My Sony "smart" TV has updated itself and tried to force me to use a new app

Post by judge2020 » Sun, Apr 01, 2018, 9:39 PM UTC

kstrauser wrote: post #315

jghn wrote: post #121

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I wound up having to change my wifi password. Without thinking about it I configured my current TV to join my wifi network. After it so kindly started putting ads on the screen while watching things I turned it off. A few months later, ads again. Somewhere in the bowels of the settings the wifi was reenabled, so I shut it off. A few months later, more ads. In a new place in the settings it was back on. Repeat a few m…

I temporarily set my SSID to some long random string and connected my TV to it. Then I turned off my TV's networking and changed the SSID back to normal. Even if my TV wanted to silently re-enable networking, it wouldn't have a network to connect to.

Post by techsupporter » Sun, Apr 01, 2018, 9:42 PM UTC

kstrauser wrote: post #314

buro9 wrote: post #55

I'm the author and linking to my tweets is a bad idea because they auto-delete after 14 days. For future HN context, as the author I'm reproducing them here in full: My @Sony "smart" TV has updated itself and tried to force me to use a new app from https://samba.tv and boy oh boy... this is worse than recent @facebook stuff. From their own privacy policy: https://samba.tv/legal/privacy-policy/ … they track what you w…

> If you have a "Smart TV" from any brand ...you should turn that crap off and replace it with a Roku, Apple TV, Fire TV, or anything else external. The Amazon app on our Vizio was so out of date that it literally couldn't connect to Amazon's API. Later updates fixed Amazon but enabled some flat-out 1984 level spying: https://consumerist.com/2015/11/09/vizio-smart-tvs-are-watch... . That's when I hard reset the TV, b…

Post by kmeade » Sun, Apr 01, 2018, 9:44 PM UTC

gumby wrote: post #219

kmeade wrote: post #216

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Yes, but that's just trading one "surveillance capitalist" for another.

Is it? Apple’s privacy story has been pretty strong since forever (considerable the architecture of their thumbprint/secure enclave system, even when they customers didn’t see the value and when it inconveniences a customer who has their screen replaced). This could of course just be propaganda, but my friends who work at Apple seem to believe it too.

Post by RaleyField » Sun, Apr 01, 2018, 9:47 PM UTC

skrebbel wrote: post #186

pjc50 wrote: post #183

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> Netflix actually supports UHD on the Windows 10 app and on Microsoft Edge Still a closed platform :) It's the DRM problem. They insist on these limitations as an anti-piracy measure. Fundamentally the only way to decode 4k in real time is to pass it fairly-unmodified to the video hardware, and at that point in a non-closed system a driver could steal it. Or just record it off the screen from the inside.

> Still a closed platform :) Sure, but not a smart TV and that's the part I personally care the most about. I doubt Microsoft, even with all their telemetry nonsense, will ever include something as ridiculous as samba.tv. Also, they employ more than 0 UI designers. Thanks for the explanation btw. So it's basically the 4k video version of copy-protected CD's. And that was a great idea that totally worked!

Post by fencepost » Sun, Apr 01, 2018, 9:51 PM UTC

zeep wrote: post #172

TheCoreh wrote: post #144

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Or just don't connect them to the network?

Any of them automatically connect to open wifi networks or maybe cellular networks?