but you can't complain for the price.

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.

https://cdw.com/content/cdw/en/products/monitors-projectors/...

You don’t need an agreement or anything to buy from them.

That looks perfect, but it looks like it's US only. Unfortunately, I live in the UK.

I like this initiative anyways:

https://ironcast.tv/

I’m not affiliated in any way, I just like what they’re doing.

My TV software gets updated. Have gotten noticeable improvements.

I've had a 55" Samsung smart TV for 6 years now - zero software updates after year 3.

Quite annoying, as I had hoped that codec support would improve over time.

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 guess their clean design philosophy bleeds into their website by making it devoid of useful information.

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.

Yes it is?

And where can we find these dumb TVs?

Why Apple hasn't made a TV set is beyond me.

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.

Any recommendations?

Don't try to buy a "TV", buy a "monitor". The ones sold for digital signage may be your best bet depending on the size you're looking for.

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.

I tried this. At least for larger sizes, the price premium is often 2x and finding HDR - and sometimes even 4K - is hard: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21664952

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!

That sure is one hell of a privacy policy:

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

Practically, a Smart TV is an oversize mobile phone that you use in landscape mode.

In that respect, all ad-supported revenue for a phone is extended to the smart TVs.

Unfortunately all vendors do it. Here is how to disable it, for most brands: https://www.flatpanelshd.com/focus.php?subaction=showfull&id...

On my recent LG WebOS-TV Netflix and Amazon Prime wont start anymore after that.

Here is how to disable it for all brands: Don't connect your TV to the internet.

Exactly. I wouldn't trust any TV where it's even an option.

Some of the newer TVs need to be configured with internet access to even work.

I'd return it and get a different manufacturer.

Got specific examples? Bold claims require proper sources.

I just bought a new TV and found zero examples of that from any manufacturer.

If only that were a future-proof strategy. :-(

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.

Great link, I still don't connect mine to the internet.

I was hoping it mentioned consoles. Does anyone know if PS4 does this and if there is a way to turn it off?

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!?

If you don't want to read the whole thing, the content recognition part is this:

> Viewing Information Services This privacy notice should be read in conjunction with the Samsung Privacy Policy, which also applies to your receipt of customized Smart TV experiences and can be found at https://www.samsung.com/us/account/privacy-policy/. In order to provide you with customized Smart TV experiences, some of our feature and services will rely on your TV viewing history and Smart TV usage information. Your TV viewing history includes information about the networks, channels, websites visited and programs viewed on your Smart TV and the amount of time spent viewing them. We may use automatic content recognition (ACR) and other technologies to capture this information. Your Smart TV transfers video snippets or TV tuner information in order to determine the programs watched.

To those in this thread denouncing these dystopian times my question to you is, how do we as technologists create a meaningful and successful career changing this?

I’ve been against this for a very long time and can’t see any easy way to contribute (and also provide $ for my family) short of being in government policy making or law making which would require substantial career changes and further education and then some luck.

Unfortunately I don’t think there is a legitimate opportunity to work on this problem, and also have a stable high paying job. At the moment I think the best thing to do is educate people. Eventually, awareness will build and the market will emerge.

With all the media coverage and growing concern of recent years I was hoping that time had come.. that’s a shame

Well don't take my word for it. I'm just some rando on the internet. There are positive trends too. Apple sees consumer interest in privacy, for example.

You could pipe a piece of your paycheck to the EFF, a lot of companies have donation matching.

Yes I’ve considered that (and will probably do so) thanks. I’m looking for contributing though through my career if/when that is possible.

Bruce Schneier has been advocating for "public interest technologists" in order to address this very question: https://public-interest-tech.com/

He even recently had a job posting (on his blog) for someone to work in this area.

This is a great resource thank you! Although it’s slanted to the USA and I’m not American it still looks very useful.

Support organisations that are trying to create and preserve software freedom (FSF, Conservancy, CCC etc) using your existing job.

Join communities where people reverse engineer the devices they own, work out how to modify the firmware and write Free Software replacements. Then buy devices second-hand, replace the firmware with free equivalents, resell the devices and use the profits to enable more reverse engineering work.

> To those in this thread denouncing these dystopian times my question to you is, how do we as technologists create a meaningful and successful career changing this?

Disclaimer: I don't mean to criticize you, just to critique the mode of thought expressed in your comment.

Why are we as technologists so rarely willing to entertain the idea that meaningful change (in this and other socio-political domains) and "career success" might be mutually exclusive? At best they tend to be orthogonal, I think. Very rarely are they tightly coupled. More often one arrives at work that leads to "success" as conventionally defined (i.e., high pay, job security, nice benefits, social status) by embracing preexisting ways of thinking and living: that is, by embracing convention.

Convention is precisely what needs to be challenged, if one wants to effectively resist social inertia in contexts like this.

The answer to connected TVs is commercial display. These are "dumb TVs" that you've seen 10K times at airports manufactured by the usual suspects such as Sony, NEC, LG, and yes - even Samsung. They are offered in 4K, have plenty of ports, and are price competitive to smart TVs

https://www.necdisplay.com/category?category=displays#1 https://pro.sony/en_GB/products/small-displays

As someone who installs commercial displays, I wouldn't quite call them "price competitive" in many cases, the commercial displays cost considerably more than a domestic set with a somewhat equivalent feature set.

Surely the answer is just not connecting your set to the internet in the first place, and if you absolutely must have Apps or internet connected features, then something like an AppleTV (Apple being at least vaguely privacy focused), would be ideal ?

I tried this. At least for larger sizes, the price premium is often 2x or more. Also, finding HDR - let alone HDR, HDMI-CEC ("Turn on the TV when the source comes on"), and ARC ("Generate decent audio without two cables") - is hard: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21664952

It's hard to find a consumer TV that doesn't have HDR, CEC, and ARC in 2019. Commercial displays may have other missing features I don't know to look for.

Anyway, expect a 200%+ premium for a product that in nearly all respects is inferior for this task.

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.

To each their own - 100% of the content I consume is Netflix or YouTube. For me a non-smart tv is useless unless I hook up something smart to it.

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.

You do not need to "trust," just read their respective Privacy Statements and you'll see for yourself.

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].

[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

>but I probably trust those companies more than I do Samsung.

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...

The thing is, the smart thing you hook up to it is under your control. It could be a laptop or Raspberry Pi.

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.

No, but you can detach the Windows PC. With a smart TV, you're stuck with whatever is in that firmware, without which the TV may not even turn on.

I guess you could detach the smart TV and replace it with another... but I get your point.

"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.

I hear you. Nobody could say this in reference to reading books. That tells you something.

I've seen "gobble up" and "devour" used in reference to books before.

Netflix is watching you. Youtube, on the other hand, in a private window over a VPN is as far as you can go privacy-wise.

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.

Solder the antenna to ground on the wifi module. It's what I'll be doing on my next TV.

Only if ripping out the wifi module isn't feasible first.

I could see firmware failing to boot or crashing if an assumed device is missing.

Or you could just block the TV’s MAC address on your router.

they'll just connect to your neighbour's router, or their car, or their phone...

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.

Nothing prevents you from presenting that same SSID as a honeypot.

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.

I don’t see an awful lot of open networks anymore... :/

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).

Given that the above would potentially be illegal on both counts in many places, that seems like hyperbole.

I discovered this "feature" when I set up a PiHole on my home network. After a few days I noticed that my TV was phoning home on an almost minute-by-minute basis. After digging into the URL (which had the acr in it), I read a few posts about their data collection and immediately lobotomized my TV (reset to factory) and disconnected it from the network. There is no universe where the manufacturer of my television needs to know what I'm watching on it.

The solution most of us fall back to is to never connect a smart tv to the internet.

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.

Remote comms with no user intervention or control is already happening in medical devices. Almost certainly coming to consumer devices soon.

Also the FBI recommends you have a separate network segment for your TV/IoT devices [0].

[0] https://www.zdnet.com/article/fbi-recommends-that-you-keep-y...

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.

Remove ads pop-up at the first set-up? AFAIK the games that offer this option make a very little portion of their games from ad-removal IAP.

Most people simply don't care enough. For those who care, there will be a niche premium market.

Saying it subsidizes price is not entirely true. Even the stupid expensive brand new 8k panels do this same thing.

It's a simple fact of corporate greed and lack of regulation.

Moreover, on the other end of the scale, there are <= $200 LED TVs (1920x1080 x 40") that don't have the networking to upload anything.

Unfortunately, their panels are usually not up to par.

If you have specific examples, I'd be interested in learning about them.

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.

See, that seems like a lawsuit waiting to happen for Samsung.

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.

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.

Just block all traffic from the TV at router level or don’t give it the WiFi password in the first place

>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.

I'm definitely not buying a 'Smart TV' next time.

[0] https://gist.github.com/peteryates/b44b70d19ccd52f62d66cdd4b...

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.

A note for other boxes, especially the nVidia Shield. It's my top blocked client on my home network with pi-hole.

It tries to connect to api.segment.io every 30 seconds.

FWIW my Sony TV has an option to update via a thumb drive, which is exactly what I did since it’s not connected to the internet. Worked great.

> My TV needed an update via internet.

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 knew it needed an update. It was a high-speed HDMI bug that required a software update. I learned about it via internet searching.

At some point piracy is just better, not only cheaper.

Surprised I haven't read this in thread yet, but isn't this Issue what makes homekit enabled routers appealiNg when they finally release ? As I understand it the router can isolate Internet access on a per device basis.

Yes you can VLAN & firewall your way to the same place, but dealing with it at a consumer router level seems like a really great feature of homekit to me.

And yes, homekit supported devices are relatively rare and often more expensive, and they don't have a $€|$$> doorbell. But If we are talking about BSG Colonial style dishwashers, then this seems like a small price to pay.

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'm not surprised that most mainstream buyers don't know about this, but I'm surprised that this is still news to HN readers. In addition to past HN coverage (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21657930 and others), in the last year it's been in NYT, WaPo, Consumer Reports, and tons of other places.

That said, if anyone doesn't already at least skim the privacy policies of any networked devices they own… now is a good time.

Even retailers often sell your info. For example, Target "may share your personal information with other companies." Crate & Barrel may share "a record of any transactions you conduct on our Website or offline" with third parties. The defaults are worse than any reasonable person would expect.

(Have a few extra dollars? Consider spending it on a DIY public service campaign. I've been promoting https://twitter.com/simpleoptout/status/1191029269691957249 and other tweets to followers of Samsung's Twitter accounts.)

There are a number of gaming TVs coming out that are essentially big monitors with high refresh rates. They're expensive, but they don't have Ethernet ports, or built in apps or any of that bullshit.

I've never connected a TV to Ethernet/Wifi and I don't understand people who have those fucking Amazon/Google/Apple spy devices (aka digital assistants) in their homes. I disable all that shit on my phone too.

Any good recommendations?

Linus Tech Tips did a review of this one:

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/products/big-format-gam...

..but in a recent review he actually recommend a high refresh rate LG over it due to price. There might be others too.

I've listed all of the Telemetry servers that I could find my set connecting to should any of you wish to block them on your local network. https://factory-reset.com/wiki/Samsung_Telemetry_Servers

If you guys notice any others, let me know and I can update the list.

If only there was good guy ISP service that would maintain blocking list for these and all tracking tools so that even clueless people are safe.

They would be sued to hell as the role of an isp is not to be a regulator of what a company can and can not do.

It could be sold as security feature for additional $1 per year.

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.

Try $5 a month. $2.99 if you're lucky.

I'm surprised ISPs aren't providing this service already. Just run a virtual PiHole for your customers.

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)

why? Net neutrality has been struck down. The ISP can basically throttle/block whatever they feel like, right?

This sounds like the perfect use case for a Pi-hole in your LAN.

When we were developing Yahoo TV, which ended up being deployed on a bunch of "smart" TVs for a while one of the things we struggled with was "what are people going to do with this?" First thing that came to mind for me was, "look up the show on imdb.com". One huge issue though was that the TV basically didn't know what was on — the connected devices don't transmit that information. So we started thinking about a database of shows & movies so that we could identify what was on (using audio and video) when someone wanted to find out more about it. Amusingly, we were thinking about user convenience and not about advertising at all. I don't think Yahoo ever shipped that but I am not surprised it exists.

Apologies as the thread is long, but has anyone mentioned Vizio's creepy ACR tactics yet and how they got sued into submission?

I got a one for the bedroom about a year ago and although it was priced well for a 4K set, I had already heard about their adventures in getting viewing data on the sly and turned all that crap off as soon as I was able to do so.

Sounds like Samsung may well be trending in that direction.

We just bought a Q80 to go in our renovated basement and I'm starting to think about all of the small tweaks I'll need to make in order to minimize the data it collects.

Hard wired w/ Cat 6, Pi-Hole the ad servers, etc.

Washington Post had an article about this here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/09/18/you-wat... it was also discussed on HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21657930

Is this the sections the OP is referring to with their link title?

> Your TV viewing history includes information about the networks, channels, websites visited and programs viewed on your Smart TV and the amount of time spent viewing them. We may use automatic content recognition (ACR) and other technologies to capture this information. Your Smart TV transfers video snippets or TV tuner information in order to determine the programs watched.

Yes, this is the section.

The Smart TV has many inputs, including PC input (if you connect with your computer), Camera input (to watch the photos you took with your camera), Chromecast streaming from your phone.

The wording in this section syas that any of these are fair play to be sent over to the manufacturer for recognition purposes.

>>>Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., along with our affiliates and subsidiaries, (collectively, “Samsung”) knows how important privacy is to our customers.

Translated:

Samsung spits in the face of customers and will do everything in it's power to monetize users private information without compensating users in any way, shape or form.

I've actually been researching this a little bit more using some of the test sets that I have, and it seems that there might be a way to disable some of these features through the service menu.

If you enable the service mode / service menu of the set: https://factory-reset.com/wiki/Samsung_Service_Menu - then navigate to the "Control" sub menu, disable the following settings:

Voice Recognition OFF, Network Support NONE, BT Support OFF, Samsung Smart Control OFF

With the "Network Support" in particular it seems to disable all internet related settings on the TV.

It seems that in some cases this is in the "extended service menu" for which you will need a special remote to access.

Would this cover using your TV as a monitor only? Theoretically, the monitor could recognize/screenshot your wifi/account setup information (presuming passwords weren’t *-out), do recognition on it, and then log itself into your wifi while pretending to be a dumb monitor.

So why isn't there a market for open source TVs? Wouldn't that make sense?

Or is it a similar story to printers?

My Samsung TVs are not connected to the internet. I have never even run the “setup” on them as it turns out you can name inputs and change video settings without excepting any terms. Also before someone post “they look for open WiFi” again it would be great to have proof of that statement that has been made 100 times. Anyway, I was thinking about the screenshots. I wonder what happens if it could not ID the program? Does a human review? It would be a blast to take some shots of Samsung executives and family members and do some deep fake work on them, maybe including Kim Jong Un and some North Korea propaganda broadcast. Except all the terms, hook up to the internet and play the fakes and the propaganda for a month at a time. Just saying..

My TV has an obnoxious full volume boot sound unless you connect it to the internet :-/

Good thing large computer monitors are still a thing, and seem to do well.

I don't have a single proper TV in my house, because nobody needs them. We can consume whatever video streams we care about via the internet, using computers that I reasonably control.

Not an option for non-IT people, though, alas.

Will Samsung take screenshots even when it runs as a dumb monitor on HDMI or Display Port?

I'm sure they would find value in doing so. To understand what you watch on your set-top boxes (cable TV, Amazon/Google/Roku/AppleTV)

Well, that just justifies my decision to never buy a TV. Yes yes, I own a smartphone already. But I've tried to lock it down as much as possible by deactivating some services, limiting which apps I install. There will always be some tracking if you own a phone by the carrier anyway.

But TV's are becoming a whole other thing. I also just hate free-to-air TV, hate having a black void in the living room begging to be switched on, and I hate the effect it has on kids. A projector that only comes out on special movie nights is more than enough. And a laptop to watch Netflix or something with my wife is better than having a TV.

We are beyond fighting this with technical solutions. This can only be properly fixed via regulations and laws. Unless it can be proven that certain information is required for the product to function, it should not be collected. If it is required, it should only be stored for as long as technically necessary.

I am not familiar with the details of GDPR. Does it help in this particular case?

Roku has been doing that forever, and now all those cheap TCL TVs are doing it too. Keep this in mind, especially if you use one of these in a productivity context.

https://docs.roku.com/published/userprivacypolicy/en/us

https://test.tcl.com/eu/en/privacy-notices-smart-tv-services...

This is why you pay more for a Dumb monitor than a Smart TV. The monitor has no avenues to sell your data so all cost and profit needs to be extracted from the consumer through the sales price.

Is that really the reason though? I highly doubt they would lower prices because they are compensated by selling our privacy down the river. Mining data is extracting more value, why lower your profits?

Before the advent of the smart TV, bumb TV's have always been cheaper than commercial displays or monitors of similar screen spec. The commercial offerings have things like rs232 control, sdi video for long runs, and other features to allow them to be remotely controlled for signage and kiosk use. The dumb TV went away because we're knee deep in cheap SoC's that can both control the TV portion and run hulu and netflix. No boxes, wires or cables. No separate remotes. Digital convenience, aka "faux luxury", is the drug of choice nowadays.

Note that this is also in the UK privacy policy[0]

> We may use automatic content recognition (ACR) and other technologies to capture this information. Your Smart TV transfers video snippets or TV tuner information in order to determine the programs watched.

And in the german one[1], which is just a translation

> Wir können zur Erhebung dieser Daten die automatische Inhaltserkennung (ACR) und andere Technologien verwenden. Ihr Smart TV ermöglicht die Bestimmung der gesehenen Programme durch Übermittlung von Audio- und Video-Ausschnitten bzw. von Informationen vom TV-Tuner.

I doubt that this is defensible under GDPR.

[0] https://www.samsung.com/uk/info/privacy/ [1] https://www.samsung.com/de/info/privacy/

I work on this technology(not for Samsung), they do not upload the screenshots. They upload a cryptographic hash of the image and match it to known content. Also, this is true of nearly every smart TV available for purchase and quickly being integrated into projectors. If you want to turn off the functionality, you will have to go through the feature sets of the devices.

> Your Smart TV transfers video snippets or TV tuner information in order to determine the programs watched.

Can this upload screenshots even if you use the TV as a mere monitor?

The wording of the privacy policy does not preclude getting video snippets from the PC input. Unless the wording changes, it can be assummed that it can be affected as well.

I suppose if I film a sex tape and watch it on a Samsung TV, it will upload images from that as well.

Samsung Smart TVs do not take screenshots as far as I know. They do audio and video fingerprinting. It would be way too costly and inificient to upload screenshots for content recognition (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_content_recognitio...).

Disclaimer: I work for Samsung, but not directly in the TV software.

So, they do video fingerprinting? To me, that means that they can identify what you are watching, which I think is what the OP was pointing out, regardless of mechanism. Mike (ex-CTO Shazam)

It's right there in the linked text:

"Your Smart TV transfers video snippets or TV tuner information in order to determine the programs watched"

It could be great if you can get clarification from your colleagues

My Vizio that I’ve had for years recently popped up an “opt in” that asked me to allow them to track my usage. Except it wasn’t opt in at all. I couldn’t use any of their services if I didn’t agree to let them track me.

So I promptly did a factory reset and now we use the AppleTV exclusively with that TV.

It is not only the last Vizio product I’ll ever own but I’ll go out of my way to find a dumb tv the next time I need one, if such a thing exists by then.

There was a good conversation about this on HN a few months ago [1].

Has anyone successfully blocked unnecessary outbound traffic from their smart TV using a firewall such as pfsense? Whilst maintaining usability. A separate VLAN for IoT devices seems like a good first step.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21002745

If some dystopian scifi author described in a book 30 years ago what is actually happening today regarding the points of consumer data collection they’d likely be laughed at.

The programmatic elimination of any expectation of consumer privacy.

Thank fluky we have heroes doing open source projects. Yet open source hardware alternatives remain quite limited or non existent.

Can anyone suggest meaningful ways to contribute?

> We offer you certain choices in connection with the personal information we obtain about you through the IBA Service. You can opt out of receiving interest-based ads from the IBA Service on your Samsung Smart TV at any time through your Smart TV settings menu, at Menu > Support > Terms & Policy or Menu > Smart Hub > Terms & Policy.

I have my samsung spy device blocked at the router. Always amazed at the level of bullshit consumers have to put up with.

I think I wish there was a fine per customer per data item when a data leak happens. That it was 3x if it is discovered the company didn't report it in a timely manner and that it was high enough that companies would be reluctant to collect the data in the first place.

not sure what unintended consequences there would be.

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.

So uhhhhh, my Samsung TV got stolen, can I compel them to cough up information leading to its current location?

Where does it say "screenshot"?

"Your Smart TV transfers video snippets or TV tuner information in order to determine the programs watched"

Not trying to downplay Samsung's sinister behavior, but could you just not connect it to the internet?

I was recently shopping for TVs and found it impossible to find a model I liked without this kind of stuff baked in.

Then you could plug your Apple TV, Xbox, Chromecast or what-have-you and avoid being tracked — oh wait...

Interesting. So say a couple likes to take nude photos . . . Samsung reserves the right to collect and use those photos if you store them on "your" tv. So you decide that you won't store them there to be "safe", but Samsung can take a screenshot of them anyway?

For my last TV I intentionally tries to find a non-Smart TV, in part because of the privacy stuff, but also it always is in your face about wanting you to use the SmartTV features. Unfortunately Samsung and LG really have no competition on the higher end of the spectrum anymore.

Relevant sections:

> Viewing Information Services

> ...

> You may change your privacy choice at any time by going to the settings menu to disable the particular feature or service at your sole discretion, in which case your TV viewing history will cease to be collected for that particular feature or service.

> Bear in mind that your privacy choice may affect the availability or quality of the specific viewing information based service.

> Interest-Based Advertisement Services

> ...

> In order to make the advertising on your devices more relevant to you, the IBA service will rely on your TV viewing history (including information about the networks, channels, websites visited, and programs viewed on your Samsung Smart TV and the amount of time spent viewing them), Samsung Smart TV usage information, and other statistical data obtained from trusted third party data sources. We may use automatic content recognition (ACR) and other technologies to capture your TV viewing history.

> Based on the information above we create groups of Samsung Smart TV owners who share similar interests and use these groups for the IBA Service. The information above is used to determine the groups to which your Samsung Smart TV is assigned and thus, which advertisements your devices receive.

> You may disable the IBA Service at any time by visiting the Settings menu on your Samsung Smart TV.

> PSID

> Your Smart TV viewing history and usage information collected for the purposes of providing interest based advertisements will be linked to a randomized, non-persistent, and resettable device identifier called the Personalized Service ID or “PSID”.

> You may reset your PSID at any time by visiting the Settings menu on your Smart TV and, once reset, your Smart TV viewing history and Smart TV usage information with respect to interest based advertisements will be de-linked from its previous PSID. Bear in mind that if you reset your PSID, the quality of customized and interest based advertisements may not be fine-tuned.

Is it possible to open the TVs and snip snip the wifi/LTE/5G module/antenna?

I guess the antenna is hard to snip in 5G since it’s probably part of the circuit board.

Are the modules entirely on the cpu chip?

Is it possible to screw up the timing (say replacing the crystals) w/out breaking something else?

This is not new. It’s been embedded in tvs for years. You can thank judges who don’t care about consumer privacy and mandatory arbitration clauses for the spreading of this junk. If consumers could sue these companies none of this would be happening.

I join my smart* devices to my network, then add a policy to block all of their traffic on my eero router.

Not sure if this is good practice or not — I remember something about there being an attack vector for devices not on a network. Started doing this since.

This is one of the big reasons I bought a projector instead of a large tv. Because all the large(r) TVs came with "smart" crapware in them.

I just need a HDMI port. Please. Let there be options for us that's not only a friggin' projector.

The days are coming where STBs and TV's can do Direct Ad Insertion right on top of your existing video stream, either augmenting or outright replacing other advertisers content. Going to be super interesting..

I occasionally use my Samsung tv as a second screen. I can't be sure but I may have had my banking information on screen. Does this mean they are keeping screenshots of that too? Isn't that unlawful?

My girlfriend asked why I carry a gun around the house?

I looked her dead in the eye and said, "the motherfucking Decepticons". She laughed, I laughed, the toaster laughed, I shot the toaster, it was a good time.

I use Pihole and block all my appliances and other traffic I deem unusual or unnecessary. Its also very useful forensically if I suspect shenanigans on my network. I recommend it to everyone.

It is possible to post to a Samsung endpoint so we can help them gather data?

This is why I never connect my TV to the internet and made it 'smart' via the HDMI input.

Next step is to rebuild my house as Faraday cage.

Ha, if this disturbs you, wait to see what's going to happen when we perfect under display cameras. Your TV may be watching you, just as much as you're watching it.

Surprisingly, why are we talking about TVs only? It says they can collect photos stored on the device (including phones I guess), isn't that the the prime crime?

I connect my smart tv to my internet connection and then explicitly block it at the router. (Easy to do with eero - yes yes amazon gets my Mac addresses etc though)

Just don't buy a smart tv, don't connect it to internet, cover its camera, and disable its microphone if possible.

These things are cyberdystopic surveillance devices

Lets say you work with private data such as something under HIPAA- does the liability fall to you for buying one of these or could you go after Samsung?

What if all Samsung appliance buyers will buy and then return Samsung appliances back to store because of unacceptable data collection policy?

Hm, I was pinged by a company (samba.tv) earlier in the year which does exactly this for a number of TV models. They claimed it was always opt-in.

If you buy a smart TV, disable these features, disable network connectivity, and then plug in another 3rd party box you should be fine right?

What makes you think the third party box is any better?

If it’s one you build yourself (e.g. Raspberry Pi with Kodi), it will be.

That's by definition not a third party box any more.

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.

I was kinda hoping Apple TV would adopt a more privacy-forward stance. No?

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.

Google depends on data to make money while Apple doesn’t. They make their money from the hardware.

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...

I have an TV and I feel like Apple is doing a decent job of trying to prevent selling user data by any means.

I pihole on my local network and samsung is the biggest blocked domain on my list with the default block lists. It's INSANE.

If you just point out that it would ID what types of porn you ware watching, it would make enough buyers opt out.

The simple answer for any new TV, as Samsung is not at all alone here, is to never connect it to the internet.

Just another of many reasons to push back against 5G. Enabling this kind of crap is an end goal of 5G.

Can we stop calling these things smart. What is smart about devices sharing user data with companies?

They're smart enough to be rebellious...

If they are gonna do that Lowe th price significantly, let us choose to get screwed or not

Could something like pi hole fix this problem, without disabling services such as Netflix?

Would love seeing the materials Samsung uses to market this “feature” to their partners.

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?

Fuck these practices.

What DNS settings do I need to change to block this shit?

Covered under default Pi-hole settings?

Is there a Raspbian + dumb (non-monitoring) monitor that’s smarter?

Spoiler alert most TV's in the US already sell this data..

The solution is simple. Stop watching TV and read lol

Are they uploading screenshots or hashes?

Not sure if it's available to everybody or just Europeans, but there is a checkbox to disable it (I don't remember whether it's checked by default or not).

Settings -> Support -> Terms & Policies -> disable "Viewing Information Services" (there is detailed information about what this checkbox entails, and it includes using ACR on screenshots)

Could be a placebo button of course, but that would be a pretty big violation of GDPR and a risk for a huge fine.

That’s why we use projectors.

Who offers a non-abusive tv?

not if I don't connect the damn thing to my network ... right?

Which TV's?

TLDR: the page says: "Your Smart TV transfers video snippets or TV tuner information in order to determine the programs watched."

As soon as 5G is widely available, TV manufacturers will most definitely include a modem in each set. A GDPR style regulation is needed.

privacy is dead!

Truly WTF.

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.

We need something to firewall the Internets from our too-smart house stuff! Something like an inverse firewall. A waterwall.

Blocking unwanted egress is already accepted as possibly part of the functionality of a firewall (see, e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egress_filtering ); there's nothing inherently 'reverse' about it. Indeed, note the symmetry in Wikipedia's definition of a firewall (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firewall_(computing) ):

> 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.

> 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.

How is your firewall going to know the difference between uploading screen shots vs. communicating with a streaming service?

Fortunately, you can specify your own DNS to point at a black hole proxy like: https://pi-hole.net

My understanding is that newer DNS-over-<thing> like DoH would make this impossible...

Not really once DoH is supported at the OS level.

Pi-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.

Or you could just not connect your TV to your internet connection.

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...

I wish there were more dumb TVs on the market. What kind of dystopian market is it where you can't even trust an appliance you own to not spy on you.

I think it's because the phrase, "None of your business" has fallen out of common use.

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.

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.

This has been a reality for years.

I can't tell you how I know this - but I can tell you it has been a fact for more than five years.

Not sure what the problem is. The user consents to this by saying 'yes' when they are asked if they agree with the Terms and Conditions.

It's hard to argue a click through agreement presented after they already bought the TV represents informed consent.

I know rejecting it on my Samsung TV just reset the wizard

You forgot the /s sarcarsm mark

> Not sure what the problem is. The user consents to this by saying 'yes' when they are asked if they agree with the Terms and Conditions.

That right there is the problem!

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