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Nearly half of LG smart TV apps contain residential proxy SDKs

spur.us

101–110 of 189 posts

Re: Nearly half of LG smart TV apps contain residential proxy SDKs

#101

Never ever connect your "Smart"-TV to your network, or if you have an incurable impulse to then make sure it's on a firewalled gateway-less VLAN. Take the money you save buying the thing (compared to what a profitable "dumb" version would cost) and buy a surplus corporate mini-workstation system, and slap LibreELEC/Kodi or whatever on it, and use that device as your "smart" device. No good for you can ever come from…

I've heard this wisdom before, usually with an apple TV positioned as the alternative, but I've had that setup before and didn't enjoy having to use 2 remotes instead of one. A better solution would be to root the damn TV and neuter its spyware/adware crap.

I only use one remote. The tv remote. I just enable HDMI-CEC

I keep the Apple TV remote around for extremely rare situations where that doesn’t work but even then, my cell phone has a built in Apple TV remote as well, which makes it even less necessary

Re: Nearly half of LG smart TV apps contain residential proxy SDKs

#102
post #21

Walked past a TV and it was advertising a security guard. Why does a TV need security software?

Because most people (HN is not a representative sample set) are not willing to pay the real price of a TV if it wouldn't be subsidized by adtech.

Aren't consumer class dumb TVs gone?

Re: Nearly half of LG smart TV apps contain residential proxy SDKs

#103
post #59

What portion of Fox's acquisition thesis for Roku was activating residential proxies (distributed AI crawling!) across all the units?

Is bypassing scraping blocks the main purpose of these residential proxy networks?

Yes. For instance, Bright Data describes itself, on its home page, as the "all in one platform for proxies and web scraping".

Re: Nearly half of LG smart TV apps contain residential proxy SDKs

#105
post #47

I'll get on my high horse and say you can get solid "DID/Commercial" TVs for not that much more: https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1788343-REG/samsung_q... I got this a few months ago -- 4k, solid brightness, and ok color. Is it the OMG BEST? no. But I Disabled wifi, and even the channel display. I use it with an apple TV with CEC on the TV -- I turn on the apple tv, TV turns on straight to apple interface. I tu…

What's the current OLED recommendation today?

Re: Nearly half of LG smart TV apps contain residential proxy SDKs

#106
post #7

This needs to be illegal.

[flagged]

I cannot think of a legitimate purpose for residential proxies existing. They take advantage of people who don't understand what they're being asked to give "consent" to, and then offer up those people's internet connections to whatever actor wants to abuse it, including malware authors, aggressive scrapers, and anyone with ill intent.

Why do you think this rampant abuse is a good thing? What benefit does this provide to society?

Re: Nearly half of LG smart TV apps contain residential proxy SDKs

#107
post #96
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This, but LibreELEC or other Kodi distributions suck. They are too limited. Until recently, the best solution was to run a full Linux DE, but now there is Plasma Bigscreen[0] for that. This is basically a DE optimized for couch use with a remote. You can run Kodi as an app, but also stream from a browser, or play games with Steam, etc. [0] https://plasma-bigscreen.org/

This looks great, it just needs some hardware to run on with a nice remote. Does any hardware like that exist?

An airmouse remote, ideally with a keyboard on the back, works very well. It's particularly useful if you want to run "apps" that that not specifically designed for ten-foot use, and expect mouse or keyboard input.

Re: Nearly half of LG smart TV apps contain residential proxy SDKs

#108

12 minute article. 70% AI. The only content not flagged? Copy and pasted PR comments. Invisible Unicode characters, triads, unnecessary markdown. Good work, obviated by bloviating. Readers dropping off near-instantly. A company leaving a slop trail behind its wake. AI DDOSing should be shameful. https://www.folklore.org/Saving_Lives.html

Yeah, wading through an endless stream of AI slop articles posted here (and elsewhere like on reddit) is exhausting. I suspect I won't be coming here as often anymore, which is a shame, because I used to find this site very informative and engaging.

Though we've always had our fair share of marketing and growth hack posts this turn with AI is just a different level of frustrating. The dead internet theory is unfortunately very real.

Re: Nearly half of LG smart TV apps contain residential proxy SDKs

#109
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because most people (HN is not a representative sample set) are not willing to pay the real price of a TV if it wouldn't be subsidized by adtech.

Aren't consumer class dumb TVs gone?

Yes, that's kind of the point. If you have the choice between $500 black rectangle and $1000 black rectangle where the only difference is some boring privacy policy details most people will go with option 1.

Re: Nearly half of LG smart TV apps contain residential proxy SDKs

#110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is bypassing scraping blocks the main purpose of these residential proxy networks?

Yes. For instance, Bright Data describes itself, on its home page, as the "all in one platform for proxies and web scraping".

From the article it can be used by botnets as well, linking to https://krebsonsecurity.com/2026/01/the-kimwolf-botnet-is-st...
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