The is the modern version of "ditch your cable company's horrible DVR for a TiVO". What's old is new again, sadly.
Sick of smart TVs? Here are your best options
121–130 of 548 posts
Re: Sick of smart TVs? Here are your best options
#122For a hacker news article, it misses the crucial option - hacking a smart TV! I have LG OLED jailbroken using rootmy.tv, it was pretty trivial. It's basically a linux computer with a huge screen, you can customize it, SSH into it, map any commands to the remote, etc. Before I only used monitor, simple DP/HDMI input is all I wanted. But being able to take full control of the tv and connect it with other devices in the…
Seems like there is a big opportunity here for something a router distro to combine with a tv jailbreak. How good is the hardware? It would be nice to have my tv serve a couple purposes if it has the hardware to do it.
Re: Sick of smart TVs? Here are your best options
#123How I break free from Smart TVs ("smart" for the manufacturer but very dumb for the user). Buy a cheap smart TV and run it in "store mode". Brightness and saturation will probably be maxed out but with a cheap TV, it looks more like "normal" on a more expensive model. Hint: The main difference between cheap and expensive in some cases --- the color adjustment range is limited by software on the cheaper models. Curren…
> Buy a cheap smart TV Why does it have to be cheap? What if I want a killer panel without all the bs? > Use a small "air mouse" for control An alternative is something like 'unified remote' on it, then you can even type from your phone without any pain. > A browser with VPN for streaming in some cases. There is a missing piece for me here. A magic 'send my PC browser tab to this other PC connected to the TV' button.…
> There is a missing piece for me here. A magic 'send my PC browser tab to this other PC connected to the TV' button. Not sure if something like this exists.
Chromecast does exactly this and has existed since ~2010.
Re: Sick of smart TVs? Here are your best options
#124For a hacker news article, it misses the crucial option - hacking a smart TV! I have LG OLED jailbroken using rootmy.tv, it was pretty trivial. It's basically a linux computer with a huge screen, you can customize it, SSH into it, map any commands to the remote, etc. Before I only used monitor, simple DP/HDMI input is all I wanted. But being able to take full control of the tv and connect it with other devices in the…
> RootMyTV (v1/v2) has been patched for years, and your TV is almost certainly not vulnerable. We recommend checking whether your TV is rootable with another method.
The one-click method has been patched, but there are other methods that will work if you haven't been religiously updating your TV:
Re: Sick of smart TVs? Here are your best options
#125Spoiler: this is Ars Technica. Obviously they suggest you to instead get an Apple TV so that you send your data to Apple and watch Apple ads instead (with the only argument being that "so far they do less ads").
There are no ads in the AppleTV operating system itself.
The only Apple “ads” I ever see are inside the Apple TV+ app (yeah, their naming is confusing…) and it’s only for TV shows they’re promoting in their streaming service.
Re: Sick of smart TVs? Here are your best options
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
The entire point of the remark is that you can throw these pseudo-justifications for any and all forms of tracking, since "tracking all the shows you watch" is precisely the issue that motivates TFA. At the end of the day, they could be taking screenshots of everything you do with your TV and argue it's because of some AI system that will allow you to more easily launch whatever it is you normally do at that time of…
No the justification for the article is TVs that track your watching no matter what you watching and selling it to advertisers. Apple tracks what you are watching on AppleTV only. I’m on this thread because I understand technology. Are you saying that if you are watching something like “South Park” you wouldn’t want the service that you are watching it on to keep track of where you are in its 25 season run?
> Apple tracks what you are watching on AppleTV only.
So the solution they propose to TVs that track what you're watching is to switch to AppleTV where Apple will track what you're watching? And you still justify this somehow?
Re: Sick of smart TVs? Here are your best options
#127I'm confused. Every TV is a dumb TV if you don't give it your Wifi password.
Yup - my LG (~6 months old) works fine without my ever having given it a WiFi password.
This is what the article recommends by the way.
Re: Sick of smart TVs? Here are your best options
#128I'm confused. Every TV is a dumb TV if you don't give it your Wifi password.
My recent TCL TV forces you agree to Google's terms and conditions, and you aren't even provided the text of what you're agreeing to unless you connect the TV to the internet.
It felt illegal.
Re: Sick of smart TVs? Here are your best options
#129Unfortunately cars are becoming like smart TVs in this respect.
I'll never buy a car manufactured after about 2014 for this reason. I'm planning to just keep getting repairs & upgrades done on my model year 2006 for at least the next 10-20 years. By then perhaps I will want to switch to electric, but I'll do it by electrifying something older. Cars from around 1998-2014 usually have side curtain airbags & adequate rollover durability. The only improvements since then that I'd eve…
ESC is pretty good for safety. I would not want a car without that. Cars from 2014 do have it of course but not those much older.
FWIW I have two 2018 models with zero “smart” features.
Re: Sick of smart TVs? Here are your best options
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
Through what technical or legal mechanism is the company identifying or locating you - assuming you never logged in or associated the product with your identity?
They shipped it to you. They associated a machine UUID with you at that time, as well as the SIM card. Now maybe you mean the TV? That’s not what this particular thread is about.
> That’s not what this particular thread is about
This thread is about removing the SIM from a TV.
If I bought that TV in cash (or even credit card, sans subpoena) at a Best Buy and removed the SIM, how is any corporation identifying me?