361–370 of 524 posts
I wish the people who make my parents' TV would stop trying to trick them into doxing themselves.
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Not entirely related, but I remember thinking when Hulu was talking about an ad-free version of their streaming library that “this will clearly cost a lot more per month because my eyeballs are worth A LOT!!” Imagine my surprise when it turned out only being $4 a month to remove commercials. It almost hurts my feelings knowing how little I’m worth to advertisers...
But it was 50% higher... that’s indeed a lot.
I would love to update my 10 year old 1080p Philips non-smart TV to a 55" or so 4K HDR screen but I don't want any of the smart features. Does anyone know of any manufacturers selling high end "dumb" TVs? For now I'm comfortable using my appleTV but I like the fact that I can disconnect it at any time. I want a TV that will simply display whatever signal it receives without any connectivity required.
https://www.sencor.com/ultra-hd-televisions?smarttv=false
There is not a lot of options though. And getting a DumbTV larger than 55' is near-impossible.
This is a pretty open secret within the industry. Geographic data can be provided via setup (a lot of TV's ask for a zip code on setup) or usually simply via GeoIP lookup. Dig a bit deeper and you get into service provided by Samba TV and or Inscape and you can find that they're sending back frames of video in a lot of cases to track what you're watching. This data is becoming a huge mechanism for subsidizing TV sale…
How do Doctor's that use TVs like this in meeting rooms get around HIPAA? or other places with PII, etc? With so much stuff being thrown to TVs now, a lot of times they are inheriently monitors, and there are very few people who think taking a screenshot of a monitor is not invasive.
Which is always the issue - people want a 65" TV, but they don't want to spend $6000 on it. But if they can have it for $2000 (for example) they're all over it, glossing over the mostly unobtrusive privacy invasion that goes with it.
I disabled WiFi on my Samsung TV after they were injecting ads into the home screen. Spend $800 to get ads served in their shitty/slow UI.
An acquaintance attempted that with Kindle, by keeping it in flight mode. After some days it popped up a message kindly asking to give it some network access. After a few more days it simply ignored the flight mode and connected to get fresh ads. Edit: I've checked with my wife who has an ad supported Kindle for over a year and keeps it in flight mode for months at a time. It never did that to her. So either Amazon c…
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I worked on that. It sends audio and/or video fingerprints (not frames, for privacy and bandwidth reasons), which are matched against a fingerprint database. Whatever people see on TV is usually 10 to 60 seconds behind the real live stream at the broadcaster (which is where the reference fingerprinting happens). GeoIP data can be used to roughly deduce where the TV is located, in order to better filter out false posi…
Any way to turn it off? Or perhaps block a specific domain via pihole?
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At which point I hope there will be websites describing how to take the TV apart and disable the 5G modem. There's always been rumours that some Intel vPro CPUs have modems (and entire secondary CPUs..) built in to the chip itself. Atom x3/x5/x7 processors have a modem in the CPU package. I imagine disabling the modem without breaking the TV would be impossible.
But a modem won't help if it isn't connected to anything.
> Smart TVs sending sensitive user data to Netflix and Facebook No way! Has that ever been news? It is the first thing that comes to mind when some product 'needs' to be connected to the internet. Sending private data is most likely the only reason a internet connection can be made with the device. All the 'great' software around it is only fluff supporting to lure people sending their private data unknowingly. Do th…
>>I have a new x-large smart tv which I would never connect to the internet for these reasons. I use a dedicated pc with a good graphics card that connects through HDMI.
Assuming you use windows on it, haven't you just traded one type of telemetry for the other?
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IIRC there isn't a problem for most of the flight; but right as you're ascending/descending your phone can end up getting a very weak line-of-sight connection to a whole bunch of cell towers at once, which causes a few different problems, but all of which come down to "it makes both your phone, and all the towers, shout really loudly at one-another to try to achieve a circuit." Which, sure, means that there might be…
I have never seen the claim that cell service providers played an active role in this. Do you have a source for this info? I am curious to learn more.