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Comment by bitlevel | Hacker News Reader

They appear to not be trustworthy to be on our networks - so we should:

1. Not join them to our networks 2. Stop buying 'Smart TV's' 3. Get panels and a smart box that you can control

I'm lucky enough to be able to direct ALL DNS through my router first. Nothing gets out without my say so. Not everyone has that capability, sadly, with home routers.

The solution provided by the OP is a solid one - another would be to purchase a decent router (such as a Mikrotik) and learn how to use it - much more powerful device for the same price, or sometimes lower, as a regular 'home' router.

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It’s going to be really difficult to not get a smart tv pretty soon. You can, of course not hook it up to the internet. But pretty much all of the current TVs (particularly the good ones with nice displays) are going to be “Smart”. One reason for the recent huge price drops on TVs is the ability to subsidize the price by selling viewing data. It’s the new normal in the CE world.

Yeah the only thing that can stop this trend at this point is regulation unfortunately. Unless you make it a rule that TV manufacturers can’t do this putting them all on a level playing field the ones that do will always be ahead on price.

This is all a result of consumer preference -- dumb TVs were once the majority of the market. Smart TVs have taken over because people prefer them.

Regulation should not be used to override clearly demonstrated consumer preferences or to force companies to produce products that few people want.

Regulation should intervene when smart tvs come with non-obvious downsides like data collection. Consumers don't get informed and have no possibility of making an informed choice here.

People know about data collection. They don't care.

The first thing we need to do to have productive conversations about privacy with non-technical people is to stop pretending they are ignorant or unable to understand trade-offs. People know that their online activity is tracked. They know that their Alexa devices record their conversations. All of this has been on the news enough times that you'd need to be living in a cave to be unaware of it.

People know this, and they have chosen to purchase these devices anyway. Maybe it's not because they are stupid and need the state to protect them -- maybe they are capable of evaluating trade-offs and their choices ought not to be second-guessed by people who think they know better.

> The first thing we need to do to have productive conversations about privacy with non-technical people is to stop pretending they are ignorant or unable to understand trade-offs.

And then those same people complain about folks who won't vaccinate their kids, saying they're being selfish.

Without realizing they're doing exactly the same thing.

They are ignorant. They do not understand the trade-offs.

I agree that people know about data collection and don't care to some extent, but I'd argue that they don't understand the consequences and the extent of this.

If they'd be presented a bill of what they're being overcharged through better targeting, ads, etc., the same way activity trackers show how many steps a user takes, things might change.

What I'd disagree is that people choose to purchase the device anyway, a non-tech-savy user will hardly get presented a non-smart device, wouldn't even know to search for this.

I think regulation should at least let you turn off features, e.g. it should be possible to use Airplay and turn off the app store the tv uses.

The article has convinced me to do exactly that and finally get a pfsense router to make the pihole more effective. I'll (try to) only allow each device to run the services I really want it to run. I doubt my partner, siblings, parents, etc. would be able to do that though, this needs a simple pfsense/pihole combo that runs well out of the box or regulation to protect consumers.

Umm. I’m not saying force TVs to stop being smart. I’m saying that you can level the playing field by saying that TV manufacturers aren’t allowed to collect user information or display ads. That’s the race to the bottom where users lose.

In Europe I buy TVs aimed at office dashboard displays etc. No “Smart TV” with crappy software in my home.

Can you share what “dashboard display” you’re buying snd what’s the quality like compared to an actual TV? I just want a high quality screen ~55-65” to use with an AppleTV. I’m considering an LG oled cx because I don’t want android and will not use any of its features other than sound and display. I wish there was an oled display only for this use-case :(

I have two LG TVs,one being a C8, neither is hooked up to the internet and they both work just fine with CEC enabled HDMI devices.

I have one at home as a TV, four at work as dashboard displays for live data. No other affiliation.

https://www.swedx.se/#horizontalTab2

> One reason for the recent huge price drops on TVs is the ability to subsidize the price by selling viewing data. It’s the new normal in the CE world.

That's good though! If you are one of the people who wants a dumb TV, congratulations! You get to benefit from lower TV prices, subsidized by all the other people who are buying smart TVs for the smart features. Just don't connect your new TV to your network, don't try to use the smart features, and pretend it's a dumb TV. It works fine.

>I'm lucky enough to be able to direct ALL DNS through my router first

Even DNS over HTTPS? Do you do packet inspection? Just blocking ports doesn't do much any more. I run an IDS/IPS and it blocks lots of DoH to Google. Apple devices are even worse.

Would you mind sharing a bit more detail on your setup?

I’m interested too.

I'm not sure what the commenter's setup is, but I have one that (at least mostly) achieves the same thing. It is a combination of a few things:

1. Redirect all outbound DNS traffic to your own local DNS server (as described in the link in this post) 2. Return NXDOMAIN for well-known DoH domains [1] (as well as "use-application-dns.net" for well-behaving software like Firefox [2]) 3. Block traffic to well-known DoH providers by destination IP address [1]

[1] https://github.com/bambenek/block-doh [2] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/configuring-networks-di...

Yep, pretty much the above - I have a combination of rules that control all traffic. Only the router is allowed to use port 53 outbound - all other traffic is redirected using NAT to the router's DNS server.

I mentioned Mikrotik previously - I use them myself.

Not DNS over HTTPS currently, although investigating a way to MitM the connections with a proxy.

So which “smart box” would that be?

Roku? Where the CEO outright said that they aren’t in the hardware business and they are trying to monetize via ads?

Google? Need I say more

Amazon Fire devices? See above with Google

AppleTV? Sure I have a couple. They aren’t trying to monetize with advertising. But the HN crowd is anti-Apple.

HN not liking something doesn't make it a bad choice.

Kodi running on a Pi or some other low power computer is probably HN-friendly, although the usability isn't even close to as good as the Apple TV.

No Netflix or Amazon on Kodi. While I have a NAS with my media on it that Kodi worked fine on the need to open a browser and need for a keyboard and mouse became to much of a pain. I switched everything to AppleTV which had the issue of not being able to mount the NAS. Lucky there is a Kodi "port" to the AppleTV in the App Store called Mr.MC for like $8 that is pretty much Kodi with built in support for NFS, SMB, etc. AppleTV is the perfect box for this to be honest.

Or Nvidia Shield TV - there's Netflix, Amazon, whatever - and also the genuide Kodi, right in the Play Store.

Netflix works fine on my Kodi on Rpi 4. It has a plugin for widevine DRM and gets the required parts (keys?) from a chrome os image it downloads.

In terms of usability OSMC is in my opinion a lot better than all the smart tv UI's I've seen (and you can definitely run it from even older pi hardware)

You can also chromecast and airplay pretty smoothly as well.

By saying I “have a couple” of Apple TV’s, isn’t kind of obvious that I don’t think it’s a bad choice?

As far as usability, look at all of the comments mentioning hacks solutions instead of just ordering a commercial product and plugging it in.

I went one step further with my parents. I just bought them a Roku TV and called it a day.

A raspberry pi media centre obviously is not the simplest solution. But for someone who feels they just want a "dumb" tv and a box they can control, it's perfect. It's a good choice for those who can set it up and that get peace of mind and satisfaction from having a box that is on their side.

Running your own Plex server maybe? (Haven't tried.)

AppleTV 4K all the way. Works great. Small, silent. Use your iOS device as the remote. Love itz

My xbox has been reasonable

KDE is working on a "smart box" software to run on raspberrypi. I believe it's called KDE Bigscreen and even has voice search features through mycroft if you are hosting an instance. The project is available in beta right now but it looks like it has potential

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