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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

#81

Post by UncleSlacky »

traveler01 wrote: post #53
obscura wrote: post #46

Yet another example of the customer coming last. Are TV's that force ads on customers heavily discounted? If not, the manufacturers are earning extra revenue while the customer loses their privacy and gets nothing in return other than annoyance. It's a good illustration of why privacy is so complicated: most people wouldn't think that in buying a TV they're compromising their privacy because they don't know about ACR…

This is so stupid. When I bought my TV it didn't behave like this, but now for some stupid reason I need to get ads on it? I mean, normal TV it's 90% ads 10% content, do we need to watch even more ads? Anyone has any idea on how adding a filter like AdBlocker to your router? Never thought about this but it's getting useful af.

Pi-Hole would probably do the trick: https://pi-hole.net/

Re: Samsung TV owners complain about increasingly obtrusive ads

#82

Post by sdfqasdghj »

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #41
sschueller wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had to blacklist my wifi controlled air purifier on my router as it was sending data every few seconds to Amazon's DCs. If they want to collect air quality stats from my location they should pay me for that data.

I'm guessing that in addition to them pushing their data stats to AWS they don't make that data available to you for free or indefinitely? (kinda like how Nest only lets you see 10 days' worth of thermostat data via their own service with absolutely no option or ability to download a CSV of all data since day 1 even though they have that data in a SpannerDB somewhere in a Google datacenter)

It is not the company's data. It is the users' data.

Re: Samsung TV owners complain about increasingly obtrusive ads

#83

Post by vmnjhhh »

traveler01 wrote: post #53
obscura wrote: post #46

Yet another example of the customer coming last. Are TV's that force ads on customers heavily discounted? If not, the manufacturers are earning extra revenue while the customer loses their privacy and gets nothing in return other than annoyance. It's a good illustration of why privacy is so complicated: most people wouldn't think that in buying a TV they're compromising their privacy because they don't know about ACR…

This is so stupid. When I bought my TV it didn't behave like this, but now for some stupid reason I need to get ads on it? I mean, normal TV it's 90% ads 10% content, do we need to watch even more ads? Anyone has any idea on how adding a filter like AdBlocker to your router? Never thought about this but it's getting useful af.

https://pi-hole.net/ ?

Re: Samsung TV owners complain about increasingly obtrusive ads

#84

Post by fxtentacle »

... 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 is only a matter of time until all of them show more aggressive ads.

But if you fully wipe it and then keep it fully offline, most TVs have a great screen and they can be configured with "gaming mode" to work like a low-latency HDMI / DisplayPort display. And without internet, there are not ads :) and no forced (useless) updates.

BTW, my LG OLED is completely ad-free, defaults to using HDMI port 1 and even has GSYNC. Just connect any barebone with an NVIDIA card and you have 100% control over what you see.

Re: Samsung TV owners complain about increasingly obtrusive ads

#85

Post by mercora »

pabs3 wrote: post #78

There used to be open source firmware for Samsung TVs called SamyGo, it would be great if it were ported to newer ones so the ads could be replaced with Kodi or similar. https://www.samygo.tv/

this is merely a modification of the original software on the TV which is achieved by gaining root access on it which is currently not easily possible on more recent models.

Re: Samsung TV owners complain about increasingly obtrusive ads

#86

Post by solarkraft »

adamparsons wrote: post #13
retSava wrote: post #5

Do they wait with showing ads, say a month or so, until after the common return policy for most stores have expired? That would be a really evil thing to do, just struck my mind. Also, sounds like a case of optimization creep - "I know a way to get even more revenue, we just sign up with this $more_shady_ad_network!". Displaying more and more creepy ads, no-one decreasing ads since they don't want to be the one decre…

They retrospectively updated panels going back to 2016 to "improve" the experience. Truly evil shit.

That's especially funny because Samsung TVs don't get feature updates.

Re: Samsung TV owners complain about increasingly obtrusive ads

#88

Post by fxtentacle »

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.

Then I'll start selling a little $50 box to emulate internet and route all update / advertisement requests to /dev/null :)

Or maybe we (the tech community) just agree on one model and produce an open source firmware. If you look at MagicLantern for Canon, you'll see how amazingly far people will go to control their hardware.

Re: Samsung TV owners complain about increasingly obtrusive ads

#89

Post by rvwaveren »

pfundstein wrote: post #9

Here's wondering if these ads can be blocked simply with a DNS based blocker like PiHole.

Yes, this works actually. I recently bought a Samsung Frame and was very annoyed by the ads in the interface. I now have a Raspberry Pi running PiHole and it removed almost all ads. Sometimes I still see an ad, then I know it's time to update the block-list of my PiHole. When looking at PiHole's logs, it's unbelievable how many requests the TV sends to Samsung servers. These are blocked now luckily, but this TV (and I suspect other Samsung TVs as well) is a real nightmare with regard to privacy. It's the first time I actually read all the privacy statements on the TV. The remote has a microphone (for an 'assistant' called Bixby[1]) that I absolutely do not want turned on, but it's very unclear how to disable it. I wish I could buy a dumb TV.

[1] https://www.samsung.com/uk/support/tv-audio-video/how-do-i-u...

Re: Samsung TV owners complain about increasingly obtrusive ads

#90

Post by ComodoHacker »

walrus01 wrote: post #52
ComodoHacker wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it is possible to serve fake ads from Pi-hole.

very hard to do if they're expecting it over TLS1.2 and have hardcoded their own root CA into the TV.

Hard but doable. So far everything hardcoded of that sort has been successfully extracted (or leaked). I don't think they'll be adding expensive TPM chips.
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