Put a black sticker on it's camera and it's mic (make sure voice commands no longer work) and problem solved. I don't see any use of facial and voice recognition anyway. they can send and analyze black screen and silence all they want.
I’m Terrified of My New TV
221–230 of 346 posts
Re: I’m Terrified of My New TV
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't that exactly how Google's voice recognition works? And Siri's too I assume? Your phone doesn't have the processing power to do speech-to-text on the fly, so it sends it to a server to do it. I don't see a vast government conspiracy behind this. If they can make the TV a bit cheaper by putting in a less powerful processor and taking advantage of the always present high speed Internet connection, of course they w…
Genuine question, that makes all the difference in the world for me: Does the TV require me to push a button to activate the voice commands?
There is a button on the remote to activate voice.
Re: I’m Terrified of My New TV
#223I wasn't particularly disturbed by this article until I got to the following passage regarding the "Voice Command" feature: "Please be aware that if your spoken words include personal or other sensitive information, that information will be among the data captured and transmitted to a third party." I don't think there is a prison horrible enough to send these people to. There is NO legitimate reason that an always-on…
...so you want your TV to be so powerful to automagically turn speech into text and process it, in possibly a dozen languages?
All similar services work like this.
IMHO, from an IT point of view there is nothing weird about how his TV operates.
What's weird, is buying a smart TV and then complaining it's smart, or about the things it has to do to be smart. I mean, your answering machine keeps confidential messages because it needs to play them back to you. Now, you're connecting that to the Internet—probably not a good idea, but what is the big deal? Otherwise it would be a "regular" TV.
Re: I’m Terrified of My New TV
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
Out of curiosity how many aspects of this TV could also be applied to your laptop. 1) It has a webcam 2) It has a microphone 3) You install software all the time that has access to both of these things. 3) Practically everything you do on it is tracked, cookied, and shared. (Sure some companies probably respect Do-Not-Track, but everyone?) 4) Do you realize that facebook knows your age, all of your friends, your demo…
If you're really into avoiding these, at least on a laptop you can: 1) Use a blob-free OS like Trisquel. Heh, your webcam may not have drivers in Trisquel. Or tape over it. 2) Trisquel also. 3) Trisquel also. Another good alternative is TAILS. 4) Use IceWeasel (Firefox source code) and the RequestPolicy extension. 5) Use DuckDuckGo or another anonymizing proxy. I agree with you though, that we must think bigger than…
RequestPolicy is cool, but there's a new addon called Policeman that gives more fine-grained control.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/policeman/
Re: I’m Terrified of My New TV
#225I wasn't particularly disturbed by this article until I got to the following passage regarding the "Voice Command" feature: "Please be aware that if your spoken words include personal or other sensitive information, that information will be among the data captured and transmitted to a third party." I don't think there is a prison horrible enough to send these people to. There is NO legitimate reason that an always-on…
No. Government needs to have laws against this. We can't leave it up to ignorant and fickle consumers. This is a failure of the system of law, thus government. Consumer action is no substitute. Voting with wallets is not equal in anyway to voting. And never should be. We shouldn't be trying to herd consumers to punish companies, we should be asking governments to do their job.
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Re: I’m Terrified of My New TV
#226Put a black sticker on it's camera and it's mic (make sure voice commands no longer work) and problem solved. I don't see any use of facial and voice recognition anyway. they can send and analyze black screen and silence all they want.
Microphones are incredibly sensitive. You pretty much need to cut their wires.
Re: I’m Terrified of My New TV
#227The only reason I feel comfortable connecting things like consumer network-connected cameras, TVs, Bluray players, game consoles, or anything else "Internet Ready" to my network is because I perform outbound filtering, and it's a big eye-opener to see first-hand what these devices are trying to connect to. Luckily most things use HTTP so you can actually filter based on the URL it's trying to access. For example, per…
Can you recommend any resources for getting started?
Glasswire: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8222652
Re: I’m Terrified of My New TV
#228If you're looking for a "dumb" TV, projectors may be one of your last options. I just got a great Sony projector and 92" screen for less than an equivalent quality large TV would cost. The only other consideration is the size of the room and ability to limit ambient light entering the room.
And also the noise is really a problem with projectors, in quieter scenes you can definitely hear the fans working.
Re: I’m Terrified of My New TV
#229I wasn't particularly disturbed by this article until I got to the following passage regarding the "Voice Command" feature: "Please be aware that if your spoken words include personal or other sensitive information, that information will be among the data captured and transmitted to a third party." I don't think there is a prison horrible enough to send these people to. There is NO legitimate reason that an always-on…
Google led me to Samsung. Under the "Voice Recognition" section [1] Voice Recognition You can control your SmartTV, and use many of its features, with voice commands. If you enable Voice Recognition, you can interact with your Smart TV using your voice. To provide you the Voice Recognition feature, some voice commands may be transmitted (along with information about your device, including device identifiers) to a thi…
I have a (2013) Samsung Smart TV.
Voice recognition for it isn't always-on - I have to press a button on the remote. It's like siri, surely, in that whatever you say to it gets shunted off to a third party API that recognises words?
Re: I’m Terrified of My New TV
#230I have a 10 years old TV (still a CRT because they were better than LCDs back in 2004, but that's not important). It will stop working more sooner than later and I'll have to replace it with some sort of smart TV. Whatever I get inside it I decided what to do with it long ago: keep it off the Internet. Instead I'll hook it the the very same Raspberry PI with OpenELEC I'm using right now. If something breaks because i…
In principle it is not that hard to repair a CRT TV, my grandfather owned the same TV for the majority of his life.