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Nearly half of LG smart TV apps contain residential proxy SDKs

spur.us

131–140 of 189 posts

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

#131
post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The companies that make these TVs love that we are this point since they can now take away the subsidy, and you also coincidentally now have no option to buy a non-smart TV, so they are now collecting $ from both the purchase and from the ads. Tada! Grossness all around.

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

#132

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…

Why not ever subscribe? I mean, yeah, subscriptions are getting pricey these days, but you can subscribe to one network, watch the things you want, then cancel and go to another.

There's plenty you can trash Amazon for, but at least on Prime Video, you can subscribe to the other services through them, watch on any browser, and reliably cancel easily when you're done.

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

#133
post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[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 provid…

Also these proxies are against the terms of service of every ISP.

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

#134
post #43
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the content hosting side (getting reamed by scrapers overloading infrastructure), the problem is that we have to be able to set "reasonable" ratelimits to share finite network uplink and server cpu resources between all of our real users and these scrapers. When you can identify the nature of the traffic (quickly in realtime, based on simple deterministic rules), you can protect the resources: you can rate/concu…

All the arguments you made applies to VPNs or tor as well. I'm sure rightsholders would be very happy if VPNs are banned, because that gets rid of one avenue for pirating with impunity. Same goes with every ad network ever, which has to fight click fraud.

How exactly does that also apply to VPN or Tor?

Who's using VPNs and Tor to blend in their automated scraping traffic with real human traffic?

Who's using multiple VPNs or Tor exit nodes to avoid rate limits?

No one, but I would have no problem with that being illegal too.

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

#138
I have a 2018 Samsung QLED SmartTV, I use Pihole to block data collection and since it has Google DNS hardcoded in it, I use OPNSense Firewall rules to enforce any DNS request to Pihole.

My TV has only one AD that no longer shows for years now, LG is ADs all over the place. My home setup allows me to have a smartTV without compromises it.

Since it runs TizenOS, I can use my Linux PC to install remove apps from it like installing Jellyfin App so I do not depend on Samsung releasing it to the app store.

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

#140

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.

> A better solution would be to root the damn TV and neuter its spyware/adware crap.

That sounds like a lot of work. I don't want to sign up to this much work for every product I own that I want an iota of control over.

So I would argue if this is "better" by any stretch of the word

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