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Comment by uptown | Hacker News Reader

"The trade-offs for cheap TVs is that customers are themselves becoming the product for TV makers [...] For something to be as cheap as a great TV, people have to give something up — whether they know it or not."

Just never give the TV its own direct connection to the internet. Use another device that you do trust, to feed the big screen its content.

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This is getting really hard with some devices. I got a bose soundbar at the start of the year and it comes with a remote that has a few basic features but it is almost impossible to use properly without configuring it via the app and the app demands that you first create an account and then give the device your wifi password.

In the end I eventually caved and installed the app and connected it to the internet to configure and then blocked the device from my router.

> then blocked the device from my router.

Hmm. Thanks.

No worries with sound. There are plenty of audio enthusiasts that will have nothing to do with a system like this and there will always be plenty of options because of them.

I know this isn't your central point, but you should know that a speaker can be used as a microphone, and vice versa. Granted, a speaker won't be a very good microphone, but it is possible one could design an exploit that uses this capability to record audio and send the results off to who knows where.

Assuming the chipset support jack restasking (most don't).

It's unlikely that a basic Bluetooth speaker would even have an ADC to switch to, not to mention speakers without Chromecast-like streaming capabilities probably only have some tiny real-time operating system.

You only need one bit of digital input and oversampling to make for a pretty good ADC.

I doubt that anyone can listen through my old JBLs. Totally analog, back to the preamp input.

Wait until these companies partner with Comcast to get default access to the ever present Xfinity public hotspot.

Sure you might deny it privileged to your network but for a profit share I might let it access mine.

I guess alternately you could grant it access to your wifi and block all its traffic.

How does one block the traffic?

Most routers allow some kind of traffic denial, even the home use ones. But I guess you could get a rpi and set it up as a firewall or something

I wouldn’t put it past the TV makers to aggressively evade firewalls, latch on to public WiFi or include a secret cellular modem that they bury in the finest of fine print.

I doubt you'd get a profit share. When the idea of all of those 'CableWiFi' networks started, it was because the cable operators wanted a separate network. It usually runs on a separate circuit so it won't interfere with the customer's bandwidth.

The point they were making was using this cablewifi, tv will be able to send data back without requiring your WiFi password.

One more reason the best neighbors are those that are out of site.

If the trends from previous schemes follow, then soon someone will offer you a 'free' TV streamer which streams what ever you want for free while simultaneous streaming 3 or 4 other streams, using your behavior on your stream to mimic you on the other streams which capture revenue from advertising that is never actually viewed.

Companies were giving away “free” $400 computers in exchange for signing up for dialup for two years back in 1999. I’m surprised that streaming service providers aren’t doing the same.

I did get two “free” $179 AppleTV 4Ks for signing up for, DirecTVNOW for 3 months (signed up twice in the course of a year). A 40 inch TCl Roku tv is the same price.

The price of dumb TVs has also fallen dramatically.

Can you even get a dumb TV anymore? I found it surprisingly difficult when I replaced mine 2 years ago. So far I've been OK with simply not plugging it into the Internet.

There are certainly dumb displays. You'd have to decide if they have the characteristics that you want.

Yes. Sort of. You can buy a commercial display, the kind used for digital signs. But, those probably cost 10x more than a consumer TV.

Not really, to be honest. I don't consider this 43" 5000:1 2160p 350cd/m^2 screen ( https://iiyama.com/gl_en/products/prolite-le4340uhs-b1/ ) to have a bad price @ 580 EUR. Unfortunately it seems to be limited by 8bit sRGB when it comes to using that contrast. They do have HDR screens though.

Wow maybe this is a US to EU mismatch but I just got a 4K 65” HDR screen for $500 including tax? That seems very expensive by my standards, as $500 ~= €448 and €580 ~= $650

Can confirm, low-end prices for HDR-capable non-OLED (so, worse blacks than higher-end screens but still much better than most of what was typical, say, 10 years ago) 4K screen @ 65" is like $500. Under $400 for 55" and same quality.

Mind you, this is a 18/7 screen with an insane viewing angle. Your eyes do not have that much in-picture dynamic range; you only see it when the content is dim. (I have an older version of this on my desk.)

At Best Buy, their store brand (Insignia) is not "smart". Everything else seems to be.

Piggybacking on this, I contemplating the same problem and was wondering whether I could create a new wifi network which can only access hbo go domains and let the TV use that network only. Is something like this possible without any additional device in the loop? Just tweaking the (ISP) router and forget about it?

Probably not. The HN advice always seems to be to use your ISP-provided device only as a modem and plug a separate router into it. I don't know how many people actually do this in practice - probably the same proportion of vim users who actually have Caps Lock remapped to Escape.

Well, I'm doing this but my Caps Lock is mapped to Control. Anyway, you are probably right, there are dozens of us. On the other hand I've seen couple of discussions here around Ubiquity and MicroTik in consumer environments some maybe it's not that rare.

Roku TVs are one of the higher rated smart tv platforms, so is there a difference between plugging in a roku device or just using a roku tv?

Not really. The TVs tend to have more computing power than the lowest-end Rokus too.

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