YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Disconnect it from the network and hook up a streaming device that is relatively trustable (e.g. Apple TV or an open source alternative).

don't let it connect to the internet

Load the art from a flash stick and never connect it to the internet?

I'm sorely tempted to go down that road, I have a few frames. They've never been connected to the Internet, but the software on them is trash - literally the only thing I ever want it to do is display art (in standby) or display the Apple TV connected to HDMI.

That's a pretty good point. We kept hearing these rumors for a while now and all the usual suspects keep saying "we don't listen to your microphone on your phone" but yeah nobody expects the TV and fridge to do it, so maybe that's how it happens and people are not crazy.

This is similar to Flock and Palantir who collect info the government is not allowed to and then sell it to the government.

In this case Meta, Google etc can honestly say they aren't surrepticiously listinging to you or collecting data not in their privacy statement. They just buy it instead.

So I need to write a chaffing agent that runs when I am not home and randomly spouts synthetic conversations through non-smart speakers about nappies (kids a re long gone), nuclear weapons development, plumbing, union membership, crochet, video games, crypto coins, and other things we don't normally do.

This does not mean that Google and Facebook never do it.

Has this not been proven by now? That smart devices are used to do this, including smartphones? Their OSes just ship with apps that that record that audio information right out of the box.

> Now we can basically say that its not Facebook and Google doing this directly

Finding out that TVs are listening does not mean Google and Facebook aren't. I've had plenty of times in an old car, or on a walk talking about something only to have related ads pop up later.

You are unlike most people. Most people just want to come home and watch TV. Historically it used to be cable, now it's YouTube or similar. What do you think is the quickest way to watch YouTube?

better yet,in the age of AI why not do more?

Ive been motivated recently to start making my appliances mine by using Ai to reverse engineer and replace their firmware. So long as the appliance has been slow to update its security channels, the recent eMudrha certificate leak was the perfect opportunity to place yourself in the middle of the relationship between device and vendor. Its allowed me to make some trivial updates to my television's firmware and start to have AI build me firmware that better serves my purposes. Hoping to lobotomize it and replace everything with a simple linux system that executes a startup script to launch a Jellyfin client.

I bought it and its mine, this is the freedom we were originally robbed of.

One way that you probably are behind on the goings on in the TV market are that there are whole TV brands that require you to login just to use the television at all, like Roku.

These are usually the cheap models, the kind that are heavily subsidized by spyware, but the fact that this exists at all is seriously not cool.

I imagine that you can login to those televisions once and then take them offline, though I haven’t tried personally.

The other thing I would say is that here we are asking customers to basically buy duplicate products and that second product might still engage in spyware.

E.g., I’ve bought a $500 TV that comes with Roku or whatever. It already runs all my streaming apps. So the strategy now is to turn off internet on that TV and now I have to buy a streaming box and hope that it’s less intrusive. If we decide maybe Apple is the one with the least intrusive ads and tracking, that’s now $300, almost doubling the cost of the TV.

And if we buy some other streaming box like Roku or Amazon well guess what they have all the same sorts of telemetry and ads going on.

This is what I do. I find navigating with a remote control to be infuriating, especially when you need to search for something. With an old computer and wireless mouse and keyboard, it's so much better. Some minor configuration of Firefox's homepage and it's a fine start page for watching TV, with all your stuff right there. Plus you can have extensions that save hours of your life over time. The only downside is the remote becomes the literal keyboard and mouse which might be cumbersome for some, but I don't even think about it anymore. I've been using the same 50" for ten years.

It's not hard; but often the TV will nag and nag until it gets a wifi connection.

And with how hard these manufacturers are trying, I wouldn't be at all surprised if they start including some alternate data connection for metadata/DRM/whatever. (ie, not the primary streaming data connection)

>Hook up a computer via HDMI and never connect the TV to wifi.

Having just gone through this...it's a lot harder than you think.

Current gen TVs have specs that garden variety connect a computer can't supply over HDMI. You need HDMI 2.1 with FRL to hit it. So you climb onto google, discover yes there are minipc that can do that...except only the new ones...the "AI" ones that cost you an arm and a leg. Also they need fast DDR5 memory which is great fun right now. And the more affordable ones are AMD so no quicksync.

So you think lets maybe do a USBC dongle to an existing device, only to discover that they require different firmware (!) on the dongle depending on whether you're using a mac or a windows PC [0]. And then you realize you actually need a cable capable of 48gbps and none of the ones lying around are labelled so you have to buy a new one just in case. And after you've done all that you still don't know why its connecting at 120hz not 144hz per TV specs. And then the whole media encoding circus starts...

I can 100% understand why people just type in wifi password and call it a day. The average consumer is not up for flashing firmware onto dongles to watch their big brother series.

[0] https://kb.cablematters.com/index.php?View=entry&EntryID=147

Until Samsung is sued out of existence

Yeah same experience. People working in Facebook (I had a friend there) say it is only pattern behaviour, they can predict your interests, check when you meet with your friends, share WIFIs, etc, so they can imagine things you have been talking about. I call this bullshit. I dont know if my friend working at Facebook believes this, or was just hiding it for me, but it's 0% chance of them doing that. Also because I never got any of these recommendations BEFORE I mentioned it out loud, which means their prediction engine (if it exists) also knows when I am going to talk about it!

It's been a feature of the phones for years too.

While caution is definitely warranted after LG, I am definitely getting the impression that people are far too quick to jump to conclusions because an A.I. service told them something without them factually checking it first

It’s called Terms of Service agreement

They need to you blindly accept the terms and conditions and think "oh that seems fine" instead of returning it and costing them money.