Sounds like there would be a market for an openWRT-like firmware hack for these TVs!
Or, what about dumb TVs, aka monitors, and computers that run normal operating systems.
I’m Terrified of My New TV
51–60 of 346 posts
Re: I’m Terrified of My New TV
#521984, 30 years later.
> Telescreens are fictional devices which operate as both televisions and security cameras [... and] are used by the ruling Party in Oceania to keep its subjects under constant surveillance, thus eliminating the chance of secret conspiracies against Oceania.
> All members of the Inner Party (upper-class) and Outer Party (middle-class) have telescreens in their homes, but the proles (lower-class) are not typically monitored as they are unimportant to the Party.
Re: I’m Terrified of My New TV
#53This if a fluff piece. They write an entire article on why we should be terrified but then they don't even mention the make or manufacturer of this scary new TV, so we can't check the details of the TOS. It's the hypothetical smart TV that everyone owns. They also neglected to mention you could just not connect it to the internet - you know, like the ancient TV he just turned in?
It's pretty easy to find the TOS though, by Googling the quoted text. Apparently it's manufactured by Samsung. http://www.samsung.com/us/common/privacy.html
It's still scare mongering.
Here's the full context of the personal information, for example:
>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 third-party service that converts speech to text or to the extent necessary to provide the Voice Recognition features to you. In addition, Samsung may collect and your device may capture voice commands and associated texts so that we can provide you with Voice Recognition features and evaluate and improve the features. 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 through your use of Voice Recognition.
They then go onto say you can disable this.
It's legal speak for working with a vendor to improve the accuracy of their voice recognition, but by taking it out of context you can make a scare piece. It's probably why they neglected to mention or link to the TOS.
Re: I’m Terrified of My New TV
#54Went through this recently at Best Buy. The salesperson said by next year they may no longer carry any "dumb" tvs. Currently, those options are almost gone. I didn't see any dumb tvs over 40" and there were no 4Ks without "smart" features. I plan on just blocking it in my router, but who knows if the TV scans around for open hotspots. If I were a "smart" developer Id store everything locally if offline, then dump to…
Simple solution is just don't log it into your WiFi.
This is what I was going to say. Do you guys really find the "smart" features on your television to be useful? I just, you know... use it as a television.
Re: I’m Terrified of My New TV
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, and any mobile phone. "Ok Google" RMS was right all along. We need free software, or we will have no control over our computers. And our computers are going to be everywhere.
But that's not the argument RMS has made. The morality of RMS is an abstraction that is disconnected from empirical truth, just like any religion is. Maybe he would have done some good (other than the software he's written) if he had actually made the argument that we need open source for privacy reasons.
He did. Privacy is merely a byproduct of having the freedom to control your computer.
We should all feel deeply offended at not having that control, if we know what's good for us.
Looking at the current state of affairs, I'm starting to think RMS wasn't radical and fanatical enough!
Re: I’m Terrified of My New TV
#56[deleted]
Re: I’m Terrified of My New TV
#57So what happens if you just don't plug in the network cable or setup WiFi? How does it gather anything?
FBI van with free wifi goes through your neighborhood, the TV happily auto-connects to it and dumps all its data. How can we make the wifi module inside the TV unusable?
DDOS it?
I mean something that connects to that WiFi and smothers it with so much data that no other device can get a word in edgewise.
Re: I’m Terrified of My New TV
#58We need a Butlerian Jihad against surveillance. You know what will never stop this? Posts on hacker news. Letters to your congressman (LG can donate a fuqton more to his re-election campaign than you can). Voting with your dollar (people who know what a privacy policy is are few and far between). You know what will? Taking these TVs into the street, smashing and burning them. Mobs storming Best Buy and smashing the s…
Well, in my "bat shit insane" reality, the Arab Spring was actually mainly a cyber-intelligence operation on Facebook designed to get Mubarek out of the way so they could get better access to Libya. Mubarek had blocked a previous Libyan invasion attempt in the 80s.
And actually Gaddafi was the ultimate non-boring active protester. If you knew what he actually did, instead of the mythological version of events, he is basically your poster child. Gaddafi got got because he wanted to get away from the petrodollar dictatorship.
The reality is that there are very serious challenges, not insurmountable, but problems that haven't actually had solutions engineered yet. And the institutions and even deeper, the belief systems that form our global operating framework, are completely outdated.
Leading edge technology has already made governments obsolete in some sense. Eventually, I believe that distributed technologies will make traditional governments, and a traditional operating mode based on deadly force and amoral behavior, irrelevant and passe.
Re: I’m Terrified of My New TV
#59My only question is why, knowing all that, he still bought that particular TV? Because when I bought my set I saw all that crap and got the dumbest one I could fine.
Even if none to be found, I'd totally pay for a large format display instead of a TV just to save the headaches.
Re: I’m Terrified of My New TV
#60Went through this recently at Best Buy. The salesperson said by next year they may no longer carry any "dumb" tvs. Currently, those options are almost gone. I didn't see any dumb tvs over 40" and there were no 4Ks without "smart" features. I plan on just blocking it in my router, but who knows if the TV scans around for open hotspots. If I were a "smart" developer Id store everything locally if offline, then dump to…
Simple solution is just don't log it into your WiFi.
It just takes one neighbor to temporarily create a public WiFi connection for your regularly-scanning-for-open-hotspot "smart TV" to dump its entire cache of logs over HTTP.
(Now it may not be designed to do that, of course, but we're both responding to 's hypothetical.)