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Comment by pletnes | Hacker News Reader

What we did for our old tv, was to get a chromecast after 3-4 years. This might be a cheaper and more environmentally friendly approach than yours, as we then buy one «smart-device», but you might end up with 2, over 12 years. But then some (all?) smart tv offerings have issues with terms and conditions, privacy, etc which may make them undesirable for you.

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I never hooked up the smart tv to my wireless network. I have heard too many stories about data getting sent back to the manufacturers to sell your watching habits, etc. Instead, I use a Roku, that I know gets updates (and yes, they also sell your watching habits, but so far, nextdns.io's lists block the DNS that roku uses to do this.)

Problem some do connect to any non secured WiFi they can find.

I purposely bought and expensive one that’s pure android tv where you can disable all the tracking bits

You bought an Android device to avoid tracking? lol

As long as you're using binaries that were compiled by Google I wouldn't trust them one bit.

If you use LineageOS on your TV you might be a little better off.

Android by Sony verses Samsung or webos? I’m happy with my choice.

That is terrifying.. good to know!

Just remove the antenna? Won't be connecting very far after that!

I have a dummy hotspot with no access to anything whatsoever, and which I allow my TV to connect to. Apart from exposing an undocumented API (with code execution capabilities), and allowing logging in as root over Telnet (without a password), it also tries to fetch software updates over plain HTTP. It's a bloody nightmare.

On the plus side, it was possible to disable many of the smart features once I discovered the telnet capability. :D

Vulnerabilities are a massive trade off. I want my devices to be open to me, not to anyone. Seems like it should be straight forward to give you access to the device (like "scan this qrcode on the inside of this panel" and you get the private key). One can dream...

Yeah, pretty much every single "smart" device I've ever bought has had vulnerabilities that never got patched. It's ridiculous.

On the plus side, my 10 year-old laptop still finds a use as an access point/firewall for all those things. :D

Does anyone know of such hacking that someone has done and documented? I'd be interested in trying to telnet or connect to a Samsung TV that I have, or at least be able to sandbox it somehow.

Pro-tip: you can usually un-accept privacy policies on Smart TVs and this reverts them to "dumb" TVs. This disables built-in apps and may make "software updates" unavailable but that's actually what you want anyway.

How would I do this?

It's buried in settings. On samsung it's in system settings.

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