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Comment by ljm | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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