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Comment by davidhyde | Hacker News Reader

My advice is to stop seeing a “smart tv” as a feature and see it as an expensive piece of equipment subsidised by extra advertising revenue. Don’t get upset about this, just understand it for what it is. Now, what can you do about it? Easy, don’t connect it to the internet. They will tell you that it needs updates but come on, what is a security vulnerability going to to to something that’s only output is a screen and audio? So there is your answer. Don’t use the smart features, plug in something you trust like a raspberry pi and use the expensive part of the product (the screen itself) without incurring the cost (the advertising they were using to subsidise the screen)

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no no no. this is bad advice.

1) "Some Samsung TVs already try and connect to open WiFi networks if you don't connect them yourself."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24629155

2) there is ethernet over hdmi - I would image this is another source of inadvertent connection.

3) samsung tvs require an ethernet cable to "update firmware" so HDMI works.

4) ACR - which will look at ALL the inputs.

and wait for the next few iterations

- smart devices talk to each other and exfiltrate data

- smart device manufacturers collaborate with ISPs who have put wifi gateways in your house and your neighbor's house.

Solder the wifi antenna to ground (so long as the remote is IR and not radio!)

My TCL starts to bootloop if it goes more than a month without connecting to the internet so it can download screensaver ads. The warranty people force me into the support gauntlet. The support gauntlet's first demand: connect it to the internet.

This is disgusting. Ads are ruining everything.

And if you think it stops here, I've got bad news. This is only going to get worse without strict regulation.

Edit: Didn't know TCL is a brand, not available in my part of the world... - What brand is your TV?

He already said - TCL.

TCL is the brand. (I hadn't heard of it either)

I see that around in supermarkets here. Cheap garbage from you-know-where.

TCL is a big Chinese company, they even have their own tv streaming service golive tv.

Hold up. What if you don't have internet? Are they legitimately prepared to say "well, in this case your TV is not gonna work"?

soon, not having internet will be like not having a phone, and wanting a tv that works without internet will be like using a computer without internet.

in any case, i'd get any claim that the tv works without internet in writing. then it becomes a warranty issue if the tv stops working

Yes. I lived on a farm for a couple years recently and you had to extensively research any tech you bought even if logic said there’s no reason that particular tech should need internet. The TV we took with us no longer worked (Samsung) so we had to buy a Sony (and have never looked back), among other things.

Also, software. Half the software on our computers stopped working despite not being internet related.

It was incredibly frustrating and really soured me on the direction tech is headed.

Yes and they’re legitimately paid to ignore the fact that internet access is a base need for everyone and should be cheaply available.

How does it know the time? Can't you set it to 1971?

You should try running it through a pihole. Even better, maybe you can manage to MITM it and replace the ads with something funny.

Some devices bypass the Pihole, and while you can catch them at the firewall, it’s a tedious game.

So what we need is a jailbreak and custom firmware?

Very very much so.

how is it possible to bypass? if it is the only thing available then it is impossible to use an alternative

They use their own DNS rather than PiHole’s.

If they use own DNS then maybe it can be disabled by IP rule in firewall?

If they can't get to their preferred DNS servers directly then they use DNS-over-HTTPS which you can't block.

Piholes just replace DNS results, so a device using hard coded DNS servers allows it to bypass that. This leads to people redirecting all port 53 traffic to the Pihole, which leads to devices/apps doing DNS over HTTPS, at which point it’s game over unless you can get your self-signed cert onto the device.

but surely these devices are set up to use DHCP and receive home users' DNS servers? giving them static IPs would not work. I suppose it depends on a) if these devices are somehow set up to receive just an IP address over DHCP and use their own hardcoded DNS servers and b) whether the home DHCP server / router would honour this and not enforce its own DNS servers along with the IP address

They’ll be using DHCP, but even when not doing anything nefarious you’re better off using known DNS servers when deploying appliances on random networks because consumer ISPs have a habit of ignoring TTLs and redirecting DNS results when you’re reaching bandwidth quotas and the like.

then the DHCP can assign PiHole as the DNS resolver, and if the requested domain isn't in its block list then it will be forwarded to google, cloudflare, etc.

i. e. the ads on smart devices can be blocked

#2 sounded intriguing, but it seems likely to not be the case [0].

I was curious because I have a Vizio that I deliberately keep disconnected from the internet, and rely on an Apple TV. Seems like that's not an attack vector in this case, though #1 is (and #3) seem worth looking into.

What's ACR in point #4?

[0] https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/325215/appletv-eth...

ACR == Automatic Content Recognition. Basically it periodically screenshots what the panel is showing and sends it to their servers to see if it matches the programs they know about to figure out what it is you're watching.

I don't see why people aren't rioting in the streets about this, apart from the fact that there are currently bigger issues already occupying rioters. It's seriously beyond the pale.

They're glued to their TVs.

Because most people don't know and/or understand. Look how many (often smart) people are bringing Alexa devices to their homes

I know smart people who have Alexa devices. Some of these people are software engineers who know there's someone on the other end listening to everything. One could argue that they must not be smart to buy these things.

But I think that a more helpful way of thinking about it is that (1) people are great at rationalizing, especially when it makes their lives easier. And (2) the open source alternative isn't good enough or easy enough.

For a long time, pirating music was the easiest way to listen to music that you wanted. Then things like iTunes and the iPod came along.

Until there's an easy, open alternative, even smart people will continue paying money to put surveillance devices in their living rooms and bedrooms.

Since I never connect my TV to the internet, why would ACR bother me? Doesn't really matter if the data isn't going anywhere.

The TV might still find a way to connect through open WiFi, Comcast xfinity or (a future model) 5G whispernet style connection.

It might not do that today, but perhaps a future firmware update that you would need or want, will do that; Visio TVs started ACRing and uploading that data after an update (they were sued for it and lost; it was called “smart data” or some other innocuous name.

To play the part of the average consumer here... why should I care exactly? I know about the concept of TV ratings so some families are allowing a computer to keep track of what they watch. How does this hurt me? Maybe if I was using my TV as an output for my home surveillance system I would care. Otherwise it’s just displaying content featuring paid actors or other people who are already being watched by millions on TV. Samsung or whoever they sold the data to is just one more viewer for that content.

I get that they can build a profile of me based on what kind of content I’m watching, but it doesn’t seem different from what Netflix or YouTube is doing anyway. Probably they’re going to use the data to show attribution for engagements on ads for media. Good for them I guess. It‘s not in my top 1000 reasons to riot personally.

Nielsen families get paid, for one thing.

Part of the distaste is the lack of control.

That a faceless, remote corporation can reach into your home and arbitrarily control a product you've purchased feels very invasive.

Companies like Samsung and LG have previously had cameras and microphones silently streaming unencrypted feeds. They've also been caught running network probes to search out, catalogue and report private media.

All that feels very creepy to some people such as myself.

You want to say no, don't do that ...but you can't.

Exactly. It's my house. It's my behavior. These four walls are sacrosanct.

Imagine you are working from home or your kids are schooling from home, and you use the TV for meetings. Are they recording your presentation? Are pictures of your kids' classmates being fingerprinted and archived somewhere for correlation with all the other classmates?

There are levels of outrageousness here:

- Spying on TV through a purpose-built device: mildly annoying that every show and ad now has a tracking watermark that can be used surreptitiously, but voluntary Nielsen participation is just fine.

- Spying on an app you own: YouTube collecting aggregated watch times for videos is useful to creators to avoid reaching people who don't want to watch them. Netflix collecting in-house analytics is only mildly annoying because I don't know how individualized the data is, but aggregate stats are fine. Behavioral analysis of individuals is still creepy.

-Spying on all apps running on your software: Roku or a smart TV reporting what you watch in all apps is starting to approach unacceptable. Presumably appmakers know about this when they are making the apps, but a third party doesn't have the same checks and balances to make sure they aren't alienating users with creepy behavior. There is not a functioning market here because appmakers don't get a choice of how to reach users, because platform rentiers are claiming all of the users.

- Spying on arbitrary video files you watch through DLNA: not okay. My work-in-progress video productions and self-ripped discs are simply none of the TV makers' business.

-Spying on HDMI inputs: serious WTF. Like I can't even... WTF??? Who do they think they are?

>Probably they’re going to use the data to show attribution for engagements on ads for media.

This is a problem. I don't want advertisements to be optimized for engagement. Anything that makes advertisements more effective is something I'm against.

I have a 65 inch samsung tv that kept popping up on my network. I put it on an isolated wifi network once to get the firmware updates. After I did that I turned it back off.

But it keeps trying to come back for just a moment every couple of days. I had to ban its mac address since there was no way to get it to stop in the settings or after factory resets.

It's crazy how user hostile TV manufacturers have become.

Profiteering using the personal information of consumers.

It is maddening how incompatible with Democracy the commercial surveillance system has become.

Just wait till you’ve been to the country it’s made in.

Forcibly banning the MAC address of a TV on your own home network, that you've paid money for, really does sum up the state of consumer electronics atm.

that's pretty funny, it's like fighting a rogue employee in a corporate network.

>1) "Some Samsung TVs already try and connect to open WiFi networks if you don't connect them yourself."

This claim doesn't seem to be well sourced. It's essentially going on the word of an anonymous redditor.

See user mkhpalm’s comment

That's unrelated to open Wi-Fi networks.

One needs to mentally prepare for the coming 5G era; ubiquitous tracking and data harvesting combined with artificial intelligence and social credit. Where is the opt out from this hellish corporate revolution?

5G doesn't change the economics of having cell radios nor paying for cell data.

Why would notoriously low margin products like a TV ever pay for such a lavish addition when most people voluntary connect it to wifi or ethernet anyway?

A TV is no longer a TV when it is part of a lucrative network of sensors; this not only represents a risk for the buyer, it fundamentally alters what a product is, while reducing language to newspeak.

But still, 5G changes nothing. Why have they not had this since 3G radios could be found in a Kindle?

search for "comcast lpwan" or machineq or "comcast iot"

just make an agreement with one company, done.

This is the only reason why I'm concerned about an overly optimistic 5G rollout. It's frustrating that all the nutso conspiratists have made it practically impossible to problematize this without coming off as either uneducated or a lunatic.

Meta-conspiracy-theory: the 5G conspiracy theories were spread deliberately with the precise intention of making the truth look like just another crazy conspiracy theory.

(I don't think that's very likely in this case, but I bet there are actual examples out there of conspiracy theories being deliberately seeded as a way to discredit potential real criticisms.)

I absolutely think that there are forces putting fuel to the flames with this as one goal. Not necessarily the origin or the main driving force, but I'm sure it happens. Just as with other recent polarizing movements.

Samsung TVs are an extreme example though. They’re the most obnoxious and the most disrespectful of your privacy by implementing all these dark patterns. Not to mention their QLED bullshit, it’s just LED but it’s meant to make you think it’s OLED and pay extra.

I despise Samsung and their junk.

It's sad because I have multiple (ageing) Samsung appliances (amongst them a dumb TV) and they're all great so Samsung would have naturally be a contender for my next TV.

If all you’ve read in this thread doesn’t put you off Samsung... then nothing will.

Brand loyalty is in fact a thing.

Well, you do you.

How can you even think to not buy an OLED instead of their scammy QLED full of advertisements is beyond my comprehension...

Old Samsung HDTVs were awesome, but that's changed in the last few years. They added features like in-menu ads to the low end models that seem to be trickling up their top end as well.

I also have a buggy 1.5 year old Samsung stove that has to be reset when I lean a pot lid against the back It causes the touch panel to trigger a random button and lock up.

I have had to service/replace parts of my Samsung dryer 4 times in 3 years, have never read any other positive notes about them. Their appliance quality has went downhill and I am never buying Samsung appliances again.

QLED coating is not bullshit, I had a PC monitor with it and it won against any other VA panel I compare it with. Now, the name is a but unfortunate, but the tech is there

I think the confusion comes from the impression that quantum dots can be individually controlled like pixels in OLED/plasma. But quantum dots are are actually a "dumb" film which converts blue backlight into a RGB components similarly to how phosphor works in LED light bulbs. Of course QD can improve color gamut and brightness but it is still just an improved LED panel. The name QLED tries to confuse people into thinking that it is somehow similar to OLED but they are completely different technology.

QLED refers to the quantum dot film and is part of the process by which the device generates rich colors. It's not OLED and any person who can't read the difference between Q and O probably shouldn't be pretending to choose a TV based on its technology.

I prefer QLED anyways, even the best OLEDs still have issues with burn in these days.

There are ways to reduce burn-in, some TVs even have this functionality built-in. But it is enough to simply don't display the same patterns on the same place for long periods (I mean days). As long as you are mostly watching movies and zooming to avoid black stripes or replacing black stripes with gray stripes, you are fine...

My TV is an LG plasma unit from 2010. This tech was also was supposed to suffer from burn in problems. And in fact, just recently I noticed that the Ubuntu screen that manage this TV's content with was starting to burn in where the Icon array is along the top. So, what I should have done in the first place, I did now, which is make that icon automatically hide when the mouse isn't near. And now, about three months later, that burn in image is now imperceptible. The screen's colors are still as fabulous as they were in 2010 but the 720p aspect is starting to feel like a hinderance but one of the best buys I've ever made.

> It's not OLED and any person who can't read the difference between Q and O probably shouldn't be pretending to choose a TV based on its technology.

I suppose, but it's still misleading to be calling it "LED" in the first place when that's just the backlight.

To add to this, various things try to bypass the Pihole by doing their own DNS. Google devices skip the Pihole, and I’ll bet others do too. You can catch at least some of the bad behaviour by blocking all outbound port 53 traffic that isn’t from the Pihole, or redirect it back to the Pihole.

I’m sure this will be beaten though.

This is why they invented DNS-over-HTTPS, to work around your ”foul play”.

It's funny because at home apps bypassing my dns annoys the hell out of me but in China which is where I currently am DNS-over-HTTPS is necessary just to get online some days.

I just wish there was a manual captive portal check button built into browsers that forces a standard port 53 check because if I'm behind a captive portal I have to reset my dns settings to sign in before then switching it back to get my VPN to connect.

Smart 'X' in general has become synonymous with 'paid for by your data we scrape 24/7' at least when it comes to most consumer range products and platforms made by big tech companies...

Smart phones

Smart TVs

Smart speakers

Smart doorbell/security cameras

Smart home systems

If there's one thing these all have in common it's:

'Known privacy issues regarding tracking and data collection by large tech companies.'

When a product is marketed as smart...I assume it's smart as in it's watching and learning from me and giving the data to someone.

> profited additionally by your data we scrape 24/7

since it's not necessarily "paid for" via the advertising

Good point...

Would 'heavily subsidized by' work as well?

Subsidized implies that the revenue from advertising defers the cost to the end user. This isn't generally true for TVs.

With TVs, the sticker price pays for the hardware. The ads pay for the extra house the manufacturer's CEO feels he's entitled to have.

Not so much. That's why, as a bunch of other comments mentioned, there's commercial displays available with equivalent specs to smart tvs that are essentially dumb terminals with no smart functionality that cost more than twice the price.

Your data is subsidizing the low hardware costs.

I think this is a question that doesn't have a well defined answer. Most likely raw hardware cost is smaller than consumer price, which is smaller than what the consumer price would have been if the manufacturer weren't able to get extra profit by selling your privacy and/or attention. So who's getting the money from selling you to Facebook depends on what you think the "right" price without that would have been, and there's always a wide range of possible prices for any given product.

The saddest part is that it's not even "heavily". From a profit margin perspective it's huge, because those are so thin on a product like a TV. But from a sales price perspective it's not even that notable of an amount.

You mentioned commercial displays costing a lot more but those are a different market entirely, and the extra price is only slightly motivated by the lack of advertising.

What's really concerning is that "smart" TV's are no longer an upgrade, but the standard. You practically cannot find a new dumb 4k TV. When I went to purchase one recently, Best Buy at least had no other option.

All smart TV's are dumb if you don't connect them to the Internet.

They won't spy on you, but you'll still have to deal with the laggy shitware they run. In some I've had the misfortune of using, simply changing the inputs was a torturous affair because of the shitty software the TV was running.

Thankfully most let you skip the UI entirely by having direct input selection IR commands. Get yourself a generic universal remote that either has these buttons, or custom ones you can program.

With this I basically never see the UI on my LG and Samsung TVs, and I certainly don't interact with it unless I need to get into settings.

I still remember the near-instant channel switching from the 90s, when analog signals and CRTs where the norm. You could change channels on a dime.

Now with complex video and audio codecs, video post-processing and shoddily coded software there's been a very severe downgrade in that department. I don't have a TV at home but every time I'm in a hotel or my parent's place I notice how laggy it is when I'm just browsing through the channels (which is what I do 90% of the time when I'm using one, since there's hardly anything worth watching anyway).

For those of you who are too young to know what I'm talking about, have a look at this: https://youtu.be/v83WEzw8tfw?t=44

That video is already laggy compared to what I remember as a kid. If you were watching OTA analog the channel change was near instant. Even on our cable box it was near instant.

Was it not actually instant?

My recollection from the 80's was you switch the channel (physically) and it's... switched!

So was there some magical latency there that I just couldn't perceive, or are the "near instant" reports talking about some other type of TV? Or something else?

Change was instant, took a frame or two for all the sync, gain, etc to settle.

There was a few ms of latency but you couldn't actually perceive it unless you used a slow motion camera or something.

There absolutely was some latency, about 13ms worth, because it had to wait for the next field to start so it could properly synchronize and start drawing. But you'd never notice that yourself.

Yeah, I think that video appears to still have some digital delay. Perhaps something related to the satellite receiver decoding in that example.

I am personally considering just getting an HDMI switch that I can manage externally from the TV. I mostly use the Android TV device I bought and its much more stable than the UI on my offline Smart TV thankfully it has most if not all the apps I need.

There are lots of shitwares that don't do async, so the shitware runs at a snail's pace offline because all the spyware requests have to time out before the shitware can do anything.

If they have wifi you have no idea if they're connecting to open networks.

I've heard the solution to that is to set up an AP in your house that is either firewalled or doesn't have an outbound connection and connect your smart devices to that AP.

Apartments are a problem though

Unless the TV ignores your settings and hops to random networks when it can’t phone home through your AP, this approach should still work fine in apartments.

From what I understood, this is precisely what some new models do.

Buy a cheap router, don’t connect the router to the internet, and connect all smart appliances to the router.

Wonder if the TV would detect it as nonfunctional and still search for open networks that work.

If you can think if it, they can too.

As Samsung is essentially hostile beyond belief, and has thrown away all pretense of 'helping', I'd say yes.

I wouldn’t be surprised if they did but isn’t it illegal to connect to an open wifi if you haven’t got the explicit permission to do so?

All they need in that case is a signed contract with Comcast saying they’re allowed to connect to Xfinity networks.

Or buy a cheap good one ( eg Edgerouter Lite or X) and block them there, or put them on their own subnet.

Why would they even have such logic? Especially since the only open wifi points are captive portal ones?

But if there's just no open wifi points around then you can still be pretty certain of this.

it used to be that way for "3d" tv's. I'm really hoping that "smart" tv's get relegated to the same fate.

This. I found the same thing in Australia.

Sadly, that won't help you if the smart TV is constantly looking for open wifi networks to use without your knowledge or intervention.

Rather than constantly monitoring and investigating what your TV is doing it's far simpler to just avoid Samsung, LG, Panasonic or Sony products.

Even if your current smart TV doesn't do this, it's exactly the sort of dark pattern that certain manufacturers could add with an update and there's nothing you can do about it because you don't control the product.

Best to just avoid brands you don't trust.

That's fine for now, but you just know within a crop or two there's going to be panels that insist on being connected to the Internet or they won't even display anything.

And then once one or two companies have made that acceptable, they all will go that way.

As usual, _Idiocracy_ is a documentary from the future.

https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/idiocracy....

I like money.

we should hang out

Can't believe you like money too

> Easy, don’t connect it to the internet.

Maybe not so easy in the future. TVs might eventually have 5G internet connections built-in and paid for by the manufacturer. It could be worth it to them if they get enough revenue from their software platform through user tracking and advertising.

This makes me remember the guy who was pulling SIM cards out of these IoT car boots and putting them in his phone for free 4G service.

Only if there's enough users who refuse to give their TV wifi to justify such a crazy expense. Which seems highly unlikely.

There are IoT SIMs available on most major carriers, which are intended for economical occasional low-data usage on large numbers of devices. They're popular in GPSes among other things.

5G is looking to reduce the cost of them further as LPWA is a key part of the standard.

maybe one way to fight this is by finding a way to abuse these SIMs/connections to use a lot of data en masse until they get cut off or dropped altogether.

They can easily be remotely disabled if there's any suspicious activity, ie to any other server than the telemetry backend.

Exactly what I meant, and then you use their own SIM to DoS or DDoS them until they or their network provider disconnect the service.

I don't know why you're downvoted, there's already screens currently in development that have precisely this. They should hit around late 2021 or early 22. There are SOHO routers in development that have this (Q1'21), and the 5G modem isn't even for your usage, its for the manufacturer to push/pull data. There's a side-by-side fridge/freezer that has this already on the market. There's a (commercial) coffee machine for installation in to offices that has this.

But alot of people want Netflix etc streamed. also alot of people dont know how to manage firewalls, pihole etc. This idea of stuffing tracking and ads into everything “smart” is such an insult to the individual.

Anyone should be able to setup and use Apple TV. (If you trust Apple, that is).

If not, you could use a Raspi? I had non-techie (but still young) friends who came up with and implemented this idea by themselves.

Apple TV is expensive though for people without a bunch of cash. Pay $400 for a 4K TV that has Netflix built in and then spend $200 for Apple TV too?

Definitely true, not everyone is willing to pay the price for privacy in the first price.

Easy, don’t connect it to the internet.

No good. The TVs are starting to nag the user if left unconnected.

What's a good media player system for raspberry pi in that case? Any chance that it can drive netflix?

Kodi, and yes, I believe there is a Netflix add-on that you can authenticate to if you need to ;)

Interesting, thanks for the pointer

I use a Chromebit it's really effective and has all the apps you really need.

If you want to trust this you have to put your tv in a faraday cage. I wouldn't bat an eye if tv's actually connect via 4G to their spying servers.

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