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Comment by julianlam | Hacker News Reader

This may be tinfoil-hat adjacent, but I have heard that the allure of advertising data is so high that TV manufacturers will program their software to connect to any open WiFi network in order to deliver their collected data.

By the way, your post is basically the article, except they mention Sceptre TVs, who specialize in making dumb tv panels.

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So I advertised sceptre TVs here last year about this time. I’ve had one for a year now and I do not recommend it. The color recreation is garbage, lots of glare, poor upscaling, and basically it’s everything you would expect out of a $200 55” tv (or $380 75”, they are stupid cheap) . Also my TV has a line of dead pixels and sceptre seems to have forgotten about my RMA.

While I won’t replace it with an LG Cx series oled, I won’t be ashamed to pickup a hisense or Samsung when I eventually rage quit this trash

It’s worth noting that they sell very high-peice dumb TVs for over 2000$ as well now, so I’d expect those to have pretty amazing panels built in.

At that point it's time to open the thing up and rip out the antenna.

At some point, it becomes time to pass draconian laws against consumer-hostile practices like phoning home other than to perform the intended function of a product or forcing updates that change behaviour in adverse or unwanted ways.

I am reasonably sure that point is already behind us, but politicians are not exactly known for their tech savvy and timely regulation of tech industry.

You can't legislate morals.

What else is worth legislating? If it was in the manufacturer's short-sighted selfish interest, they'd do it. For everything else, there's customer action and legal action.

It's being done all the time, and it's exactly what legislation is for. Workers rights, consumer protection, EPA, outlawing child labor and slaves, etc.

There is already the GDPR, but it lacks sufficient enforcement.

This is a very relevant read (PDF): https://www.bundeskartellamt.de/SharedDocs/Publikation/EN/Ot...

Interesting report, thanks for sharing it. I think there are other significant dangers in this area beyond those it covers, but promoting a better approach to privacy and to security updates after purchase would at least be two significant steps in the right direction.

Have you seen the size of the antenna in your cell phone?

You're never gonna find all the antennas inside a product the size of a television. Some will be part of the circuit boards.

If you connect to a black hole Arduino AP is it smart enough to detect that and roam to an open Wifi network?

Yes.

I mean, "smart enough" is "can I phone home? no? try other wifi" which is pretty darn simple to build. Even by accident.

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