441–450 of 579 posts
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Invasive advertising is a form of violence.
Words have meaning. I despise the insertion of ads in every form of media, but it is not violence. That's just silly.
Advertising is mind rape.
FWIW, it is still possible to get TVs without this stuff, albeit at a premium. TVs are still made for business usage in areas like conference rooms, wall displays etc. They're often found under labeling like "commercial digital signage" or "business display" or the like, they seem to often try to avoid using "TV" (if being cynical maybe to make them harder for normal people to discover and confuse them if they do). B…
Which brands of smart TV show ads? I live in the UK and I've had three different brands of smart TV (Philips, Samsung and Toshiba) and my experience with all of them has been pretty good. Netflix, YouTube, etc. have worked pretty well and I haven't seen any ads that weren't linked to the apps themselves. Perhaps they're tracking me in ways I don't know about, though?
FWIW, it is still possible to get TVs without this stuff, albeit at a premium. TVs are still made for business usage in areas like conference rooms, wall displays etc. They're often found under labeling like "commercial digital signage" or "business display" or the like, they seem to often try to avoid using "TV" (if being cynical maybe to make them harder for normal people to discover and confuse them if they do). B…
You know what else kind of had this problem? Well, not the spyware as much, but just the crap software embedded: routers. OpenWRT appeared.
It appears most smart tvs are already running linux, but probably in the way that android phones are already running linux.
With android and smart tvs, the corps got a major foothold into managed computing platforms that they can control to do whatever spying was necessary. Firefox on the phone, ubuntu phone, etc, they couldn't break into Android, and nothing has broken into smart tvs.
But man if there was an OpenWRT I could replace my roku TVs with, I'd probably do it in a heartbeat.
It's not just that, my relatives have an old LG smart TV that long ago stopped adding apps. If there was an open linux alternative, it probably would be getting updates and AppleTV and Disney Plus would be options on it.
Cursory searches have basically returned "man it would be hard, you'd need to know the board pretty well", yet ... aren't there armies of linux hackers that love hacking stuff like this? Seems like Smart TVs are a big, ubiquitous consumer item with privacy concerns that the linux hardware hacking community has treated with apathy. Which seems strange.
Maybe all the hackers think "eh, plug a raspberry pi into a free HDMI port" or "eh, build a media pc".
This is corporate big brother in your grandma's living room spying. This is freedom on the line, it's strange that the linux-as-hacking-freedom and the linux anticorporate crowd haven't jumped on this.
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However those TVs are not easy to get and, like you said, they come with an increased price. I couldn't recommend enough to buy an Apple TV (or equivalent) and block all Internet access to your "smart" TV. I did this and everything was instantly better.
How do you block internet if it will join open networks automatically?
1) will it bounce between open wifi points if one does not allow internet access (set up a honeypot)
2) will it try open wifi if you join it to a secured wifi and block that traffic
3) can you send de-auth packets to any open wifi the tv's radio connects to
4) can you desolder the wifi antenna completely
FWIW, it is still possible to get TVs without this stuff, albeit at a premium. TVs are still made for business usage in areas like conference rooms, wall displays etc. They're often found under labeling like "commercial digital signage" or "business display" or the like, they seem to often try to avoid using "TV" (if being cynical maybe to make them harder for normal people to discover and confuse them if they do). B…
It was $8500 + 1500 freight IIRC
FWIW, it is still possible to get TVs without this stuff, albeit at a premium. TVs are still made for business usage in areas like conference rooms, wall displays etc. They're often found under labeling like "commercial digital signage" or "business display" or the like, they seem to often try to avoid using "TV" (if being cynical maybe to make them harder for normal people to discover and confuse them if they do). B…
You can still get cheap ones. And by cheap I mean TLC/Hisense level quality displays. Walmart sells Sceptre's for low prices and have no smart features, best purchase I've made in years. We use a lot of Rokus here and my issue isn't the ads, its that every Roku built-in TV gets REALLY slow after a few updates, so now it's just easier to chuck a $20-30 device instead of having to buy an entire $300+TV. Sure I don't ge…
The Firestick 4k Max I got for $75 advertises prime shows occasionally (unobtrusively) but the UI is 2x as fast as my Chromecast so I very happily use it w/ IPTV, Airplay, and streaming apps.
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Now let me just open an ADB bridge with my Apple TV and install some third party applications, maybe flash a custom OS, rollback to an older firmware.
That doesn't negate my original point.
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This is my expectation of the market, based on at least the following two points: 1) Video games are sold at full price and still include ads and microtransactions 2) Cable TV was originally ad free (and marketed as such), until they realized they could include ads and make even more money. I hold the opinion that executives at many of these companies hold the view, "Why only get some of our customer's money when we…
Video games are not sold at full price. 20 years ago the average game price was $50. The price point was universally increased to $60. In Europe the price point has scaled beyond that but in the USA the price has stayed $60. 20 years of inflation has not be accounted for in that price. 20 years of technology improvements leading to increased art team demands, etc. And to top that off, the frequent mass sale events on…
Valve has proven with lots of data that holding deep discount sales actually greatly increases revenue. It took a long time for the industry to fully realize this.
They are not simply trying to cover costs. It's indeed charging what the market will bear. Which I have nothing against, I'm more upset that gamers fork over cash for all these micro-transactions. But that is another topic.
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Intent matters, and EU DPOs and courts have already begun striking back against dark patterns [0] years ago. [1] https://www.datenschutzkanzlei.de/grenzen-des-nudging-lg-ros...
Tell it to Meta who used that pattern on Whatsapp to obtain consent to merge data with Facebook.
[0] https://www.handelsblatt.com/politik/deutschland/datenschutz...
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> I couldn't recommend enough to buy an Apple TV (or equivalent) and block all Internet access to your "smart" TV. I did this and everything was instantly better. I'd be worried that's a losing battle long term though (maybe even short/medium term?), same with other hacks like running your own DNS and blackholing ad stuff that way. At the ultimate level, cellular modules and fixed data plans are getting real cheap, a…
It's a constant war, and most people don't care. The options are thus 1) Pay big bucks to avoid it (buying 42" monitors rather than 42" TVs) 2) Do clever things to work around it via cat and mouse (pihole, blocking traffic, wire mesh, desolder the 5g modem, etc) 3) Persuade people to care, so that a company starts building TVs at more reasonable prices but without the data capture This is a consequence of the fully o…
At least with my objection to shoving ice cream cake into my 1 year old they listen. With electronics I might as well speak Swahili.