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lbotos
gruez
>Is it the OMG BEST? no. But I Disabled wifi, and even the channel display.
Why not just get a (presumably subsidized) smart TV instead, and skipping the premium? It'd also be not disconnected from the internet, and despite vague HN/reddit speculation that TVs have cell modems in them, that has yet to be confirmed.
lbotos
I wanted more control and no UI. The commercial ones do that -- I think this was like $150 more than the "samsung smart ui" one... Never seeing a smart TV interface was worth that for me. YMMV.
anon7000
Idk. I mean I have the equivalent experience on a Samsung TV that has the smarts. I only see the Apple TV interface and control it with the Apple remote, including volume and power.
While I have WiFi disabled on the TV, I do like that I can still hook up a broadcast TV antenna and have the TV scan for channels and all that, which Apple TV can’t do
afavour
I have a TCL Roku TV that I use disconnected and with an Apple TV. It still has annoyances here and there, like pausing for three seconds or so on every startup before it switches inputs. I’d pay a mild premium to not have that.
initramfs
I've noticed that older TCLs are a bit laggier than Samsung smart tvs. Nice to have one that actually has a fast response to the remote. There was an app that was super slow on it- one of the less popular streaming apps. Although when the firmware updated, it might have erased the entire account and started anew. The Google Play store manages the apps, so I would imagine they get purged when they aren't up to the latest requirements. I am not sure how long the Android/Google OS version would get supports though).
Barbing
Same. Our data is worth a lot I guess (not the whole differential but):
$627 - commercial display
~$200 - comparable invasive options
Barbing
Some instead assert TVs might connect to the first open network available, like if a neighbor briefly opened a hotspot, which sounds more believable.
RiverCrochet
I haven't seen an open network around me or anywhere I go in years. Even places like gyms, coffee shops, and restaurants require passwords typically.
I think it's much more likely TVs make deals with cell phone companies and offer hardware that only works with their cellular service. Many pay more than $100 a month on their phone bill to pay off a phone. People might accept another $20 or so for a large screen TV with bundled apps-costs can be kept down for the carrier with ads and tracking that can't be bypasssed as it will use the carrier's network connection.
mminer237
Both theories would be easily testable. The danger is also much smaller if it's not on your Wi-Fi regardless.
helterskelter
These days a lot of them will nag you if you don't connect them to the internet and only use them as a dumb display.
account42
That hasn't been my experience.
initramfs
I use HDMI on my Smart TV and just disabled wifi because I realized it was downloading more than half my bandwidth (a small amount, in fact). It could have been doing an update but I found no reason to leave it on. Occasionally I'll use YT or Prime since it doesn't have to be tethered to a PC, but overall it's nicer as a monitor than a streaming app.
3eb7988a1663
Not that I believe it is used, but an ethernet connection can actually ride over HDMI. Possible to share your network connection by plugging in a display.
LeoPanthera
If you do this, connect it to the internet at least once, because most smart TVs ship with missing features that aren't activated until you do a firmware update.
glaslong
Hmm generally I want the smart tv to have as few features as possible, ideally never ever even show me their "home / launcher".
Kinda on the opposite recommendation that the fw it shipped with had to meet SOME minimally functional bar and every update after that is an opportunity to make it worse.
05
Were I an enterprising enshittificator, I would certainly make sure to force being online as a prerequisite for basic functionality for any TV that has ever been seen online since that proves that it's capable of connecting. So.. be careful upgrading the shitware, you might get more functionality that you've bargained for. Functionality that you can't downgrade because you don't own the TV.
sidewndr46
I don't think you can use the ones at wal-mart without an internet connection of some kind
newsoftheday
We keep our TV dumb, have a laptop behind it running Kubuntu Linux. Stream in everything in Chrome. Use an Air Mouse and wireless keyboard sometimes. Works great.
hoherd
That looks like The Frame from Samsung. Does it have a matte surface? What version of Tizen is it running? Does it have API access?
glaslong
This would be my dream tv. I like the matte look of the Frame a lot (I have one), but it's not at all worth the being subjected to the terrible Samsung software experience
hoherd
The 2020 and 2021 versions of The Frame had direct API access for updating artwork. Newer versions apparently have access through cloud services, but I haven't tried it yet.
- https://github.com/ow/samsung-frame-art (older models)
- https://github.com/TheFab21/ha-samsungtv-smart (newer models)
p0wn
Begs the question - why has apple never come out with a TV.
MBCook
Why should they? It’s an absolute cutthroat business with next to no profit margin.
All you gotta do is add an Apple TV and you got everything they would give you. And they make nice margins.
Apple seems to have next to no interest in making displays at all. We are lucky whenever a new one gets announced.
Banditoz
What's the current OLED recommendation today?
thfuran
Last time I looked, I couldn't find an OLED commercial display like that.
cognitiveinline
Nitpick, hobby horse, not high horse.
lbotos
Huh?
“Get off your high horse” is the phrase I flipped because I was grandstanding.
What phrase are you referencing?
rustcleaner
Never ever connect your "Smart"-TV to your network, or if you have an incurable impulse to then make sure it's on a firewalled gateway-less VLAN. Take the money you save buying the thing (compared to what a profitable "dumb" version would cost) and buy a surplus corporate mini-workstation system, and slap LibreELEC/Kodi or whatever on it, and use that device as your "smart" device. No good for you can ever come from bringing the TV onto the internet... ever!
(Also: never paypig, never subscribe!)
drnick1
This, but LibreELEC or other Kodi distributions suck. They are too limited. Until recently, the best solution was to run a full Linux DE, but now there is Plasma Bigscreen[0] for that. This is basically a DE optimized for couch use with a remote. You can run Kodi as an app, but also stream from a browser, or play games with Steam, etc.
Dig1t
This looks great, it just needs some hardware to run on with a nice remote. Does any hardware like that exist?
drnick1
An airmouse remote, ideally with a keyboard on the back, works very well. It's particularly useful if you want to run "apps" that that not specifically designed for ten-foot use, and expect mouse or keyboard input.
eliaspro
Via KDE Connect, you can also use your smartphone as touchpad to control the cursor or to act as remote keyboard.
microcode
An Xbox/PlayStation controller is cheap and high quality.
ufmace
Why not ever subscribe? I mean, yeah, subscriptions are getting pricey these days, but you can subscribe to one network, watch the things you want, then cancel and go to another.
There's plenty you can trash Amazon for, but at least on Prime Video, you can subscribe to the other services through them, watch on any browser, and reliably cancel easily when you're done.
gozucito
I've heard this wisdom before, usually with an apple TV positioned as the alternative, but I've had that setup before and didn't enjoy having to use 2 remotes instead of one.
A better solution would be to root the damn TV and neuter its spyware/adware crap.
elahd
Put the TV remote in a drawer and only use the Apple TV remote. With CEC enabled, that one remote will control power and volume for the TV and any connected audio devices. It'll also switch to the proper input when the Apple TV is turned on.
cheschire
I only use one remote. The tv remote. I just enable HDMI-CEC
I keep the Apple TV remote around for extremely rare situations where that doesn’t work but even then, my cell phone has a built in Apple TV remote as well, which makes it even less necessary
wolttam
> A better solution would be to root the damn TV and neuter its spyware/adware crap.
That sounds like a lot of work. I don't want to sign up to this much work for every product I own that I want an iota of control over.
So I would argue if this is "better" by any stretch of the word
jerrysievert
why were you using 2 remotes? did you have other systems attached to the television, such as a game console, or cable?
the Apple TV provides hdmi cec, which should control your television through the hdmi cable.
notatoad
this is a solved problem on basically any modern tv: HDMI-CEC lets your appletv control your tv without using the tv remote.
SchemaLoad
Having 2 remotes is so much easier than trying to flash custom firmware on the TV
microcode
You don't necessarily have to flash a custom firmware. Rooting the TV and killing the ad processes is usually sufficient.
topranks
I connect every few months (with cable) to check for firmware updates and the like. Otherwise agree it stays offline.
popcornricecake
The only time mine were ever connected to the internet was to update the software, and for that the easiest thing I thought was to host a temporary wifi hotspot (using a phone).
rustcleaner
My concern is your telemetry may have been stored up to that point, then forwarded upon connecting.
memcg
Is there enough 4K content available to justify replacing an older Samsung 1080P LCD? I still find free TVs on Craigslist. When I see 4K TVs running in demo mode at Costco I'm impressed, but at home watching World Cup over the air or on Fios at 1080P looks good enough. I don't pay extra for Netflix 4k and most Fios content is not 4K.
andai
I've always have a deep, instinctive revulsion for smart TVs, but every year I read of some new mandmade horrors beyond comprehension, and it escalates by a few more points.
thewebguyd
Same, but for "smart" anything in the home that requires an internet connection and does not let me set it up or run it LAN only.
People forget the reasons TVs got cheaper is because smart TVs are heavily subsidized with ads and your watch data.
I have the most "low tech" home of any of my peers, intentionally.
drnick1
This. The only "smart" things allowed in my home are those under my control. This means devices that work over Zigbee, or that that run free firmware natively (like ESP32-based devices), or that can be hacked to run free firmware. Everything is orchestrated via Home Assistant and in its own VLAN. It's surprising how far you can get. For example, I recently set up a voice assistant by wiring together a few Home Assistant components and a small local LLM (Qwen 4B). Response times are basically on par with commercial solutions like Alexa, and all processing is done locally.
microcode
The experience with this is so much better. Hacking most Tuya based devices has become extremely easy when you use https://docs.libretiny.eu/ Replacing MyQ with ratgdo was one of the best IoT decisions I have ever made.
layoric
Coming for PC monitors as well, LG again leading the charge.. see "smart gaming monitor", same BS.
cube2222
I think it’s worth emphasizing that based on the article, those are third party apps, not first party LG apps.
Based on the headline I thought it’s the built-in apps.
drnick1
LG runs its own spyware already (content recognition).
mycall
This does raise the question if other Smart TVs with the same third party apps have the same issue.
HDBaseT
The LG WebOS Store is a different beast.
Just browsing the list of apps raises eyebrows for even the most non-tech audiences. 99% of it is spam, with maybe 1% being well known apps like YouTube.
The rest are weird IPTV Players, Wallpaper apps. It feels like a portal into 2009 apps, but its not.
wowczarek
2009 indeed. Their app store was an absolute cesspit even in the early, pre-WebOS days and it hasn't changed much since, like, who would install any of this and why? Even the "official" app selection isn't the best. OS aside, they are pretty good TVs and quite popular, so I find this mind-boggling.
OkGoDoIt
In the article they mentioned that Amazon and Roku block apps from using these SDK’s, and specifically after Roku recently made a change to disallow this kind of thing, many of the affected apps were withdrawn from the Roku app store. The implication is that those other smart TVs don’t have the same third-party apps because these apps were specifically created to act as a foothold for these residential proxy networks.
HDBaseT
"Publishes with the most proxy flagged apps"
1. Desoline (based in Netanya (Israel)
2. Bright Data (based in Israel)
Interesting.
port11
A country known for plenty of spyware and iOS hacking tools. Interesting indeed.
(I didn’t draw any conclusions.)
smashah
[flagged]
smashah
[flagged]
throw468358
Perhaps English isn’t your first language, but “Holocaust” (esp capitalized) refers to a specific historical event, and you using it in this context is rage-baiting.
gruez
This turned out to be more ethical than I thought. I'd thought there wasn't any consent at all, or the actual mention of proxying was buried in a 20 page EULA.
OkGoDoIt
Yeah, this does seem somewhat reasonable. I get that most users will probably accept it without thinking twice, but if you’re going to do something like this, this is at least a fairly upfront and consenting way of doing it. For the TV platforms where this isn’t allowed, you have to wonder if apps are still doing it but just completely secretly, and trying to hide their tracks as well.
201984
This needs to be illegal.
pocksuppet
What would be illegal about it?
201984
I cannot think of a legitimate purpose for residential proxies existing. They take advantage of people who don't understand what they're being asked to give "consent" to, and then offer up those people's internet connections to whatever actor wants to abuse it, including malware authors, aggressive scrapers, and anyone with ill intent.
Why do you think this rampant abuse is a good thing? What benefit does this provide to society?
wmf
Also these proxies are against the terms of service of every ISP.
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gruez
Why? The only thing that's vaguely objectionable is the fact the consent screen's wording of "download public web data from the internet" omits important information on what's actually happening and the associated risks. Otherwise I'm not sure how you can come up with a principled justification of the ban beyond just "AI scrapers bad" or "hiding identity". Tor relays and VPNs are basically doing the same thing, except with clearer disclosure about what actually goes on.
tadfisher
Does there need to be a principled justification beyond that? I used to be on the side of the traffic, as in, it does not matter where traffic originates as long as it's not abusive. But the fact is that too many scrapers exist which are, in fact, bad. Their behavior is bad, their programming is bad, and they result in way too high costs for free infrastructure, thus they are morally bad.
I expect AT&T and Comcast to offer a residential proxy service any day now.
topranks
Absolutely.
Bear in mind the scrapers wouldn’t need to use these proxies were they not being blocked by the sites they are scraping. So it’s being used to evade blocks.
For some content the level of scraping is outweighing real users, driving up costs and pushing them towards more closed models.
Wikipedia for example make content available free, if you start hammering the site they will rate limit you to keep the lights on. If you need the data fast in bulk they have a paid program to get it without scraping. But some prefer to neither adhere to reasonable request limits nor pay for their use of the infra; instead they choose to pay these grifters to avoid the rate limits.
ff317
From the content hosting side (getting reamed by scrapers overloading infrastructure), the problem is that we have to be able to set "reasonable" ratelimits to share finite network uplink and server cpu resources between all of our real users and these scrapers.
When you can identify the nature of the traffic (quickly in realtime, based on simple deterministic rules), you can protect the resources: you can rate/concurrency -limit the AI scrapers in the name of saving resources for the real humans, effectively putting the scrapers in a lower priority band (which is how it generally worked for search engine scrapers before!).
The problem is they're using resiproxies to disperse and whitewash their traffic, making it extremely difficult to tell their requests apart from the legitimate human requests. They're basically lying to us about the origin, and thus denying us the ability to put them in a lower priority band than humans.
They may scrape us at, say, 25K reqs/second, but it's coming from 50K random residential eyeball IPs at an average rate of only 0.5 reqs/second/IP, and then they're intentionally lying with the UA and headers and other fingerprint details as best they can to "blend in" with the humans so that we can't differentiate.
Let's do an analogy: Imagine if there was a neighborhood grocery store you and all your neighbors rely on for food. It's cheap because they keep their margins low, and more importantly the next store down the road is like 50 miles further away. That store 50 miles down the road also charges double the price. Now they've decided to play arbitrage: they load up 100 employees in the back of an air conditioned semi, clothe them to look like local shoppers, park it 3 blocks from your neighborhood store hidden inside a fenced property, and have them all go in and buy out all the inventory in the store over the course of a couple hours. The store just looks like it's having a great sales day at first. All these customers waiting in line, each getting just a few things at a time. But two hours later, the store shelves are empty, the semi is loaded up, and they're headed 50 miles back to double the price and sell it to someone else. You go in to buy some veggies to cook dinner and there's nothing to buy.
We've been playing this game with AI scrapers and resiproxies for way too long, and someone needs to hold them accountable for their fraud.
gruez
All the arguments you made applies to VPNs or tor as well. I'm sure rightsholders would be very happy if VPNs are banned, because that gets rid of one avenue for pirating with impunity. Same goes with every ad network ever, which has to fight click fraud.
bigfishrunning
This is why I don't run a tor endpoint; possibly objectionable traffic I don't control sourced from my network. All it takes is one horrible request to come from your IP and you're on a list
thephyber
Perhaps.
But if these are popular apps / APIs, then the number of affected households is significant. Authorities / investigators will have to treat IPs as likely proxies and not the geolocation of the human initiating the request.
TurdF3rguson
It's not Smart TV apps specifically, it's all free apps. They have to monetize those somehow, don't they? And you get upset when you see ads, don't you?
Basically it's either this or pay for your apps.
recursive
Not sure if this is ironic, but I know it's possible for apps to exist without being monetized. I'm using Paint.net right now.
CursedSilicon
To parody the Arthur quote [1]
Do you really think somebody would do that? Just go write apps for the love of programming and not to make money?
[1] https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRGIV3u...
TurdF3rguson
Not ironic at all, and you want apps you use to be monetized because otherwise there's no incentive to support them. I feel like that's common sense.
owebmaster
Yes it's possible for the apps to exist but not the apps programmers if they can't make money to eat
zerobees
> Basically it's either this or pay for your apps.
And then paid apps show you ads and monetize anyway.
urbnspacecowboy
If you're not paying for the product, you are the product.
If you are paying for the product, you're still the product.
Indeed, if you're a paying customer, there's more incentive to push ads at you, not less, since you obviously have more money to spend. The only winning move is not to p(l)ay.
drnick1
> And you get upset when you see ads, don't you?
Yes and no. I understand that Youtube needs to generate revenue, has staff to pay, etc. About a decade ago, I got an occasional 10 second commercial at the start of a clip, and I could live with that. But Youtube pushed me too far when it started playing two consecutive commercials at regular intervals that cannot be skipped, and I now use uBlock or VacuumTube on all my devices.
TurdF3rguson
I solved that by paying for premium.
bigfishrunning
I pay for apps whenever possible, in some cases it just isn't. Also, you have to trust that paid apps aren't also doing this shit.
tabwidth
[dead]
ctippett
I absolutely adore my 2018 jailbroken LG OLED, although it pains me that everything I love about this TV are features the manufacturer actively discourages and wishes I never had access to.
lukax
Well, that's how data for training LLMs is scraped.
handle584
Not only this, it also enables sneaker/pokemon/5090 scalping, Chinese/Russian using ChatGPT/Claude. A residential IP in the US is very valuable elsewhere.
brikym
And price comparison sites big companies don't like since they want to price discriminate. There are positives to it.
londons_explore
This is a good thing.
If you could anonymously proxy from anywhere to anywhere else, the internet would be region-lock-free and anonymous again, just like it was to support it's boom in 1999.
Good on these guys I say. When it becomes normalized, we can integrate these 'privacy proxies' into desktop and mobile OS's too.
topranks
Nah it’s messing up peoples home internet, and massively abused to perform denial of service attacks and scraping of web content by large AI companies who are otherwise blocked.
Your vision of a randomly-routed mesh internet overlay is also not very scalable bandwidth or latency wise.
jhartikainen
Good point, hadn't thought at all of this kind of perspective. Though the fact it's some dodgy residential proxy provider that runs this stuff makes me feel like it isn't going to become available for something good.
ThePowerOfFuet
So you think until someone breaks your door down because of something sent from your connection.
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I'll get on my high horse and say you can get solid "DID/Commercial" TVs for not that much more: https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1788343-REG/samsung_q...
I got this a few months ago -- 4k, solid brightness, and ok color.
Is it the OMG BEST? no. But I Disabled wifi, and even the channel display.
I use it with an apple TV with CEC on the TV -- I turn on the apple tv, TV turns on straight to apple interface. I turn off from the apple remote, TV turns off.
It's effectively "an apple TV" -- I'm happy.