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Comment by ctkhn | Hacker News Reader

What does this get over just leaving the glass itself disconnected from wifi and use an external brain for the tv?

Exactly: If you're super paranoid, the best approach is to pick a quality TV, never hook it up to the internet, and use an external device that you trust.

This worked great for me for years until a dog sitter stayed over and hooked up the TV to the Wi-Fi.

Now the TVs MAC address is banned from the router, so this particular edge case can't happen again.

Out of interest, did anything obviously adverse happen?

LG and Samsung TVs are known to record and transmit audio of everything said in their vicinity as well as scan your network and upload the scans.

Yes, but that's hardly obvious. I was wondering if it triggered some kind of "update" that permanently altered functionality. Such things are not unknown.

Make sure your TV and device enable CEC. (Allows your device to turn the TV on and off, select the input, and control the volume.) I know the NVidea Shield can do this, and the Chromecast can do this.

Then hide the remote from your TV and only use the remote from your device.

It's a little slow, but for me, it's nice that I can turn on my Switch from the controller and it turns the TV on; or that I can put a disk in my Bluray player and it turns the TV on.

Even if I never connected my TV to WiFi , Windows and my iPhone can find it somehow and connect, so there's other protocols that are exposed and probably vulnerable without updates.

In theory I could still see a hellish reality where a TV will automatically join any free guest WiFis (eg a neighbor’s) and update its firmware that way!

One less box. One less thing to get something like a Harmony or Sofabaton remote to integrate with. An interface of your choice (there are many frontends), etc. I see a lot of ppl in here advocate AppleTV but that assumes you're part of their ecosystem already.

Or think of it his way: get root for some powerful new features over the stock TV OS and get telemetry blocking as a bonus. I'm planning to set up lg-hue-sync [0] that can read the TV's framebuffer and control an ESP32 connected to a LED string for a dirt cheap AmbiLED setup.

[0] https://github.com/poiedk/lg-hue-sync

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