41–50 of 346 posts
So what happens if you just don't plug in the network cable or setup WiFi? How does it gather anything?
How can we make the wifi module inside the TV unusable?
> In the meantime, I’ll be in the market for a new tinfoil hat and cone of silence. I know this is meant as a pseudo-joke and I know there are going to be a ton of comments here on why the guy is overreacting, but is the tin foil hat really useful anymore? We have demonstrated proof that things like this have been exploited on purpose in the past few years. Instead of the tin foil being representative of the crazy pe…
If anything, the tinfoil hat conspiracy wackos of yesteryear were far too conservative in their paranoid fever dreams. They'd never have believed this. I wonder sometimes: if things like this had existed in the 50s and 60s would we ever have had a Martin Luther King? Or would such things have been picked up at their earliest stages by the data miners and nipped in the bud? Would Ginsburg have read Howl in Golden Gate…
So what happens if you just don't plug in the network cable or setup WiFi? How does it gather anything?
So what happens if you just don't plug in the network cable or setup WiFi? How does it gather anything?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But since it's free, nobody will pay for it. If nobody pays for it, it won't get built. Free as in beer is the enemy of free as in freedom.
I don't understand your argument. Some of the most popular software in the world is free. Linux, Apache, OpenSSL, Firefox and more are used by millions and got built without charging people to use them. On a personal computer, there is free software to accomplish any desktop computing task. How can you say that it wont get built when it already has been?
Meanwhile, the closed systems people do pay for have a monstrous advantage and will continue to be far ahead. Nowhere are they further ahead than design and user experience, which in my experience are harder and more work to get right than core code. When you make something work you are only maybe 25% of the way to making it usable. That last 75% is the no-fun stuff people have to be paid to do, and it's the stuff that separates products people use from geek projects only a tiny number of enthusiasts play with.
a lot of these are inherent on the laptop you wrote this with coupled with using the internet in general.
Yes, and any mobile phone. "Ok Google" RMS was right all along. We need free software, or we will have no control over our computers. And our computers are going to be everywhere.
The morality of RMS is an abstraction that is disconnected from empirical truth, just like any religion is.
Maybe he would have done some good (other than the software he's written) if he had actually made the argument that we need open source for privacy reasons.
You know what will never stop this? Posts on hacker news. Letters to your congressman (LG can donate a fuqton more to his re-election campaign than you can). Voting with your dollar (people who know what a privacy policy is are few and far between).
You know what will? Taking these TVs into the street, smashing and burning them. Mobs storming Best Buy and smashing the surveillance cameras built into these telescreens. Bricks through the window of every mercenary selling your privacy, selling a live feed right to your living room, to the NSA/FBI/creepy internet hackers.
It's really hard to get people to commit to sustained, long-term action -- that's why boycotts are not effective and why this trend has continued. But people are actually angry about this and that anger can be fueled into displays of acute disapproval. Like burning a pile of spy TVs in the street and then flipping the cop car that comes to defend the surveillance state and burning that too.
Pretty sure this will get downvoted because anything outside the blandly acceptable boring-as-fuck politics always gets downvoted. But just keep in mind that you need to break a few eggs to make an omelet, and the power structures of the world pretty much only respond to Arab Spring-esque events now. We need to make every digital dictator afraid of becoming the next Gaddafi.
Went through this recently at Best Buy. The salesperson said by next year they may no longer carry any "dumb" tvs. Currently, those options are almost gone. I didn't see any dumb tvs over 40" and there were no 4Ks without "smart" features. I plan on just blocking it in my router, but who knows if the TV scans around for open hotspots. If I were a "smart" developer Id store everything locally if offline, then dump to…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But since it's free, nobody will pay for it. If nobody pays for it, it won't get built. Free as in beer is the enemy of free as in freedom.
I don't understand your argument. Some of the most popular software in the world is free. Linux, Apache, OpenSSL, Firefox and more are used by millions and got built without charging people to use them. On a personal computer, there is free software to accomplish any desktop computing task. How can you say that it wont get built when it already has been?
That will not automatically happen for a lot of classes of software. You point out that any desktop computing task can be done with free software. So what? That doesn't even matter anymore. It's 2014 and we can't accomplish a significant amount of mobile computing tasks with free software, and those are more intimately connected to us than desktops ever were.
I'm going to get a projector anyway. Of course, they keep getting "smarter" too.