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Sick of smart TVs? Here are your best options

arstechnica.com

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Re: Sick of smart TVs? Here are your best options

#381

Post by 1970-01-01 »

csdreamer7 wrote: post #25
valleyer wrote: post #19

Sceptre is not in fact "a Wal-Mart brand" but rather an independent company. https://www.sceptre.com Westinghouse TVs are made by a company licensing the brand, not a "Pittsburgh-headquartered company". These seem like easy mistakes to avoid.

This is really poor research on their part.

It's a failed article IMHO. It's to the point that the article should be pulled and corrected. None, as in zero TVs are made in the USA. They haven't been made in the USA for many decades. I HATE to say it, but an LLM would have given a better researched article.

Re: Sick of smart TVs? Here are your best options

#382

Post by Brian_K_White »

ninkendo wrote: post #365
paxcoder wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, Torvalds supported tivoization: https://lkml.org/lkml/2007/6/13/289

Because anti-tivoization doesn’t make sense in a software license. Imagine you make a smart toaster, and you make it entirely out of open source software. You release all the changes you made too, complying fully with the spirit of open source. People could take your software, buy some parts and make their own OSS toasters, everything’s great. But for safety reasons, since the software controls when the toaster pops,…

It makes sense in the context of GPL specifically when you remember that the GPL itself and the entire GNU stack and movement started from frustration with a printer, not a program.

Re: Sick of smart TVs? Here are your best options

#383

Post by rssoconnor »

throwaway63467 wrote: post #118
taxmeifyoucan wrote: post #101

For 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…

Is there much you can do with it? Does it still work as before, does it still have a GUI? Sounds really cool.

I used my rooted TV to root my PS4. I'm not even joking.

https://youtu.be/NzBBfGnAWM0

Re: Sick of smart TVs? Here are your best options

#384

Post by Arn_Thor »

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #375
djoldman wrote: post #337

For the tech-savvy, I'm not too worried about smart TVs. I just do this: > If you want premium image quality or sound, you’re better off using a smart TV offline. In the future, if they add e-sims, we'll just remove them or de-solder or whatever. The real risk is cars: if they start not working without cell network connections.

> we'll just remove them or de-solder or whatever If we continue giving money to people who build malware into the products, the malware will eventually be baked in deeply enough that the rest of the device will refuse to operate if it can't phone home to the ministry of truth or wherever.

That is inevitable. Too many people ship only on price and we’ll never reach sufficient mass

Re: Sick of smart TVs? Here are your best options

#386

Post by sllabres »

I am not a HIFI/TV aficionado, but the ACR [1] thing was new to me.

I hope it is not yet important for me as I never allowed a TV access to my LAN/WLAN. But with smart devices using accessible open WLANs to transmit who knows.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.06203 / https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.06203

Re: Sick of smart TVs? Here are your best options

#387

Post by expensive_news »

systemtest wrote: post #312
hapticmonkey wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I installed an AppleTV recently, so I don't have much experience. But the first thing I saw after the initial setup was one/third of the display advertising a TV-show on a subscription service I had to purchase. Would that count as an ad?

On the Apple TV you get ‘ads’ for the apps you have in your top row, with different levels of interactivity. Some are just logos of that streaming service, some show recently watched. The Apple TV app has full-blown ads for Apple TV+ originals.

They won’t actually let you delete the Apple TV app, but if you move it out of the top row you will never see the ads.

My parents have an Amazon Fire TV and when I go to their house and have to use it it drives me insane. Carousels of adds large at the top, banner ads as you scroll, full rows of sponsored apps. Full screen ads for random Amazon products when you pause any show you are watching. Everything you watch on Amazon’s streaming service has minute long unskippable ads. Sometimes when you turn it on Alexa will just verbally read you ads.

It’s truly a dystopian piece of tech.

Re: Sick of smart TVs? Here are your best options

#388

Post by [deleted] »

sfilmeyer wrote: post #372
djoldman wrote: post #337

For the tech-savvy, I'm not too worried about smart TVs. I just do this: > If you want premium image quality or sound, you’re better off using a smart TV offline. In the future, if they add e-sims, we'll just remove them or de-solder or whatever. The real risk is cars: if they start not working without cell network connections.

I feel like there's a bit of a jump from "tech-savvy" to de-soldering things on an expensive piece of home electronics. As it stands now, though, I agree that turning off the smart TV features seems to be the way to go for most people.

[deleted]

Re: Sick of smart TVs? Here are your best options

#389

Post by yojo »

djoldman wrote: post #337

For the tech-savvy, I'm not too worried about smart TVs. I just do this: > If you want premium image quality or sound, you’re better off using a smart TV offline. In the future, if they add e-sims, we'll just remove them or de-solder or whatever. The real risk is cars: if they start not working without cell network connections.

I just want a panel. I’m already doing what the article suggests (running a Hisense offline with a media box), but my TV still crashes a few times a month and needs to be power-cycled/takes about a minute to reboot.

There’s just no reason for this. You have one job: Take my signal and display it. Anything else is just another place for things to go wrong.

Re: Sick of smart TVs? Here are your best options

#390

Post by bee_rider »

pxc wrote: post #369
taxmeifyoucan wrote: post #101

For 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…

Can you actually replace the firmware with an open-source, privacy-respecting one? If you're still left running all the same proprietary background "services" and telemetry, I don't see how this kind of hack relates to any of the reasons for preferring a dumb TV.

Agreed.

This “proprietary telemetry” is basically malware, just, it was put on the thing at the factory. Once a system is fully rooted by malware, the least-bad option is to nuke it entirely and install from scratch.

In this context where the locked-down device probably also doesn’t have a fully open source kernel and drivers, this becomes a bit tricky. Better just to use a device that doesn’t have malware on it in the first place.

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