If tech giants could stop trying to make the telescreens from Nineteen Eighty Four for five fucking seconds, that'd be great.
216M Spy TVs – The LG Smart TV Problem [video]
511–520 of 1001 posts
Re: 216M Spy TVs – The LG Smart TV Problem [video]
#512The only thing I hate more than “smart” quotes are “smart” TVs. I groan whenever my LG interrupts. Now I have to spend Labor day wading through a “smart” UI I avoid like the plague to disconnect the internet.
Re: 216M Spy TVs – The LG Smart TV Problem [video]
#513Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's insane, but it's not like it's not known, personally, each time we have a party at home with friends, we always unplug the TV for this reason, it's out of doubt but it's normal to doubt as it's proprietary and has a microphone, so it's a bit obvious that it might be recording and processing data somewhere. The same as I would never trust an average phone around if I'm having a private conversation. Blackbox+Mic…
First of all, your TV is not interested in random gibberish from loud parties. It’s just not economically viable. During the Soviet era, not everyone could afford to have a landline phone, but the system kept hunting down its dissidents one by one. If you are a person of interest (which I believe doesn’t apply to you), there are way more important signals to adversaries than your microphone. It's important to choose…
But as the video shows, the TV is doing text to speech and associating audio with a person. That text data is relatively very cheap to hang onto forever.
The problem is really that this tracking is at an absurd scale. So while an individual attacker isn’t targeting you and buying your profile from LG, the data is out there, and once it’s out there, it’s probably easy to get on the dark web if someone did want to do something nefarious. So it’s not just the surveillance capitalism.
Re: 216M Spy TVs – The LG Smart TV Problem [video]
#514Almost all new hotel/hospital TVs have access to the internet, and more than half are LG TVs, and other half are Samsung.
Re: 216M Spy TVs – The LG Smart TV Problem [video]
#515I commented this only a few days ago on a different LG related thread. What LG are doing is indefensible and we should all vote with our wallets when considering a new TV... but for those who already own an LG TV you really owe it to yourself to jailbreak it and make it "yours", so to speak. > OpenLGTV[1] is a collective, non-commercial project for legal reverse engineering and research of LG (Smart and non Smart) TV…
thank you for the link!
Re: 216M Spy TVs – The LG Smart TV Problem [video]
#516Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Folks, never update a TV firmware unless it's necessary. Why would a TV ever need a firmware update? Either it works out of the box or it doesn't and I return it. I never updated the firmware of my PC monitor either.
security updates ?
Only needed if you connect it to the network. Don't.
Re: 216M Spy TVs – The LG Smart TV Problem [video]
#517The source video is excellent: https://youtu.be/6IFVTcM28KA I have two LG TVs so this freaks me out a lot. I guess I’m fortunate to have kept their network permanently disconnected (we use Apple TV for smart stuff) but who knows if they don’t do things like scan for open hotspots or connect without permission to networks you previously used to update firmware and then deleted from history. This company needs to be nu…
Probably best to treat the wifi password as compromised and change it after the TV has had access to it. But I suppose there's nothing you can do to prevent it from accessing open wifi networks that happen to be nearby.
I wonder if my LG will change its MAC address. Going to use my router first and just block it. Won't have to wade through that lame “Smart” UI.
Re: 216M Spy TVs – The LG Smart TV Problem [video]
#518Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's exactly why this keeps happening. If I bug your house I'd be charged with all kinds of crimes. If LG does it at scale nothing happens.
We need to climb two very difficult hills for there to be any change here: 1. We need our governments to actually start charging companies with crimes, when what they are doing would be illegal for an individual to do, and 2. We need the penalties to be something other than fines, which are ultimately treated by companies as routine costs of business.
Flogging or prison time for whoever has the highest salary.
Re: 216M Spy TVs – The LG Smart TV Problem [video]
#519Okay. This is insane. First the monitor that uses a windows feature to automatically install a small helper tool with root permissions and then starts showing adds in certain regions. Now a tv that is actually actively snooping around on top of the known fingerprinting. What else is next? In the previous topic I got ridiculed for not wanting to buy LG anymore because I could use an agent to modify to strip out the of…
I think the insane part is that this is not criminal and the executives are not jailed for it.
Seriously. This was my first thought too, the audacity to implement a system like this and the deterioration of a society that seems to give any fucks about privacy where this will be a minor news story that gets some buzz then disappears fairly quickly... I don't know what the fuck has happened. At the very least something like this should result in devastating class action lawsuits towards LG.
Re: 216M Spy TVs – The LG Smart TV Problem [video]
#520I've bought an LG Smart TV 5 years ago, read t&c where I was supposed to grant them any data they wanted, decided to disagree and kept all network functions disabled. I was ridiculed by my friends for that. At some point, I thought - maybe I'm really crazy to do so? Who am I, a caveman, a luddite? Oh well, I'm not. Not a bad tv though, many HDMI ports!
Nah, you're not crazy. I'm also someone who actually reads terms documents, because I find that they're often the only thing that will be truthful about a company's intentions. And keeping it completely disconnected from the internet should be the default, in my opinion.
> I find that they're often the only thing that will be truthful about a company's intentions.
Really? Many years ago, I had to physically sign a license with Microsoft to obtain some software. The license was not consistent with the license included with the software. Both licenses effectively said they were the real license and that any other agreement you made with Microsoft was not valid.
I don't think there was any nefarious intent. It was likely to avoid a situation where Microsoft employees offered terms that were not approved of by the company. Still, it goes to show that it can be awfully difficult to judge the intent of a company.