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Samsung TV owners complain about increasingly obtrusive ads

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Re: Samsung TV owners complain about increasingly obtrusive ads

#381

Post by Anther »

huhtenberg wrote: post #79
neya wrote: post #31

Fuck the guy who wanted to suck up to the management in some stupid meeting projecting estimated revenue out of this to ask for a raise later because he "contributed to a revenue increase" to the company. There's absolutely no after thought to this decision - If I paid 1000s of dollars for an "idiot box" that's supposed to reproduce faithfully the signal that I pass it, showing ads is unacceptable, no matter what the…

> If I paid 1000s of dollars for an "idiot box" that's supposed to reproduce faithfully the signal that I pass it Just don't connect it to the Internet. The bigger problem is that at some point there will not be any "idiot box" models at all. The TVs will refuse to work if they aren't seeing the Internet. Then we'll be truly fucked.

I run mine on it’s own network so at least it can’t spy on my NAS and network infrastructure. If it tried this ad nonsense I’d filter it through a pihole or something similar. I will not go down without a fight with these snooping gadgets.

Re: Samsung TV owners complain about increasingly obtrusive ads

#382

Post by alexpi »

fxtentacle wrote: post #84

... and that's exactly why my TV will never have an internet connection. By now, it doesn't really matter which brand you use. I have analyzed Samsung, Sony, LG and Philips and ALL of them send data about your usage to NetEase in China and ALL of them have ToS that say that they might record your voice and store it for improving their AI or whatever. Plus all of them shove suggested apps in your face, so I'd say it i…

> And without internet, there are not ads

until all TVs will have built-in 5G SIM

Re: Samsung TV owners complain about increasingly obtrusive ads

#383

Post by vetinari »

antsar wrote: post #152
covercash wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest drawback to this is the lack of support for 4K in the YouTube app on Apple TV.

And that the YouTube app forces its ads and shitty recommendations down your throat. A NUC running Kodi sounds nicer. (Yeah, yeah, pi-hole. It’s a bandaid, IMHO) Also, Apple‘s streaming services being ever more annoyingly shoved in your face on menu screens.

Pihole cannot block youtube ads. You need uBlock, that can block parts of DOM tree inside a page, knowing hosts is not enough.

Re: Samsung TV owners complain about increasingly obtrusive ads

#384

Post by Unklejoe »

mercora wrote: post #137
walrus01 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

a lot of people don't know that HDMI can carry the equivalent of 100BaseTX Ethernet, which is definitely a threat in this scenario.

AFAICT this works over the same pin that could carry ARC which is arguably more useful to most people and usually available at least on one port. However, devices could also communicate via DDC or CEC too although rather low bandwidth is available it could be enough for some telemetry. Its probably possible to do this via HDMI info frames too somehow... or via direct wireless connections between these devices or infr…

> Its probably possible to do this via HDMI info frames too somehow

These only flow in one direction though - from the source to the sink

Re: Samsung TV owners complain about increasingly obtrusive ads

#385

Post by taneq »

chongli wrote: post #237
tangjurine wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're in the middle of transitioning from making decisions based on pure intuition to being purely logical and data-driven... I wonder if that's such a good idea. There was this article a while back I read that talked about how native peoples made poisonous foods edible. Some processes were extremely convoluted and unreasonable, but it worked, and efforts by a "reasonable" man to make the process more efficient would…

Was this the essay you were referring to [1]? I think you’re bang on with this comparison. My dad and I have long complained how (for example) grocery stores seem to constantly cancel our favourite products. We know it’s not the manufacturer because the product is still on their website. My dad and I even have a term for the people in the head office who make the decision to phase out our favourite products: spreadsh…

Hmm. I feel like there's a spiritual connection between your spreadsheet guys and the apocryphal product expert at Campbell's Soups or wherever that tried to focus-test "the perfect soup" that would optimize sales. In the story, they realized that there's no one "perfect soup" and they had to create different varieties.

Likewise, there's no such thing as "the best product" at a supermarket. Everyone has their own spread of products and if you cancel low-performing product lines, sometimes it has unexpected effects. (Anecdatum: We used to exclusively do grocery shopping at Woolworths until they stopped selling the cans of chilli beans that we use for nachos. Now we do maybe 1/4 of our grocery shopping at Coles instead, costing Woolworths thousands of dollars a year in lost sales, just because we needed some chilli beans and might as well get the rest of our groceries while we're there.)

Re: Samsung TV owners complain about increasingly obtrusive ads

#386

Post by defnotashton2 »

mavhc wrote: post #288
ChrisRR wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly, we bought my 75ish year old father in law a new TV because he was using a small SD flat panel and his eyesight is going. But he hates it because there's a million buttons and menus to navigate, when all he wants is to type in the channel numbers. It even needed a firmware update out of the box and he didn't have a clue why a TV would need new software and immediately panicked and refused to use the thing unt…

What tv can't you just type a channel number in, or press an input button to switch inputs? If you don't plug it into the internet it's not going to be a smart tv

Can't get new tvs with normal remotes

Re: Samsung TV owners complain about increasingly obtrusive ads

#387

Post by huhtenberg »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #341
cced wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not the solution. Adding a PiHole to your network is not the solution. Disabling features in other places of your network is not the solution. What if Samsung decides that it will try to connect to open networks for updates or what not? What then? Ask your neighbour to install PiHole on his network? No. This is an example of a game of cat and mouse that shouldn't exist - you pay money for a TV and that's not…

All starts with us accepting the idea that the device you paid for still isn't your property, and if tomorrow samsung decides to show porn on all samsung TV's, there is nothing you can do.

... or, you know, when you can't install a software you want on a smartphone that you own and paid $1000 for.

Re: Samsung TV owners complain about increasingly obtrusive ads

#388

Post by aembleton »

hawski wrote: post #373
huhtenberg wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If I paid 1000s of dollars for an "idiot box" that's supposed to reproduce faithfully the signal that I pass it Just don't connect it to the Internet. The bigger problem is that at some point there will not be any "idiot box" models at all. The TVs will refuse to work if they aren't seeing the Internet. Then we'll be truly fucked.

I bought a used projector some time ago. Couldn't be happier. I usually watch something after it's dark and I also have very good blinds. It probably warms up in similar, or better, time that many TVs boot up nowadays. I just have a Chromecast connected to a soundbar connected to the projector. VLC handles Chromecast, although somewhat buggy, so I can watch things from my computer in another room. Also Netflix experi…

What's a beamer? I thought you were talking about a BMW at first.

Re: Samsung TV owners complain about increasingly obtrusive ads

#389

Post by beervirus »

flerchin wrote: post #348

Like probably most folks here, I block ads at the pihole, and rarely ever see them. I actually pay for YouTube so that they don't show my kids any ads when they're not on my network. I don't think I'm buying things based on ads, at all, but the adtech guys would surely disagree. I also find it hard to square the near universal loathing of ads with the draw of Times Square. I too enjoyed the lights of the ads.

The ones in Times Square (probably) don’t spy on you (yet).

Re: Samsung TV owners complain about increasingly obtrusive ads

#390

Post by taneq »

reaperducer wrote: post #363
taneq wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The problem is that this "engagement" will mostly be just annoyed customers mis-clicking or trying whatever it takes to dismiss the ad and not actually intending to purchase the advertised product "Amazing! The smaller we make the 'X' button, the more people love them!"

Or make the X button almost the same color as the background. TuneIn does this.

I think this is also the psychology behind those pop-up like/share button bars at the bottom of web pages, that on mobile just so happen to sit exactly where your navigation bar hides, and if you tap one pixel too high you hit the share button instead of pulling up the navigation bar.
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