Permanently removed my LG TVs WiFi privileges

Nope. It's not paranoia if they're really out to get you.

The most conspiratorially minded are also the most likely to miss the obvious.

During COVID lockdowns, while I worked retail, a few customers didn't want to use the QR codes to "check in" to the store because "tracking", but then used digital contactless payment without a thought.

Do you have a phone? Does it have a hard cutoff for the GPS and mic?

Edit: damn! Y'all are sensitive about your larping.

"The issue's not whether you're paranoid, Lenny. I mean, look at this shit. The issue is whether you're paranoid enough."

In the early days of analog cell phones, any teenage punk with access to a Radio Shack and a modicum of soldering skills could listen to your conversations on the things, never mind the CIA.

yup. you gotta keep some nonsense, average data about yourself going (google thinks i'm a radiological oncologist, and i'm a musician. that's kind of funny and kind of sad) and have your paranoid conversations out in the woods

It literally takes screenshots of what you're watching (this was known for a while) and listens to your conversations in standby.

The question is - are you happy to keep your door open, invite a stranger to stand in your room whilst you go about your day? If not, why do we allow electronics to do the same?

The concern then is this data is sold and used against you by insurance and so on.
This isn't a conspiracy, this does happen.

“Give me the man and I will give you the case against him” is a quote you might want to look into the history of.

I apparently read this differently from y'all.

A disturbingly large percentage of the populace does see it this way.

I read it as a sarcastic criticism of such people. Was it not?

"buy" it

According the terms of service his payment is for the use of the device according to manufacturer stated use-cases and any misuse or changes to the components negates the right to use and opens him to civil liability /s

(?)

• we live in the evil Harambe timeline

I bet this guy removed the tag from his mattress too. The sick fuck.

Insane

Mind pointing to that researcher's findings?

Gamers' Nexus speculated on the ability to connect to the other SSIDs if memory serves, or did that ever get proven?

I have an offline LG TV and an open isolated guest network it could theoretically connect to. I check periodically and it has never attempted to do so.

Just an anecdote, but I personally have seen no evidence of this happening.

Do you have neighbors with a non password protected gateway or router to the open internet? Open unsecured networks seem so rare these days.

Sounds like we need to have some fake point where it can drop its package into instead. Make the TV think it uploaded successfully but it just goes into a trash can.

Somehow this can work with some DNS tinkering.

what the hell

what would happen if i set up a little router with a virtual internet right next to the tv? i was a hardware guy in the 90s so like, i am the teensiest bit out of date

Cat got your tongue?

Here is a Samsung 65" 4K Non-Smart Hospitality Display in the US and here is the closest consumer Samsung TV also in the US.

The former is $1,023.00, the latter is $379.99.

HOWEVER, here is the Samsung commercial smart version of the first TV model.

Notice that it's actually a bit more expensive at $1080.

Also judging by figures I heard years ago for the cost to buy private information about people (well below $1 per person if I remember it correctly), I suspect Smart TV makers don't make all that much money from selling private information (especially if you consider that they're competing with the likes of Google as well as many other companies that also have massive surveillance operations) as a percentage of the total price of the TV.

I suspect that the difference in price between commercial and consumer TVs is mainly due to higher resilience in the device's design, longer and/or stricter warranties and support availability plus that they simply can extract more money from business customers (an effect you see in A LOT of things, not just this).

I suspect the current situation where non-smart consumer TVs are pretty much non-existent are a mix of big companies pursuing even small increases in profit (from selling private data) so they all inevitably end up doing that same thing that brings them a small additional revenue stream and consumers themselves being convinced that "smart" is a good thing on a TV and actually preferring those over non-smart TVs.

Certainly consumers favoring "smart" TVs would explain why even little no-brand Chinese TV manufacturers who really don't have the scale and systems for mass-surveillance are selling Smart TVs rather than non-Smart ones outside the cheapest possible TV sizes (you can find monitor-size non-smart TVs)

Don't get a smart TV, just use an external media player for the "smarts" - easiest is to put LibreELEC in a Pi and get a remoted like this.

Personally last TV I got (5 years ago) I went for something that did not advertise any "smarts" (a Blaupunkt which turned out to have some "smarts" so it has always been disconnected), though if it was nowadays I would probably spend the extra to get a commercial display - a commercial display is not only "smarts" free, it is also designed to last a long time under constant use rather than with built-in obsolescence like consumer products, so it should not need to be replaced for a long time.

I'm lucky that I've been an really early adopter of media players (well before Android TV) and quickly figure out that the life-cycle of medial players (i.e. the "smarts" in Smart TVs) is way shorter than the life-cycle of the actual display, mainly because of how often new codecs become widespread (video decoding of 1080p or higher content is only performant if done in hardware or it you throw a ton of general computing power at it), so it's economically wiser to have those things separate since you'll replaced the media player hardware much more often than display hardware, all of which is even more so when software updates of closed "smarts" solutions can literally make the device unusable simply by using too much memory, a common built-in obsolescence trick.

PS: I had a look around and above 40" 1080p the only non-smart TVs I found were indeed commercial things like "hospitality displays" and judging by example I checked from Samsung with the same spec, the explicitly "non-smart" "hospitality display" (65", 4K) was a bit over 2x the price of the "smart" consumer version.

So yeah, it's feasible to avoid smart TVs by going commercial (but costs over 2x) or be limited to the smaller sizes and resolutions, as well as simpler tech of small brands in the low-end of the consumer TV market.

None. Ads pay for part of the TV.

I wish I could find their European equivalent ...

Cory Doctorow has imagined it for us:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41085118-unauthorized-bread

Yeah they're gone now. This is one of those things where I can't get a capitalist to explain it to me. There has to be an absolutely monstrous market for this. So why does it go unfilled?

I just looked, and there seems to be ton of them on ebay

that's a solvable problem tho. thanks for the reminder i gotta replace my damn shorted out computer speakers tho

Check the audio outputs, most likely it will have and be visible there. Mine has it and it's relatively old

Yeah the price jump killed me making a vanilla android tv unit this year. Chromecast is an outright spy but we dance for a little while longer

To my understanding they only do this when denied a connection flat out. As long as it has network and can send, it isn’t aware of what’s happening at the router end with the outgoing traffic. There’s simply no route to the destination address.

Plus, I live in the rurals and can confirm there are no open connections in range unless the LG C1 has a 5g chip I’m unaware of.

Why not connect it to an old WiFi router with no internet access?

If it is connected to one router is it really going to connect to another,?

I did some checking last night in the router logs, it’s only tried to leave the network once in the past week, and otherwise it’s quiet. My firmware version is from early/mid 2023 though and I locked it down years ago. It’s possible I did this before all this nonsense got implemented.

Im surprised it works at all.

Sure, you do you. I've still been using the (modified) YouTube app, Mediathek, and media player which can access the recordings on my NAS. But this year they broke Netflix for very old TVs, they pulled the compatible version of Mediathek from the LG store... I'm already working on a Kodi box as a replacement for the network services. Guess as soon as it works (and gets approved by my partner), or they kill my YouTube app, I'll pull the plug as well.

Kind of a shame. It's a great device. Runs Linux... I was able to "root" the TV and install a YouTube app without any advertisements in it...

I looked up some publicly available Vizio (Walmart) financial presentations. For Q3 2024, their "Device" sales lost money (and that's counting soundbars, which are presumably sold at a profit). They seem to be going all in on whatever cursed thing they call "Platform +".

Note that this is gross profit, i.e revenue minus cost of goods, but not all the overhead from logistics, retail, corporate, etc.

That's exactly what I was looking for. Thank you.

as long as it's not IR module. That's the remote's talky thingy

Yup. Same here. There's not a printer in our house I haven't fixed. But I do not reliably get good results with tearing out hardwired components and I don't want to brick a new tv, so I figured I'd ask.

...but LG just uses that install pathway to put crap on your computer.

In a sane world that would be "exceeding authorized access" under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and LG execs would go to prison for it.

Ok, but, how big would the file size be for the recordings? I doubt tv manufacturers would ship tvs with insane amounts of storage just so they can keep recordings.

Aren’t our other devices like firesticks listening too? The firestick and Apple TV remotes have microphones too, right?

Imagine the power to use any TV in any home as a spy device, and remote hack it. Because I'm sure that won't be abused. It's probably fine. We shouldn't worry about it. Plus the whole ownership, we own nothing, they claim they still own the glass, on top of the copyright ownership of the software. That's pretty all encompassing. That means you're essentially renting your TV. It's a push for reducing and eroding consumer rights. So we own nothing.

playstation to sound system to [smarter than i'd like] tv.

i don't know how much data gets stripped out at the sound system, but i know they started making older sound formats stop working through the optical audio channel for "reasons" (probably to do with tracking) and we had to switch to HDMI. do not get me started.

I would still be extremely wary; HDMI as a spec has the ability to carry Ethernet data.

I wouldn’t put it past the manufacturers from giving it a couple of years for this news cycle to pass from user memory, before trying more nefarious methods to try and exfiltrate data by piggybacking through connected devices like a Chromecast.

That’s mostly because I don’t trust Google to not help facilitate that for a share of the profits and access to the data for AI training.

Fuckin tire pressure monitor system surveillance all over again

I've wondered alot about that. If we gave them data.. But really bad data.. Would it work? Kinda like that browser plug-ins that make it look like you vist every site under the sun to make your actual data obscured.

If these companies are as lazy as I think they are, then they probobly don't scrub the data because they don't understand what's junk vs real. Much like the cat in the hat trend going around.

that's not sanitized though. that's actual usage.

Yeesh! Creative

Most open Wi-Fi I come across have a "enter your email here. For Free WiFi" form. I assume they could get past this with a simple script but open WiFi is not the same as having the WiFi password.

Or if it can reach open wifi later it will send all the already collected data.

Wow, that is insidious. I did not know that we are living in the cyberpunk future already.

What if you give the TV wifi access but block it's IP address on your network?

Would it still seek out unprotected WiFi networks if it is already connected to one that gives it no internet access?

i worry about printers. they have wifi

I don't think LG does.