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586 pointsencryptluks2667 comments

If anyone is interested, I wouldn't mind collaborating to create a privacy oriented SmartTV or PC for devs or simply an industrial grade dumb TV. I have experience designing and building 70" industrial displays that utilize Samsung LCD panels. These "industrial" panels are normally twice the price of consumer grade ones but are designed to operate 24/7 with a MTBF of 100k hours (approx. 11 years) and are usually twice the brightness of normal ones (a very noticeable difference). I also have direct relations with Samsung for sourcing. Displays I've designed and built: https://bit.ly/3vV9jVm

An extremely interesting prospect you've got here. What's stopping you from doing it right now?

I would guess the massive investments needed for a hardware startup.

Kickstarter could solve this no?

Most of the upfront cost for hardware is usually setting up tooling and assembly lines for manufacture. In this case, I'd assume most if not all parts already exists and can be sourced. That negates a lot of it.

Nothing. I just realize that as I age, there's only so much a single person can do ;)

I would definitely spend time and money contributing to a "Universal Dumb Display" (UDD?)

Consider making this a kickstarter!

I agree, Kickstarter seems the way to go!

That’s interesting. Can you make something that’s higher end than the most high end consumer TV?

(If Tesla had to be “a better car that’s also electric”, I think this would need to be “a better TV that’s also private”.)

Higher-end can mean a lot of things, especially when talking consumer grade. I generally translate consumer grade high-end as being more aesthetically pleasing vs operationally. My expertise are more aligned with industrial grade equipment where size is typically not the limit. I've deployed a 16ft x 9ft high-res LED display for a customer in the past. That's something you don't normally find at BestBuy or even at their Magnolia outlets.

How much does something like that go for?

I was involved with a project that had an approx 2m x 7m LED sign as part of it, and that portion cost roughly $500k.

It used the same components that you'd find in the LED billboards alongside highways in the US.

approx $75k with control system for a 5mm pixel pitch. The control system is required for source input mapping/transformation onto the display. Here's footage from 4ft away https://bit.ly/3y5AuhW running at 30fps 60hz.

Let's say: Something that can match LG OLED CX 77 2020 model priced $3,099.99

I'd be happy to pay at the same price without the smart features.

Fun fact: some LG displays use Samsung panels internally and vice-versa

Another fun fact: When Samsung started in 1938, they specialized in trading dried fish. They came into the electronics industry in 1960s.

Don't knock it. Salted, dried fish can be delicious after you fry it with onions and chili peppers :-)

There is the rub, the smart features subsidize the price instead of adding to it as it becomes an expected revenue stream.

You can already get dumb TV, they are often used for signage or other commercial purposes, but they cost a lot more than consumer equipment.

I did not know that.

Is the "smart features" actually making money for the TV manufacturers?

A good question to think about. How can we, as consumers, incentivize the TV manufactures to focus on building good product that actually liked by users, and still making good money.

Very difficult to answer though...

It is quite well know ( mentioned multiples times in this thread and in every other TV discussions for he past years ) the smart features collect data and shows you ads which earn the manufactures a continuous stream of revenue.

They're not more expensive _just_ because of the lack of ads subsidization.

They also generally are just better built. The expected hours of operation and MTBF of the components is generally much higher than consumer displays. Many of the ones I dealt with had metal cases and stronger glass.

They're expected to stand up to much more abuse or often be installed in places where they're inconvenient to service.

If you wanted to build a non-smart panel with the expected lifespan of a typical consumer TV a significant portion of the current cost could likely be cut if it were done at scale.

You can't undercut LG, they control the oled tv market.

Is that something like this: https://displayy.studio/

I remember seeing them on HN a year ago, I assume that they haven't moved that far because COVID etc?

Sure, that use case can easily be satisfied. For digital wall art, we'd need to use a different model LCD panel which has a very small bezel all around (approx. 0.125in)

I meant their IronCast display that's designed to be basically just a display that takes whatever feed you want.

But they don't seem to have updated their info for a year.

What I'd like is a 55" 4K monitor display that is minimal bezel and has a bunch of HDMI inputs and support HDCP etc.

Displays should be to video like speakers are to audio. I can connect multiple sources to speakers without the speakers imposing their own idea of what to do other than make sound.

Yes, that's easily doable. However, unlike consumer grade displays, it's much harder to find dumb controllers with multiple HDMI inputs for industrial displays. A new growing trend in the industrial sector is to move towards dumb controllers having 1x HDMI input and 1x IPTV (ethernet) input. This might fit your requirements as you could easily put the display and your streaming devices on the same VLAN and stream directly to your display.

1 hdmi input is fine for connecting whatever a/v receiver you want to it that can have multiple hdmi inputs and outputs, as well as speakers and audio zones and such. the only problem is now the receiver becomes the privacy/speed bottleneck. i have an older receiver that doesn't require internet, but now receivers are going down the same invasive road as smart tv's. so while i like my current setup, i think the tv would need multiple hdmi inputs to bypass this issue (and not require a receiver).

I did some research for you and multiple HDMI inputs won’t be an issue.

awesome! to be clear, i'd be fine with a single hdmi input since i route everything through my receiver first (which also manages cec and essentially provides a universal remote), but the larger market would want multiple due to receivers having become too "smart" nowadays.

I might be odd, but even the hint at having some form of tuner (or whatever iptv is) could scare me off. A pretty frustrating experience with the LG TV is the prominent placement of broadcast tv features and connector assuming it would be the primary use of the display. No distractions please just dumb hdmi.

> "Designed for the smart-phone generation; we removed all the hassles and added simplicity."

> "This TV has everything you need, to start streaming your favourite content, from your favourite devices."

This sounds like exactly the opposite of what I want. Just give me a dumb display, ffs.

Completely unrelated but this hanging lamp in the second room pictured in the backgrounds on that page looks vaguely creepy to me due to my arachnophobia

A while back it was called ironcast! The rename confused me a bit

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21302825

An interesting product could be a TV with swap-able boards. One could be a simple dumb board with inputs, or you could switch it out for a board with privacy oriented smart features. There could also be a gaming targeted board with more even more power. I don't know much about driving LCD/OLED panels, but maybe it could also be useful for updating specs, like you could just upgrade the board when there's a new HDMI version or HDR standard, or to add hardware acceleration for a new codec.

Search for "Universal LCD TV Controller" or similar, it's sometimes already possible.

The gallery I showcased is already semi-swappable in that sense. You are able to change the driving board out for another board or LVDS compatible PC/RaspPi. However, if I'm understanding what you're saying, I think you mean swapping capability similar to a rackmount server hard-drive. Sure, that can be designed and implemented with some effort...let's say 2-3 weeks time.

That does sound interesting! It's a bit outside my wheelhouse, but I'm looking for a new project. Feel free to send me an email (in bio) if you want to chat about this more.

Dealing with industrial panels for a large fast food chain menu system was pretty enlightening. There was a surprising amount of management and environmental/telemetry information available from the embedded system on the panel.

Based on the application, some manufacturer do create custom controllers that monitor/capture environmental data in order to safeguard the equipment from experiencing catastrophic failure or performing triggered/scheduled reboots, brightness adjustments, etc based on specific events like local temp, fan speed, on-time hours, etc.

These were NEC MultiSync panels and yep, had a fairly rich set of op codes (page 26) - https://assets.sharpnecdisplays.us/documents/usermanuals/ext...

How would one go about contacting you?

My username at gmail

That's very interesting. I wonder if you would consider doing something like the (unicorn) new Google TV devices which have the ability to turn off the smart features entirely - except with Kodi or stock Android for the UI. Heck, even if it was a Smart TV that could run an open-source Android build instead of the proprietary bootloader-locked stuff there'd be a niche for that too.

Yeah, or perhaps build it on Ubuntu Core (their transactional/IOT version of the OS)

Ubuntu actually made a "Ubuntu TV" almost a decade ago that was based on Unity. It never had a TV actually go for sale with it (as far as I know) and the project was abandoned.

Now that you mention it I remember! But Ubuntu core is IMO better suited for this. I find it sad to see it go nowhere (visible to me at least), the value proposition is pretty clear to me, coupled to the snap store and with easy rollback and transactional updates it has all the tech to take it up with Android and WebOS.

Sure. I think it would be best to keep the solution platform agnostic by utilizing an embedded PC and developing a browser based portal (which could work offline as well) for managing playback of various services. With WebRTC in play these days, I'm sure some very interesting solution could be developed.

I think successfully partnering with streaming services might be the tricky bit of a "privacy oriented SmartTV" project? How will you get Amazon, Netflix and Hulu on board?

You might consider talking to PlayOn. They've found a way to record video from streaming services locally and stream encrypted video to DNLA/UPnP devices without encryption for over a decade - despite operating in the US. The Video Stream is only 720p, but it's better than nothing.

With their software, you can record Netflix/Hulu/Peacock/Disney+/Whatever to your computer or stream videos from those services to a Kodi box. They've never been sued from any of these services because of their (interesting) legal argument.

If you could integrate their services or techniques, you wouldn't need any approval from the streaming services.

PlayOn on the PC is on life support at this point it seems. It uses Internet Explorer and may still have dependencies on Flash, though I think that was more a provider dependency.

It's very fragile and almost like they use Selenium or some other automation tester for UI then just screen cap the whole thing. I say this because it breaks frequently when providers change their UI.

Plugins constantly come and go and stop working.

They amount of support required to keep it going is tremendous and they're pushing the cloud as a service to support and maintain it.

If you make this happen consider making them more easily serviceable too. My guess is TVs are a big landfill problem because they are too inexpensive for most people to bother getting repaired.

Personally my ~8-10 y/o Samsung LED has a periodic problem that I’ve been diagnosing with YouTube, it seems like a lot of issues are caused by something simple like loose connectors inside.

Except for the LCD panel itself, everything else (the controller, PSU, wire harnesses, connectors, etc) are already easily serviceable. If you can build a computer, you can service this display.

A big bonus with my industrial design would be that the casing itself is made out of metal and harder to damage than plastic casing of most large format displays.

For your specific case, is that a consumer grade panel? What issues are you having?

Awesome! Yeah it’s a super thin, dumb TV and other than the fact that black shots always revealed some inconsistent lighting on it it’s decent. The recent problem is that once in a while a vertical segment (probably 1/5 or 1/6 of the width of the screen) is discolored and mostly black.

Well, any LCD panel requires 2 things to work: a controller and a power-supply/inverter specifically designed to light up the display LEDs. In consumer grade displays, these components can be 3 different things (ie controller, psu, and inverter) and are fairly cheap to replace. You can generally find them on eBay. The only way to really damage an LCD panel is by dropping it and if that is not the case with your display, you can bring it back to life by identifying which of the 3 components might be bad and replacing it. Don't be scared to get surgical with your display. In the end, you will most likely learn more than you will regret.

If you get weird colours or it's black but fully lit up, then its the TCON board (the LCD controller). These are easy to replace as they're usually on their own board and you can just swap it out for a new one.

If you get the full image but its dark (you can hold a flashlight to the panel to see), then it's the LED strips. You simply take off the panel and replace the strips that are broken (though you should probably just replace them all). Fairly easy to do.

Rarely it could be the PSU that drives the LEDs, but that would usually mean the entire screen is dark.

TVs are actually quite nice to work on. They usually have big circuit boards which are nicely labeled and enough space that you could easily replace a capacitor or two with a soldering iron. :)

My LG display went black. The panel itself was working fine because the logo shows up when it powers up. When I checked online it said it’s the controller. I looked into the cost of replacing it - it was more expensive than the price I paid for the tv itself. Ended up replacing the tv entirely.

I don’t care much about the panel issues - a few dead pixels I can live with and anything worse I’d rather replace it. But everything else should be easily swappable.

Also, I’m assuming you’d at the minimum support HDR and preferably Dolby Vision and Atmos. How easy/hard is that?

I believe that consumer grade displays are inherently designed to be replaced vs serviced whenever they go bad. But, if your mind is wired-up to learn more and tinker with things, you can generally figure out a way to prop it open and fix it yourself. I don't know much about your exact LG model but I am pretty sure you could drive it with another more generic controller off AliExpress.com. What makes consumer grade displays a bit more interesting is that they generally come with the audio component. If that wasn't a big concern, you could easily drive it using another generic controller or an LVDS compatible mini-itx motherboard.

I don't know if this falls in your vision or not, probably not, but I'll say I would pay top-dollar for an Android TV that was veritably privacy focused.

I purchased a Sony TV that runs Android and adore it. I initially purchased it because it was a no-nonsense take on Android with high-rated privacy support. Sadly, over the past year they have begun introducing ads, promotions, and privacy policy readjustments that I don't agree with.

An unlocked Android store would be great value. I can currently sideload Android apps on my TV. I can SSH into it if I want to, run my own server, etc. It has a high powered processor and good RAM so I can even multitask apps in it. I love everything about the TV except the privacy changes.

Anyway, best of luck - I love the idea of dumb/privacy focused TVs :-)

I don't think it'd be that hard. There are these cheap Android chips from China all over the place from companies like Allwinner which can be bought in almost any quantity (even extremely small quantities from an industrial perspective).

You take one of those (which currently have reverse-engineering efforts for drivers ongoing with Sunxi project) and simply run a stock Android AOSP without any code signing. The end user would need to install the Play Store and video wouldn't play above HD for the lack of Hardware-supported DRM, but then you would just model your remote control to work like a Game Controller (which Android supports decently).

Also, further thoughts on this, an example would be the Pine64 series of Boards. They're open source, they've got reverse-engineered drivers coming slowly, they've got Android support already. Basically just take their board, wire the HDMI connector and instead wire that into the TV controller, and you've already got stock Android as long as you can get CEC over HDMI working (for the remote).

> The end user would need to install the Play Store

At that point you're back to square one though right?

Keeping PRIVACY a top priority, my ultimate vision would be to move away from these so called app stores. Considering the current state of things, I know that sounds very unrealistic. However, something inside me still tells me that if you create something of value, they will come!

No no no, stick to your vision!!

½ of these comments asking for AirPlay, the other ½ asking for Android TV or wtf Google is calling it these days. Next someone will want Roku, while someone else wants Amazon, and we’re right back to where we started.

The purity of your idea is in the dumb TV. Don’t put a Raspberry Pi on the back, don’t build a mini-ATX PC in.

5 HDMI ports. Power. That’s it. People can bring their own set top boxes and everyone will be happy.

Exactly. There are probably two groups of people in this thread who are interested in the pitch:

* people who want a completely dumb display with a bunch of inputs, as you say

* people who want a display with some smarts but that is "open", can be "hacked", etc

I totally understand the desire to have more things to hack, but there are already numerous little boxes, pucks, sticks, etc to scratch that itch. What's really missing is a way to get a display that doesn't have any of that at all and also doesn't cost 5x because it's made for commercial entities. (Incidentally, my early research suggests a lot of commercial displays actually have "smart" BS in them already, it's just more targeted at device management than serving content-based ads, so that inflates the cost if I'm not going to use it.)

EDIT: formatting

To be clear, I am ALL for this group below:

* people who want a completely dumb display with a bunch of inputs

This leaves the option to hack it with whatever input device the user sees fit.

I like the idea of one cable to an external box of many inputs that lives in the tv stand.

It separates out the input box from the display (makes it easier to plug things into) and allows just one cable to come from the TV. You can also have a lot more ports this way (8 HDMI?)

Samsung has a TV that implements something like this (of course it has all the rest of the smart crap too that you could nix).

Also this makes it easy to potentially have upgradeable/future input boxes with new ports without having to modify the display.

It's still 'dumb', but I think breaking out the inputs is a better design.

I agree with your vision. Keep it simple, or even better: keep it dumb! ;)

How could they introduce anything if you don't connect the TV to the internet at all?

My Sony OLED smart tv works the same way it did when I got it.

Can it support AirPlay? I hate how AirPlay enabled devices can be so expensive.

you'd have to plug in an AirPlay-capable device, most likely. For a device to support AirPlay natively, you have to sign up to a complex and expensive licensing process with Apple that includes a ton of validation testing.

I was hoping that someone out there has reverse engineered it

Sure, I'd just use a $99 Apple TV for that whenever needed.

edit: I am getting old. AppleTV used to be $99 and it seems prices have gone up a little since. Either way, AppleTV would be my goto method whenever AirPlay is required.

You can't set up an Apple TV without providing a phone number to Apple (because it requires an Apple ID, and Apple IDs require a phone number during setup).

I think OP was concerned about AirPlay which would assume he already has an AppleID. You could setup a Raspberry PI with AirPlay capabilities as well...or, use one of the many SMS receiving sites online to setup a new/private AppleID ;)

This subthread is about avoiding the privacy issues of smart TVs. They're worse with an Apple TV and Apple ID.

Is there a good Raspberry Pi SD image for the Pi 4 that can be used to receive 4k airplay streams and output to HDMI?

I ask because I don't think that is a viable solution compared to the ATV4k.

This looks promising: https://bit.ly/33E4CmS

I think there’s a market for this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26290427

“Make it OLED, dumb TV, instant on, Apple TV box plugs in. Separate box with front facing ports that connects to screen with one cable. A remote designed by someone who thought about it for ten seconds (why do modern TVs have dozens of buttons no one ever uses?).

This entire market is in desperate need of someone to make something decent. The best available option today is LG and it’s still laden with ads and takes a few seconds to boot up.”

I would buy one at least, there’s definitely some low hanging fruit.

I'd probably even lean into it and name the company 'dumb electronics', plus there's a nice sort of symmetry to the word 'dumb' and 'db' would be a decent logo.

I am 100% in on making this. Another recent thread where I chimed in on making something with fewer buttons. I also lament about the latest LG offerings. I even propose ditching a first party remote in favor of just connecting with your favorite one. Why add to the problem of too many remotes by adding yet another one?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26993846

I would love to chat with someone who knows more about the hardware side. How do you get a panel with a "dev kit" where you can load on the copy protection and all the modern stuff needed to play DRM content? I would be up for building a new OS from scratch.

My 2020 Samsung TV remote has only 3 or 4 buttons (I still don’t use it)

Yes thats why I am saying just get rid of these remotes :)

When you finally do make such a TV, you must sell it for more than a smart TV to be taken seriously, and only use the highest quality materials.

The controller in my industrial display accepts serial commands for control and has a fairly simple IR remote you can use as well. For customer application, we developed a simple .NET utility that they use to control approx. 240x individual displays at each facility from a single control room. Knowing that RS232 can be controlled using NodeJS these days, I'm sure more creative solutions can be developed for a personalized remote control.

I'm not sure why TVs still use IR - haven't all other forms of wireless moved past that to much better performing standards that don't require direction or line of sight?

Nobody is pointing their xbox controller at the console.

Cheap IR supply line?

My Roku remote takes several seconds to wake up and connect (over bluetooth?) every time I turn on the TV. It's infuriating. Give me back IR with its line of sight limitations!

It's simple and it works. It's cheap, it's responsive (button presses are responded to instantaneously, all of my game controllers take several seconds to power on and connect before they're useful), it's completely passive when not in use and gives you great battery life, in regular use (i.e., one TV per room) there's no practical issues with pairing or interference.

The only limitation is that you need line of sight to the TV.

Which might be an issue except generally if you're using a TV, you have line of sight to it because... it's a TV and that's its function.

I guess I've had more issues with it.

Line of site is often a pain with things in front of the TV or appliances in TV stands behind a cabinet.

The responsiveness is often slow (granted this is the fault of the TV's UI/software more than it is the fault of the infrared).

Having to point the remote at the TV is annoying - often it doesn't register unless you're sticking your arm out (takes a few tries for me most of the time).

The Xbox controllers work instantly and it doesn't matter what's blocking them. Latency is also low (latency matters in game consoles).

I'm not sure I'm persuaded to IR benefits.

The latency is low once the controller is on and connected. How long does that take? With all of my game controllers (switch, ps3, xbox 360, steam link) it's several seconds.

Latency to register a button press at the other end doesn't really matter for a TV remote unless it goes to extremes. It doesn't matter if you try and turn the volume up and it takes 50ms instead of 10ms. It does matter if that jumps to several seconds.

And since your remote can now travel through walls (and your TV can now receive remote controls through walls!) you now need to worry about security and pairing since there's no longer isolation being provided just by the simple act of having walls. I definitely don't want to try and support my mother in pairing her remote after the batteries need a change every three months.

Have you tried replacing the batteries in your remote? Is your entire room covered in mirrors? It could be something silly like that or maybe that your remote is just terrible. The basic technology has worked for pretty much everyone for decades now without much issue.

I generally just leave my remote sitting on the floor when I'm down there playing with the kid or resting on the arm rest of the chair or something and press buttons on it without picking it up. If it's pointing anywhere within like 60 degrees on either side of my TV whether at the floor or the ceiling it registers every time. This has consistently been my experience across pretty much every TV I've dealt with in 20 years (and I still have a 20 year old LCD TV here I use frequently whose batteries I've replaced maybe 3 times now).

Because an LED to transmit and a photodiode to receive cost essentially $0.00 at volume. The rest is software.

A disconnected roku works well once you fumble around and bypass the mandatory setup then activate HDMI-CEC so Google TV can simply and easily power, unpower, and switch inputs without issue.

The remote is simple enough only containing maybe 6 unused buttons.

Roku has ads built into the UI? I'm also not sure how it meets the qualifications of everything else I listed?

What I find amusing is that I never noticed the ads on my cheap Roku TVs until they were mentioned on HN. I never spend more than a few seconds on the home screen, and that's the only place they appear.

Doesn't Spectre fill basically all of these requirements? For example, this 4k offering on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Sceptre-U550CV-U-Ultra-2160p-60Hz/dp/... There is no smart functionality, just some HDMI ports. I haven't owned one myself, but I plan to when it's time to eventually replace my 10-year-old TV.

I have two tvs from them, bottom of the barrel Black Friday deals and they work great and seem fairly durable (they've both been through a few moves)

It's not OLED, also looks pretty cheap?

I don't want a crappy, cheap, panel with no smart features. I want a premium panel without smart features.

Think like Apple Pro Cinema Display in TV form.

Exactly. That's my biggest struggle with finding a TV these days.

I want to make sure that the networking functionality is what I attached to it, not something built into the TV that I have no way of possibly disabling or removing entirely. With some of the relatively recent PiHole posts, it's become clear that some of these smart TVs are including some level of DNS resolution on their end to get around ad blocking functionality. They'll say it's for ensuring they can always download updates, but it's really for retrieving ads.

I want a display that's going to last longer than 3 years. This is one of my concerns with Spectre displays. I'm not sure of their longevity.

I want that display to have a great picture. I also don't think Spectre displays looked particularly great when I looked at them in the past. Maybe that's changed over time.

Just don't give it your network password, don't connect it to the wifi.

And turn off 99% of the picture enhancement options

Ironic advice given what this post is about :}

I find the easiest way to make the TV dumb is to reject every EULA and ToS I'm presented with. Basic TV functionality can't really be disabled (not without making the device unfit for the purpose it was sold), and any further collection of data would expose the manufacturer to some massive legal liability.

As I commented below in another thread: If the demand is high enough, a custom controller can be developed to match controller on-board Apple Pro XDR while keeping the price point significantly cheaper.

Picked up a few of these, they look fine and work great.

Define a standard form factor for a box that can have attachments to it. (Say approximatly 1 x RPi or 1.5 x RPi), that has a secure modular connector that is fed HDMI IN/OUT, Power, a data bus (Ethernet?), and space so custom connectors can be on the other side. Offer panels with a 'startup' block, and maybe 1 or two others for other devices. Ensure there is enough ventilation for passive/silent cooling.

Set up partners to make custom boxes. Things like SSD's in the same form factor storing media to be shared with other media block devices, (HDMI would be unpopulated), a Roku in the secondary/primary position. DTv Tuners with a Coaxial F-Connector for the antenna, etc.

This "Standard media block" connector could even be retrofit to legacy panels by means of an external box, and one master upstream connector.

Does anything like this exist yet? If not, what would be preventing it?

Existing manufacturers make more by locking their hardware into their platform for ads.

This is not a show-stopper.

You can buy a simple office keyboard for $25, but there is a market for custom mechanical keyboards 10x as expensive.

You can watch YouTube for free, but a lot of people buys the premium subscription to remove ads.

Sam thing here: there may be enough people wanting to buy an ad-free, surveillance-free premium TV with user-inspectable, user-updatable open-source firmware, latest HDMI, and in interface for network boxes to taste. Given that it has a good panel, is well-built, has a minimal but premium look, and the producer offers a modicum of tech support, it can easily be sold for at 150% or even 200% the price of an ad-ridden smart TV from big names.

Such a business can be a good business, even though it won't show hockey-stick growth.

>You can buy a simple office keyboard for $25, but there is a market for custom mechanical keyboards 10x as expensive.

Or 100x even

I have a Sony x90ch, it has no ads, just a thin panel with some content suggestions which we ignore. It may be because I run it through pi-hole but I don't think Sony tvs do ads in general. I had to make to not accept a particular option for a service, don't remember the name, which does tracking. Pretty stock Android from what I can tell.

Compared to what I've been hearing about Samsung and LG it's been rather nice in this respect.

I think the market for this product is very small.

> I would buy one at least

Would you? At 2x the price (based on the last time I bought one of them) for just the panel, plus an apple tv ($200) plus a speaker/soundbar (let's say $500) - and you're not getting an OLED with ARC at that either.

They exist[1]. The pricing is likely out of your budget though.

The included ads, large volumes, and low margins all drive down the cost of consumer displays. Your dream might also end up quite expensive. [1] https://pro.sony/ue_US/products/broadcastpromonitors

I think that's a different product/market? Aren't those displays targeting high end video/movie production that requires perfect color correction? I'd also guess they're marked up a lot given their customer (movie studios/enterprise). They're also small.

I think there's a middle ground 'good enough' panel that's still high end (think like LG E6) that doesn't have the extra crap and where someone has thought through the design elements (input box, remote, industrial design of case).

I'd expect that to be possible for around $5k - maybe that's just not feasible?

As noted elsewhere, broadcast hardware has much higher manufacturing and performance requirements, so it's not an apples-to-apples price comparison.

I'm sure there's a market for $600 (or $1000) TVs that don't have all the "price-lowering" (I'm skeptical) features of $300 TVs.

I mean, maybe the prices of ad-TVs are so low as a loss-leader to get a new advertising vector into your house? Yes, of course TVs already have ads, but they don't have this particular pipeline, one that benefits the manufacturer/brand more than normal OTA ads.

How much is a less-annoying TV worth to people? I'm guessing more than is usually estimated, and at any rate probably pretty close to price+ad revenue of a "consumer display."

The last time I bought a TV, >10 years ago, a high end, but not top of the line quality dumb TV was ~$1000. I'd gladly pay that again, especially if I think it's going to last 12 years or so.

Ironically, they sell those $300 TVs at a profit of about $500, after advertising deals.

Do you have a source for this? Not that I don't believe it but that sounds like a really good deal for them.

Are they really that expensive? I looked up the device that I probably would want, and that would be the 55 inch 4k TV. Searching for a place to buy it revealed this link, that gives a price: https://www.uk.insight.com/en-gb/productinfo/lcd-tvs-and-dis...

It seems pretty reasonable to me. Is there a catch with that device that makes it not appropriate to use as your main TV?

Unlike the broadcast OLED displays, those Bravias use normal LCD panels. They're closer to consumer TVs, but lack the TV tuner for legal reasons.

If you're just using it over HDMI, it would work fine as a main TV. The added brightness would may be appreciated.

The gotcha is that it already runs an outdated version of Android(9.0). Sony consumer TVs that released back then didn't have ads. It was only a later Google update that added ads to the UI.[1] No guarantees these signage displays will be safe if you updated them over the internet.

[1] https://www.rtings.com/tv/tests/ads-in-smart-tv#remove-sony-...

Would this dumb tv support things like eARC and HDMI CEC? It would be nice to buy a TV without the builtin streaming apps (and the inevitable advertising and phoning home that comes along with it), because I prefer to use a separate device like an Apple TV anyway. But there are some useful features in modern TVs that do seem to require the processing power of a smart TV.

I’d buy one

I'd buy one. Is this something you can do like Drop where you take orders and only release if you get enough orders to make it worth while?

I guess you have to deal with bad units and other stuff but just wondering.

I think people will have different ideas of "dumb". For example.

* A TV with only 1 input. If you want more inputs get an external switch etc...

* A TV with no audio. If you want audio use external speakers

* A TV with no remote. With the 2 things above all you need is on an off? And/Or maybe just support whatever the protocol is so that other devices can control it.

Just thinking out loud, I'm sure there's a big disagreement on what's the minimal features.

I could be wrong, but I would imagine most people consider a dumb TV to be exactly how pre-smart TV's worked: Screen, speakers, multiple inputs, and a remote.

I think a survey would be needed to correctly understand definition of a dumb tv. To me, a dumb tv is actually equivalent to a dumb monitor but with a remote and without a tuner or audio IO/speakers.

All that stuff is easy to not use. Anecdotally, everyone I’ve spoken to wants a fully functioning TV that they can plug their own devices into since they’re going to plug an AppleTV/XBox/PlayStation/Roku/Chromecast into it anyways.

If you want to use your own speakers or external video input switcher or whatever then you can still do that, just like you could before, but not including multiple inputs or speakers on a dumb set makes it an incredibly niche product.

The TVs coming out today are great if they just ditched the smart aspect of it.

I just want a display. No speakers please. No buttons or menus to fiddle with to select output.

I like your list. A lot! Yes, possible. We’ve manufactured approx 3000x 70” industrial displays since 2015...since then, we have yet to run into any bad panels. 2 of the panels did get damaged during the handling process but generally, a panel being bad from the factory has never been an issue. I’ll keep monitoring your list for any updates. Thank you!

Sign me up too!

I have a 48" RCA dumb TV from like 10 years ago and I live in perpetual fear of it dying. My list would be: HDMI input and some kind of speaker, although I'd be willing to buy an external speaker if building one in made a bare-bones setup impractical.

Throw up a Patreon or Kickstarter and I'll commit immediately to a set from the first run production.

To you and all the people replying to you: have you actually searched for this already? Sounds like a lot of MOM Test fails in here. For example, [1].

[1] https://helpatmyhome.com/best-non-smart-tv/

MOM test?

Maybe this? https://www.amazon.com/Mom-Test-customers-business-everyone/...

You shouldn't ask your mom about the viability of an idea because she will be biased towards thinking good things about you (and your ideas). Similarly (sort of...), Hacker News will be biased towards wanting your product and not say anything bad about it.

Why does anyone want a smart TV at all or any other device? Almost everyone I know has an old tablet or laptop that they don't use at home. Get a dumb tv / projector (or even a smart tv but don't connect it to your network and use its smart features), plug the old laptop/tablet in using HDMI and use a bluetooth keyboard with a trackpad as a remote. You get everything you want with it - browser to login and watch whatever you want to, much much better experience typing in login/passwords than your tv remote, install whatever adblocks/security software you want. Added bonus, instead of buying another device you'd be using an old laptop/tablet you'd discard otherwise.

I'm 100% in to buy this.

Even better if you can do an OLED copy of this without all of the crap, I'm 150% in:

https://www.crutchfield.com/p_68965CXP/LG-OLED65CXPUA.html?t...

Out of curiosity, how much would such a thing cost?

I'd love a 'dumb' display, but it would be hard for me to justify dropping thousands to have one, when I'm perfectly satisfied just leaving the internet disconnected from my $400 'trash tier' TV.

This isn't knocking the idea, it's a genuine question that also kinda ties into the question of how much money mfgs are making from this privacy invasion.

Grab anyone else in this thread interested, and pitch it to Wyze as a new product division.

Granted, their products aren’t dumb, but they seem to be very consumer and quality focused. I have loved everything they’ve done.

I think I would be interested in a dumb device to plug some Apple TV in.

Would it not be hard to secure licenses for HD-playback for a small player with privacy focus for a smart tv?

One concern on “dumb” though. It’s one thing to skip apps and streaming, but I suppose some smarts are required to support things like upscaling or advanced frame interpolation ( https://blurbusters.com/frame-rate-amplification-technologie... )

Display controller solves that part. If the demand is high enough, a custom controller can be developed to match controller on-board Apple Pro XDR while keeping the price point significantly cheaper.

1) you should have some contact info in your profile so that people can actually contact you.

2) I'll suggest you setup a website with info regarding this with more details and so on, again so that people can get in touch with you, you can measure interest and perhaps even build a few one off TVs for some people to kick start.

Rest will follow..

my apologies. i thought my email was visible in my profile. i updated the about section. thx

i'd be interested in collaborating. I'm a data engineer but familiar with toying with raspberry pi type work as well.

Currently just really frustrated using my roku, which has insanely bad latency and occasionally reboots for no reason.

Take my money!

Seriously, I don't want any screens in my home that don't respect the user.

This means privacy. It also means I don't want any branding. I don't want any logos visible, either on the case or when the screen powers on.

I want the screen to be completely controlled by my Apple TV. It should implement HDMI-CEC or whatever protocol is necessary such that it does not ship with a remote control of its own. (I have had trouble with various displays requiring me to keep their stupid remote control around.)

It should have no visible lights on the case. When the screen is off, I don't want any lights at all distracting me.

How much do I need to pay for this? Every time I ask a genius at an Apple store, they have no idea.

They already exist (I'm sure you probably know about them). About 10 years ago I bought one from Panasonic, essentially a display with swappable input boards, including an embedded PC. No speakers, no legs. I bought it because back then I wanted DVI on my TV.

So, if I buy a so called Smart-TV (not because I like it but because traditional ones are getting harder to find) but don't set up it on my home network so it can't phone home, it could scan around anyway and find other open devices more than willing to participate in my personal data exfiltration? If the Amazon project succeeds, I would expect in a few months most home devices manufacturers, to partner to implement it so they have a way to circumvent users choices.

This.

That move is just one step further in removing control. They now have sealed devices that can have who knows what functions but are confined to the network. Next step is to have a concealed upstream. After that they will somehow get a legal mandate to force such devices on you (like the EU did with cars). Maybe they will use smoke detectors or "emergency" services. In the end, this is exactly like in 1984.

Less 1984 and more Fahrenheit 451. There is no central authority imposing this to exert control on the masses: consumers are imposing it on themselves willingly and industry is just giving them what they want. Juvenal redux.

> consumers are imposing it on themselves willingly

Without reasonable alternative and without consent is like a LEO version of 'willing'.

I never own a tv, I don’t plan to own one ever.

I tossed out my OTA TV in 1992. I've never had Cable TV.

You can buy commercial displays (ie. the ones used for signs). It's worse and more expensive, but it's still an alternative.

TVs without smart features used to be priced like TVs still are now; the one I'm still using cost me something like $300 several years ago.

Those commercial displays are priced for businesses to afford. It's not something the average consumer is going to reasonably buy - especially not lower-income people.

(As an aside, it's fucked that the cheaper devices that low-income people can afford are always the ones with the most surveillance.)

This is similar to saying, if you don't want to be filmed in the street move to a private island. Doesnt solve the problem for most people. Brands don't care about the few exceptions that know their dark side. What they care about is that tens of millions don't.

The existence of "reasonable alternatives" is largely irrelevant. Firefox is a reasonable alternative to Chrome, and yet very few of the people I tell about Chrome's tracking switch - they just don't care. Same for Protonmail/Gmail, iOS/Android, Linux/Windows (yeah, yeah, not everything runs on Windows - nobody I know will even attempt to dual-boot and do what they can on Linux), dumb/smart TVs (yes, reasonable dumb TVs exist - the Spectres, most notably). This is a willingness issue, not a lack of reasonable alternatives, in the majority (not all) of markets.

I don’t remember much backstory in 1984 for how the surveillance state came to be, but I think it’s totally plausible that a government could co-opt this self-imposed setup and use it for 1984-style control.

IIRC there wasn't much backstory on how it came to be other than a war between continents.

It's 1984 and we're the proles

So armed Amazon goons kicking down your door and bringing you to the dungeons of the Ministry of Customer Obsession to be tortured with fake cattle prod knockoffs?

Nope. Much more like this:

You are legally obliged to install a smart meter, smart smoke detector and smart heating control in your home. If you rent, your landlord will install these things. If you own the authorities will inspect the presence and operation of these devices and fine you if you don't comply.

All these devices will be offered by companies like amazon. Coincidentally, amazon lobbyists shape the laws that make these things mandatory.

I don't think they have to make it mandatory, all they have to do is remove all the other choices. Simple to do if you have amazon or google amounts of money. Politicians are surprisingly cheap but they aren't as reliable as narrowing customer choice behind a mask of competition. Once the barrier to entry is lifted sufficiently high the job is done.

Mandatory installation comes 3-5 years after insurance discounts for smart smoke detectors or whatever, to prod the last few hold-outs into "compliance".

"We find that tracking the smoke levels inside a house using the smart fire detectors gives firefighters an early warning system. For the safety of your pets and your children, who may not know how to use 911 or may not have a phone they can reach, and since you don't have a landline they can use, we are requiring all houses to be equipped with a FireProtection 2.0 capable smoke alarm."

I would get worried when the FAANG companies start buying insurance businesses. Since a lot of have "smart speakers" and mobile phones listening to us and whatnot lying about our houses we installed voluntarily, lobbying for something like this seems completely unnecessary.

I really think the fears of government over-reach are something that has receded into the past. We didn't need to be forced into a surveillance society, we willingly paid for and installed it ourselves in exchange for "likes" and "upvotes" and being able to discuss big budget TV shows in real time with our fake internet friends.

Big brother turned out to be our dopamine circuits.

Rural life never looked so good...

> You are legally obliged to install a smart meter, smart smoke detector and smart heating control in your home

If that's all they do, what's the problem here? All three have big and direct positives for everyone ( you, your home, your community) - a smart heating control saves energy ( climate catastrophe incoming, so could be useful), a smart smoke detector can alert the fire department if smoke is ongoing for more than X time, and a smart meter can be used to accurately predict, distribute, reduce and bill energy consumption. And if they all stay in their lane, there aren't many privacy downsides.

Edit: I'd appreciate a response to go with the downvotes and tell me what i'm missing

You're missing the whole concept of choice.

Being forced into something "for your own good" is still being forced, and is anathema to some.

And yet people are generally fine with seat belts, driver's licenses, etc. being "forced" "for your own good" in modern society.

A seat belt isn't capable of spying on you. Pretty sure people would have an issue with "smart" seatbelts that contain microphones and cameras.

Which is why i explicitly qualified that the smart stuff in question should only be smart to do its job ( e.g. a smoke detector to alarm you and the fire department, not to have a microphone and camera to spy on you), like the French smart electric meters, which only report consumption to the utility ans nothing else.

Except even if they can only do that, it's still possible to spy on the consumer's habits through their electricity consumption. What time do they sleep, are they really sick at home or did they they leave town, are they on holiday,...

And since they are connected to the internet, they're vulnerable to hacks, so this information could not only get into the hands of governments and energy companies, but all kinds of random people.

Btw in reality it's much worse than that. Many of the smart smoke detectors have microphones in them, which is a really smart idea. Sometimes companies even "forget" to tell the victims, er... I mean users about it: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/02/googles-nest-securit...

What you are missing is the motivation of the seller. The company is not interested in making your house a safer place and helping you living your life. Instead they want your data. And they want your data to essentially extract more money from you. This setup sees you as an obstacle that needs to be overcome and it is just a short step to sell that data to a third party. And no one, repeat: absolutely fucking no one, that collects your data clandestinely is doing this because they think you would agree with their motives. In the end, they always want to get an advantage over you.

And nobody is talking about a company, the whole premise was that there's a mandate to have a smart meter/smoke detector/etc.; if that were to happen, it isn't a company selling you something for their interest, it's a government telling you to get something for everyone's interest.

E.g. in France the smart electric meters are mandatory ( they don't belong to you but the utility in the first place), and are of a specific type that does nothing but collect electric consumption. I'm sure that if it were left to a private company there'd be a microphone or two just in case, but that really isn't the scenario we're talking about.

Do the amazon knock off cattle prods hurt more or less than genuine ones? Like, do they just not work? Are they just bricks in boxes? Or do they instantly cause death? I’m joking, but I go through this logic each time I regrettably make an amazon purchase: what’s the knock-off failure mode. Vitamins? Heavy metal poisoning. No go. Pens? They don’t write well. Acceptable for amazon purchase.

Time to invest in companies producing faraday's cages for houses.

You jest, but all I'm thinking about is just how unpolluted the 2.4GHz spectrum would be if everybody's house had a built-in Faraday cage, and how nice that would be...

And as long as the faraday cage wasn't in interior walls, wifi would work really well on 2.4 inside your house, with such a nice low noise floor. You'd need it though, since cell service would be rather poor.

Couldn't you have a cell antenna outside of the cage?

My father used a foil as part of insulation and the wifi in that house is amazing.

The fact that you can say this without being hauled off to Room 101 and tortured until you recant proves that this is in fact not exactly like 1984.

Coming soon, YouTube video guides on how to locate the rf ICs on the motherboard of your smart tv, and take a Dremel cutting disk to the section of the PCB that has the copper traces for the antenna.

Don't forget to cut the HDMI Cable too :)

Dystopic cable cutting is weird

Most have a dedicated WiFi board that is separate from everything else.

And then the tv bricks when it can’t access the network for 10 days.

Is this true? The GUI on my smart TV is so slow and laggy, that I planned on getting a Roku and disconnecting it from my network.

Makes me want to sniff the traffic and see what kind of replies it's getting. Maybe just spoof it.

That's what I did with my newer Samsung smart TV. Really would like to just kill the network capabilities of it physically, though.

I know you jest, but a simple x-acto knife will usually do the trick

There is nothing stopping TV manufacturers from putting a 3/4G modem in their products. The billing is likely insignificant compared to the value of the data they can exfiltrate.

Wasn’t the entire point of 5G to reduce the cost so that this dystopian ‘internet of phone home day bypassing all your security controls’?

I figure that this scenario is all but inevitable at this point. Most people just don't care -- and those that do can go live in Faraday cages like weirdos.

Our only recourse at this point are very strict laws that require all devices that do this to periodically and very explicitly state they are doing so, also providing the option to turn the 'feature' off.

The important part then is that failure to comply needs to result in personal liability for retailers, distributors and manufacturers.

That second part is the one that will probably never come true but it is the only thing that would bring any sort of meaningful change.

I disagree... can you honestly tell me that you absolutely require to have an Amazon device? Or a smart TV?

I can understand if they were putting microphones into the electrical sockets when your house was being built... you need to have electricity.

The solution is don't fucking buy the items... when they see a drop in sales, even a few percent, they'll take notice. Or, god forbid, get your old TV repaired!

Mandating that the government steps in is crazy... we're talking about governments that are paid, openly, by lobbyists from these organisations.

This is definitely one of the more naive free market takes I’ve seen recently…

Repair is not always possible.. Consider a TV with a shattered panel. You'll have to depend on the manufacturer to make this party available, which usually they won't because they'd much rather sell you a new one.

I don't think there's anything wrong with government regulations. Yes they listen to lobbies too much but it's a different issue that should also be addressed.

Amazon Sidewalk has a huge radius, so many people's neighbors likely have these devices. So if _any_ of your devices talk to them, you have no control even if you don't have an amazon device.

I own amazon devices (none that have sidewalk) but if my neighbors came to me and told me to remove them for their privacy. I'd probably laugh them to the door. I live in a building with 500 units, and its almost 100% chance that i'm within sidewalk range (I also live near to the alexa office in seattle so there's that too).

Point is: You can't control your neighbors.

Not everyone can afford to or wants to move to the middle of no where such that their neighbors are out of radio distance.

The first part will probably happen in Europe, but I can't imagine it in the USA, the lobby is too strong.

Can't wait for when aluminium foil wrapping your TV is the new normal!

Your comment is less facetious when you realize how many people (including tech-savvy ones like Zuckerberg) put a piece of tape over their laptop cameras. Yet, the industry doesn't care.

queue the need for ifix to show how to remove 5g antennas.

Well there is a cost and the challenge of having to deal with all the various carriers across the world. Wifi is mostly universal.

If Amazon Kindles can do it, it's probably not too hard for the likes of LG, Samsung, or Sony either.

Good point.

They don’t work worldwide though.

I mean, sure, but my TomTom 5000 which I bought like 8 years ago for £200 has a sim card that works worldwide, I've used it all over Europe, briefly in North America and in Martinique, it just has seamless GSM connection wherever you go. If a small satnav manufacter can produce such a device for £200 and clearly afford to pay the subscription fees for nearly a decade(I don't pay anything for having this) then I think it's literally a matter of time until we start seeing this in TVs.

There's a lot of carriers around the world, yes, but they're often "subcontractors" to some of the bigger ones like T-Mobile and Vodafone, which often operate a network covering a whole country. Those are more than happy to offer a long term data contract for purposes like this.

Use tinfoil wallpaper.

No need... the builder used tinfoil-based insulation when they built my house.

But then give it a network.. just no public internet access :)

Shhh the first rule of wifi black holes is that you don’t talk about wifi black holes.

I tried that on my LG tv. The result was a 60 second timeout before I could use the tv when turning it on. I ended up figuring out how to factory reset it and then never set up the wifi. No firmware update, but I don’t care since I only want a dumb monitor.

fwiw you can often update the firmware via USB anyway—not sure about LG specifically but Samsung TVs support this. It's often worth updating the firmware as, like a lot of software these days, it sometimes ships half-broken.

My advice: connect it to a restricted network, where it can successfully ping home and assert internet connectivity, but everything else (except maybe updates or whatever you want to allow) just fails.

A better, more useful approach is to have a DNS server on the home network (something like a pi hole), where all analytics go nowhere, Youtube isn't capable of downloading ads, etc., but you can still use the smart TV features you want. IIRC some TVs have internal DNS servers and only use those, so an ARP spoofing may be also needed.

I thought most TVs overwrote the network dns settings?

“Smart devices” have been trying to phone home for awhile now. I don’t have any stats or research to cite, but my own evidence from reverse-engineering TVs and other IOT devices.

I suspect the business motivation by Amazon is to become the “middleman” between these devices and the manufacture.

Amazon is known to sell the ring data, i suspect this could give amazon more data that they can sell and make more money. It is almost like a mesh tracking in a neighborhood if this is enabled.

I think amazon might be more focused on owning the middleware for smart home devices to improve the features available (compared to say zigbee) and improve the experience... and sell chips to device makers for $$

My answer is a home projector. It’s not 4K but it’s cheap and puts out a great display. It’s also just a projector without any applications or network access.

This is the route i went (though admittedly mostly by accident), unfortunately do have a "smart AV receiver/amp" but the functionality there's too convenient for me to kill all networking.

If i had to buy a TV now I'd avoid a smart one like the plague.

4K projectors are getting cheaper, although some reviews doubt the quality improvement.

Yeah but the instant you plug in a chromecast to watch netflix or disney+ they got you. Blu rays are drying up at an alarming rate, at least it feels that way.

That tracking is limited by account and/or access device. It is not bound to the display. I use a Roku and who knows what data they share with the channel providers, but at this time I doubt they are giving unfettered network access, outside of content request/response, to the channel providers.

I think I can accept the tracking Chromecast does when I stream Netflix through it. I have it behind a remote switch so that Chromecast only gets electricity while I'm watching something, then it just gets switched off again.

Or am I underestimating the tracking Chromecast is doing?

I just got a 65” UHD sceptre brand TV with no smart features at Walmart for $329.

It’s pretty great that such a desirable feature is at the bottom of the barrel

100%. We just got a sceptre from walmart. Stupid big for the price, great picture, and did I mention the low price. Oh, and not one smart feature; just television with various inputs.

I haven't TV shopped in literal decades. It astounded me that there was (a) a market for more advertising on your television via smart features, and (b) seemingly low-end models are the only ones that are available as 'dumb'. Other manufacturers have regular tv's, but they are never available, and cost as much as the smart versions. The whole thing is weird.

Low end TVs also skimp on HDMI ports. I didn't think of this, purchased a cheap LG (with only 2) and then had to buy an HDMI hub. Obviously still cheaper than paying $2-400 more on the TV itself, but next I'm I'll count the ports.

Fun fact - I got the sceptre because it listed 3 HDMI ports. Opened it up, and it has 4. No idea why the difference.

How are they vs. LG OLED panels? Lack of dumb option is what's stopping me from getting a LG :(

Compared to any OLED, they're just as good. A bit bright, but everything else is solid. The speakers are what are often complained about, in that they're small and not that loud. Ours is loud enough that we keep it on 7 (out of like 50? I've never gone above 10) for a room that is 14'x28'.

I'm sold on them for future purchases.

Sceptre picture quality was pretty shit though, last time I checked...

Maybe the future is having some kind of Faraday cage around your devices.

Or maybe even around the house. This might be possible in apartments.

A faraday cage around a TV kind of defeats the point. Although it would improve some films a great deal :-)

I think this has to get sorted out in the wash with regulation. If you collect data about someone, it needs to be treated at HIPPAA levels of paranoia. That just makes so much of this rubbish go away.

It might increase the costs of TVs. Certainly there are many areas of global markets that have incredible deep tech that just are not seeing expected market pricing.

(Off topic but eye-tests. In the UK there are branches dedicated to performing a medical test by post-graduate trained operators, for token cost, just so they can upsell me on expensive frames. I mean I would rather pay for the eye test and buy online.)

Perhaps people will start covering their homes in copper mesh.

Edit: I was wrong. Please disregard this comment. Someone links the comment below. And the sub thread that I remember being removed appears to still be present.

——

I commented the other week about enjoying my LG oled smart tv. Someone mentioned what about the evesdropping. (Which I’m aware of) and it started a small thread of people discussing that. These replies were removed about 24-48 hours later. I found it odd the comments about smart TVs evesdropping were removed. So I’m commenting to bookmark this, and see if this discussion is also removed.

Removed from HN? I have some doubts. It’s not impossible but I don’t think HN’s reputation would survive if they’re removing comments in service to … anyone else.

Edit: this[1] looks like what you’re talking about. Has anything been removed (by HN) from this conversation?

1 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26996739

Thank you! I am going to edit my original comment, but I was completely wrong. I see the conversation that I thought was deleted. My mistake.

I run pihole on my network. I monitored requests made from my tv and blocked the ones to LG one by one.

That’s a great move and I applaud you and also I wonder whether LG would start disabling TVs unable to get their requests through if they noticed a critical mass of them doing that.

“We noticed you’re using an ad-blocker” ...

As well as this, there are simple ways around things like pihole. Such as DNS over HTTP or even just hardcoding IPs as a fallback. I expect these to become more common as usage of pihole and similar methods increase.

They probably wouldn't be allowed to disable the basic functionality of the TV, at least not without marketing it as "online only TV", which wouldn't look good (your internet may fail, or you may want it in a place without internet). LG will disable your "smart features" if you refuse the EULA. But that's actually the optimistic and desired outcome.

The undesirable outcome is that they just hardcode some IPs or DNS in which case PiHole would be of no use. At best you could create a NAT port forward to redirect DNS requests to the PiHole, assuming it's not DoH.

And the worst case scenario is if they build in 5G connection and take the whole connectivity aspect out of your control.

You can fix the hardcoded dns IP addresses.

I just blocked all DNS traffic outside of directed to a dnsmasq container allowing only whitelisted hosts (I just allow netflix on smart tv)

Next step is to block all traffic to IP Addresses that have not been resolved by that. That would fix DoH but it seems overkill for now.

You're right but as I said above:

> they just hardcode some IPs or DNS in which case PiHole would be of no use. At best you could create a NAT port forward to redirect DNS requests to the PiHole, assuming it's not DoH.

The idea is that you'll need more than just a PiHole for all of this which further reduces the pool of people who can pull it off. You have to redirect DNS requests to your own DNS server, and/or block 443/DoH completely, neither of which the PiHole or a regular ISP router can do on their own. At this point if you can you're probably better off blocking all outside connectivity from you TV anyway.

I strongly recommend everyone to just reject any and all EULA screens ever presented. At this point at least legally the manufacturer can no longer legally do much which is why they'll disable almost every smart feature, which is essentially "dumbifying" the TV.

It's much more likely it was removed for some unrelated reason (flamewar, spam, or just a mistake - btw you can email the mods if you think it was a mistake, it seems they're very responsive)

HN is full of discussions on these matters and I've never seen them get removed.

And you can always use Archive.org's Wayback Machine to periodically save the page.

IMO. There should be a market for:

- Dumb panels (not monitors). Perhaps stripped down recycled smart tvs.

- Smart tvs but with user replaceable firmware. Think OpenWRT for TVs. Maybe the same guy who does the dumb panels could sell those but with a raspberry pi in place of the logic board.

Of course a monitor solves these issues but these are normally smaller and more expensive.

"Dumb TVs" would cost more. It's hard to market something that costs more and has what most people would perceive to be fewer features.

They would cost more because post-sale content sales and advertising generate revenue for TV manufacturers, which they use to subsidise the device sale price, because it's such a competitive, low-margin, market.

It isn't hard to market something that costs more and lacks a flaw.

This is why I saw "what most people consider". It's easy to market this to HN but most people don't know or care about this sort of control over their devices.

> It's hard to market something that costs more and has what most people would perceive to be fewer features.

I'd pay for privacy and control.

The other option like I've said is to recycle and mod smart tvs and rewrite their logic so that the user can do wathever he wants. Maybe marketing the modding kits. That would be more akin to those people who install custom open source bios on IBM Thinkpads.

Recycling and modding would be great, but I'd also like to be able to buy a new high-end TV without smart features.

You can, sceptre makes a number of models, all of which have no smart features at all. Aimed for the home market

Thanks for the tip. Sadly it doesn't look like they sell in the UK but for the US market this might be a good option.

> I'd pay for privacy and control.

Then buy a monitor. They have HDMI ports so they can get whatever video feed you need. Some even have speakers.

Monitors are designed to be used closer to your eyes. Probably have more pixel density.

So I believe there would be a huge price gap between a huge 50"+ monitor and a TV that is more expensive because some extra work on software had to be made.

Monitors lack remote controls.

A lot of functions you would use a remote for can be managed by the connected device.

HDMI-CDC (Consumer Device Control)

I, my wife, her parents, as well as the majority of people buying TVs, want a remote.

If you're using a dumb TV (monitor), and a device feeding it (Apple TV, Roku, Firestick, Chromecast), they typically come with a remote which will handle those needs.

I will admit, OTA TV (that is, via an antenna) will be... harder.

I'd rather be protected by regulation than pay more for what I shouldn't have to pay for in the first place.

When was the last time regulation protects anything?

The Security Act of 1934 created the SEC and look at the past 20 or so years and see how many scandals has happened under their watch. All big players. Look at Madoff. Whisper blower after whisper blower to the SEC and what did SEC do? They looked the other way.

You're not engaging in good faith, but I'll offer this: I have not died of botulism thanks to regulation.

Do you seriously need someone to provide a laundry list of all the ways government protects you and your interests? Or are you just being obtuse?

I disagree that it's hard to market. There are plenty of privacy conscious people that would pay extra. I see billboards every day for duckduckgo that advertise their privacy features. I think a privacy focused TV or IOT device would do well.

Privacy is only one angle, a lot of it is about selling you content like TV/Films that can be promoted via the TV. Often goes hand-in-hand with advertising that has privacy issues, but much of the money comes from the consumer not advertisers. That's a more subtle one to market: buy this device that has fewer choices about buying content.

I may be living in my own small little bubble but I don't know anybody shopping for anything because their smart TV showed an ad. Everything ads seem to do is just piss some people off.

Then again I remember that if commercials weren't successful, TV as we know it would not exist. People gobbling up ads and buying stuff because of that is why ads are still being used after all.

After all... https://www.nytimes.com/1981/07/26/arts/will-cable-tv-be-inv...

There's also the factor that whoever owns the platform showing the ads doesn't care whether the ads are effective. So long as your eyeballs are tracking it, they'll get paid anyway.

Only in the sense that restaurateurs don't care if the food is good. If it's selling... sure, they'll keep selling something that sucks. But generally, advertisers aren't quite the fools everyone thinks they are. There are always fools around, but prices tend to be rational enough long term. If ads aren't effective, revenue will dry up eventually.

All that effort to track people for ads... these are all attempts at improving effectiveness.

I don't entirely agree. A better analogy might be that a restaurant's landlord doesn't care if the food is good. I've run into the problem that sellers of adspace will often prefer to work more with customers who have lower conversion rates. Makes perfect sense when you think about it, people with the crappiest products need advertising the most, while the best products can lean on word-of-mouth.

Edit: Come to think of it, the fact a product is advertising at all might come to be seen as a negative signal of value by the public at large.

There are 20 equally good product brands for 99% of things you buy and use everyday. But you have a clear favorite amongst those 20 that you have already chosen to buy and use consistently. And you don't change your preference unless you are repeatedly reminded of those alternatives. This is advertising 101. Then there are products that you don't yet use because you don't yet think you need or want them. And you don't feel you need/want them until you are repeatedly and subtly/overtly "sold" this product.

Please don't act as if you know me. Advertisers don't know me nearly as well as they'd like their bosses to think and neither do you.

Please don't take it personally. I obviously don't know _you_ and the "you" in my sentences isn't referring to you specifically. With that "you", I was referring to the typical user in general.

Fair enough. I intentionally cultivate a preference for novelty which is at odds with that description. Between that and the presumption a lot of the hype around advertising has, I can get defensive around the subject.

Alternatives as well:

- There are things you buy infrequently or on a whim where the options are equally good, and the advertisers just want their product to be the last of the competitions' logos to be associated with a positive feeling. For example, I rarely drink soda, but when I do I'm choosing between Coke and Pepsi with no real brand connection (other than both companies feeding feelings into my brain on occasion). How can I know whether the advertising is some part of what influences me to pick one?

- Products whose function is partially social signalling, where the advertising can serve to establish the signal/brand connection. I care virtually not at all about pickup trucks, but I have a mental connection between Ford and Denis Leary's voice talking about "toughness". Ford pays for all that because you're much more likely to buy an oversized truck for your grocery runs if your community's overriding association with the F150 is "tough" than "small hands".

Your last statement runs contrary to centuries of business evidence. "Build it and they will come" is a myth.

That is only true while people don't know your product exists. Once they know it exists they try to get an unbiased review; advertising can't provide that.

This isn't how regular people think though. When presented with X products, with different features but generally good quality, people choose with their gut. You are an extreme minority if you deviate from this pattern.

Not to mention, most products can't carry themselves by word of mouth. Only a select few. Advertising prevents concentration of mindshare.

I don't think advertisers are dumb. I think they're immoral, unethical, despicable jerks.

for every 10 people like you, one is affected by it and buys something.

economies of scale and all that

>> Everything ads seem to do is just piss some people off.

This is an eternal sentiment. For the more analytical, there are many examples of advertising millions demonstrably doing nothing. Ha, BMW turned off their ads for a year and nothing happened. So and so blew squillions on ill conceived ad campaigns, etc. It's very easy to cherry-pick advertising stories. To bastardize the adage, "half of the advertising tree is always cherries."

And yet, advertising is one of the biggest economic forces of our time... as you say. It literally rivals oil, shipping and other traditional giants. FB & Alphabet are, as businesses, $trn advertising businesses. That's the market proof that advertising does affect your choices.

The simple proof is easily visible to anyone on the advertiser side of the advertiser-consumer relationship. You open an online business. No one shows up. You advertise. People show up. It may or may not be profitable, but the causality is plain. Even without tracking/analytics/snooping... it's a plain fact that many or most customers for many businesses or even whole sectors are attributable to ads.

Consumers only notice that ads piss them off. Advertisers only notice that ads make consumers do stuff. Both are extremely dismissive of the others' intelligence.

To be honest, if it was just "hey, here's this show on Netflix!" or "Try this new streaming platform!" type ads, I could deal. I've never had too much trouble disabling this sort of thing on my Sony TV.

The thing that always worries me is that it's essentially a low end smartphone with a really sweet screen. I still don't know what will happen if the OS/firmware ever gets borked. Will it just fail over to the last input I used, essentially rendering it a monitor? (not the worst thing that could happen)

Or will it just boot up to some error screen and become useless because the "smarts" broke and now I can't use a perfectly good display anymore?

I know a lot of people prefer the ease and convenience, and that's why they sell so well. But I'd always prefer to have the display be the display, and then use whatever box or dongle or PC I choose to provide the content. Those can be swapped and upgraded. The 2014-era smartphone SoC built into the TV can't.

Ads are not primarily about making the user consciously _like_ a product. They are about making the user _know_ a product or brand. Once they are in the mood or need of buying something, product X "feels" vaguely familiar. This is supposed to give them more confidence in the potential purchase.

> I may be living in my own small little bubble but I don't know anybody shopping for anything because their smart TV showed an ad. Everything ads seem to do is just piss some people off.

I don't think you're living in a bubble, but I do think that advertisers will pay for completely ineffective ads. Therefore, Samsung and LG have to compete to make the worse product so they can win the free money these naive advertisers are handing out.

I assume that investors simply won't accept one-time sales as a business model anymore. They want continuous growth with no employees on payroll to grow things. Ads are that. (You can see this everywhere. Apple wants 30% of Spotify subscriptions just for making the iPhone. Games are designed for esports and the associated sponsorships. Amazon wants $99 a year for shipping, rather than $10 on top of each order. Easy money, and people say "yes!!!!" to it all.)

Well, they might cost more, but TV/monitor prices have dropped so much over the past couple of decades that it can't be that much of a deciding factor.

That seems extremely unlikely. The "smart" portion is hundreds of dollars in most TVs. A quick search proves that out:

https://www.cdw.com/product/Samsung-40-Full-HD-Non-Smart-Hos...

https://www.cdw.com/product/samsung-hg40nf690gf-nf690-series...

The bill of materials for the "smart" parts in a smart tv costs less than $20-$30 US. Nothing more than that.

I suppose that the smart part's hardware is below $10, it's not much more advanced than a RPi. OK, $20 if it includes a decent camera for video calls.

But its presence can be sold for a hundred more, because the consumers apparently... want these features? Things like YouTube, Netflix, video calls, etc. And, of course, voice control.

> I suppose that the smart part's hardware is below $10, it's not much more advanced than a RPi. OK, $20 if it includes a decent camera for video calls.

Citation? Because I find that assumption outlandish.

I've watched them replace the control board in my 7 year old Vizio TV, the hardware is significantly better than anything but the highest end current RPi. Dual core cpu, quad core gpu, AC wifi, 8gb of memory, and the ability to push 4k HDR video at 120hz.

You keep saying they're all selling personal data for hundreds of dollars, citation?

My idea is that chips themselves, sold in bulk, are but a fraction of the cost of the complete control board. Assembly and testing easily double the cost. For a consumer device like RPi, also shipping, packaging, and markup add, say, 50% on top.

For a TV manufacturer, most of these costs don't appear because they just need to add a few components to an existing PCB, and add more tests for them.

The other part of costs is licensing and/or development of software, its ongoing maintenance, extended tech support (online, phone), maybe sometimes content deals (a free month of Netflix, or something).

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/blogs/business-blog/2017/02/...

Must be nice to be a corporation so when 6o7 hack into people's computers and wiretap their homes you only pay a fine of $1 per victim.

> You keep saying they're all selling personal data for hundreds of dollars, citation?

Since you are talking about a Vizio tv, here's some straight from their CTO's mouth:

https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/7/18172397/airplay-2-homekit...

"So look, it’s not just about data collection. It’s about post-purchase monetization of the TV.

This is a cutthroat industry. It’s a 6-percent margin industry, right? I mean, you know it’s pretty ruthless. You could say it’s self-inflicted, or you could say there’s a greater strategy going on here, and there is. The greater strategy is I really don’t need to make money off of the TV. I need to cover my cost."

Let's imagine the bill of material is about $30, and that's cheap knowing they have mid to high end embedded SoCs or DSPs being able to move 4K video.

To that price, you also need to add a continuous software development for the OS and some apps (even if they are Open Source, because they need to do at least some modifications). Minor bugs will happen and you would need to solve them.

Also, more complex hardware and software usually equals more complex testing and debugging, and with this more person-hours and a bigger cost. At the end, it might not be $100, but it will be near enough to round it for $100.

To be clear, this is said without having ever worked in a TV manufacturing company, but knowing how this kind of things are made, I think I'm not too far from reality.

That was a part of my point: BOM is not dominating the difference in the price.

No, it's common industry practice that "Smart TVs" (i.e. ones with built in ad tracking) are sold at-or-below cost and companies make up the difference by showing ads.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18905408 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21781481

So, maybe a business model of buying a bunch of smart TVs, pulling off the wifi module and reselling them?

Perhaps better yet, install a switch -- a big red toggle on the rear, with even bigger lettering -- to physically dis- and, if desired, re-connect it?

I think you might be underestimating the cost of developing or licensing smart TV software.

Privacy paradox at work.

People say they cared about privacy and then don’t if it’s more expensive?

There is a huge market for 'dumb panels', under the moniker of 'digital signage'. Nearly every major TV vendor has 'dumb' displays SKUs on offer in many different configs. The only problem is that they aren't always easy to get one's hand on, as they usually are sold through b2b channels instead of consumer-facing retail outlets.

They are oftentimes way more expense, I'm guessing because you aren't subsidizing the cost with your data.

I think the bigger factor is that they are b2b, though certainly selling the crapware helps subsidize the consumer models.

More likely market segmentation- it's a lot easier to sell a panel to a business for $2000 than it is to sell the same panel to a consumer for $500.

There's regular dumb TVs around too, and reasonably priced.

Walmart's site lets you filter for "Smart = N". Sceptre and RCA are the main brands.

For example https://www.walmart.com/ip/RCA-65-Class-4K-Ultra-HD-2160P-LE...

To offer a non-walmart option, I've been using the Rtings table tool to find consumer TVs are potentially more respectful of privacy. Although I get the impression a number of sets aren't captured here (maybe walmart has some listed that Rtings doesn't), they are fairly thorough.

https://www.rtings.com/tv/tools/table/53948

The trouble with looking at a "no ads" rating is that smart TVs can always put more ads in later: https://twitter.com/JobPlas/status/1235537095755739136

You could say "I'm not installing software updates" and be safe from ads as long as you don't need any bugfixes, but then you're also missing out on security updates. If you keep it off the internet maybe you're ok, but your TV might start connecting to a neighbor's wifi to give you more advertising.

And with a smart TV, in addition to ads you may also want to be on the lookout for Automatic Content Recognition: https://www.consumerreports.org/privacy/how-to-turn-off-smar...

I'd be much happier just not having a wifi antenna in my television.

I don't understand - every set listed on that page has a nonzero score for "Smart Features".

No, your average home tv is not designed to run 24/7. These Digital Signage Monitors are supposed to do this. Try running your average costumer tv 24/7 for half a year and see how the color & sharpness is. Also they are repairable (normally).

Sharpness? How does sharpness go down on an LCD panel??

I don't believe for a second that data is subsidizing anything. It's a revenue stream, sure, but prices haven't gone down as data collection went up.

Prices haven't gone down? So before smart TV's were a thing 70" 4K TVs could be had for $650?

That's the usual price drop as these SKUs achieved mass market and got economies of scale.

I worked at a company that was attempting to sell software to consumer electronics manufacturers as per the divx model - some of us remember when you couldn't buy a dvd player without that logo. But when streaming began to replace physical media, I was told that services such as Amazon and Netflix began paying to have their software in the devices. I'm curious whether that's still a revenue source for manufacturers.

This might be out of date now, but 10 years ago I purchased a couple of monitors for a digital display. IIRC the monitors were more expensive because the screen wouldn't "burn" in images if left on the same image for a long period of time.

This is significant. Current OLEDs at full luminance burn in within 100 hours. The problem is mitigated somewhat by the variety of details displayed during typical TV programming, but if you use an OLED TV as a daily driver computer monitor or with a gaming system to play the same games for hours you will notice burn-in quickly.

I have an OLED TV and after thousands of hours of use, sometimes hundreds on a single game, there is no burn-in. However, I do not set the TV to full brightness.

Edit: I suspect an OLED digital sign WOULD burn in though as I imagine that content is much more static and displayed many more hours per day. I just wanted to make the point that I do not fear OLED for common consumer use cases.

Anecdotal but I had burn in on my LG B7 within a year or less of usage. Chrome and windows start menu button in the taskbar.

Its even getting hard to find digital signage that isn't connected at this point. IIRC all the samsung stuff moved to having little fleet management computers some time ago.

https://www.sceptre.com/ has a nice selection of dumb TVs at reasonable prices

There’s a Samsung firmware hacking community: https://forum.samygo.tv/

Maybe finding a line of televisions we could reliably lobotomize would work in the short term (a la Librebooted ThinkPads).

I replaced my TV with an LG 43” 4K monitor which cost AUD$700 (similar price to a TV of the same brand/size here). It’s not quite the 50” my TV was but it’s big enough for my purposes.

It has 4 HDMI inputs and zero smart features. Turns on in under a second, etc. Before that I had a TV that required almost a full minute to start up before I could change AV input or change channel or do anything because it had to load it’s bloated smart crap.

Some years ago SamyGO was started towards replacing TV firmware, not sure how far they got though:

https://www.samygo.tv/

Since most TVs probably run Linux it probably isn't hard, but will have the usual problems of non-mainline drivers, blobs etc.

I've been buying "Sceptre" -brand LCD TVs for use around the house the past several years. They're "dumb" with just a basic remote and basic settings firmware like TVs from a decade or two ago, and they tend to be reasonably priced, and of reasonable quality. Plug a streaming stick or your RPi in the back for your choice of $Streaming_TV service. They now also make units with Android TV built in, but so far they're still making non-smart models as well!

I don't know about OLED and other fancy panels (like Micro LED, QLED, etc.), but for common LCD panels there are plenty of controller available to use them, even with 4K resolution [1]. And panels aren't difficult to find because they are used to repair other television. The problem here is to protect it about dust and dirt, also not having a convenient and easy to use user interface.

IMO the best middle point is buying a LG Smart TV. They have Amazon Prime, Amazon Alexa, Netflix, and other platform installed, but IIRC you can uninstall this apps and you can't use them until you accept the terms and conditions. If you don't accept them you shouldn't worry about them.

I haven't used Wireshark to know if that apps use the network even without using them, but at least isn't the same to some Samsung TV that insert ads in the menus when your TV is connected to the Internet.

[1]: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/33001887592.html

In addition to the privacy benefits, you could potentially build a controller that actually turns on Really Fast. Modern smart TVs just feel slow in every way.

"Smart tvs but with user replaceable firmware" THIS, I've never thought about it before, but I'd definitely pay extra for a TV that has a open firmware for users to replace.

Here's a company that sells dumb panels with a HDMI input and Pi Compute Module attached to them: https://www.distec.de/en/products/monitor-solutions/iot-moni...

I read the wikipedia page on shellcodes a few days ago.

It said the first thing they do is find a way of phoning home.

I had assumed with was happening with Comcast's wifi option already. Manufacturers just have to have credentials and someone nearby to have a comcast network device.

I am starting a startup which builds (stylish) Faraday cages for household appliances!

I know Apple has rejected offering a TV panel, but to offer continuity of privacy into this domain I suspect they still may need to.

I have a smart tv but never signed into my wifi from it, does it still have privacy issues. I use firestick to access netflix etc.

I assume the next versions of the tvs internet connection may be mandatory for it to work.

I think I've already heard of TVs connecting to the available open wifi networks.

Any examples? I recall HN convos discussing this as an eventuality but no examples yet.

If data from TVs is so valuable, manufacturers will just include 5G modem and phone home directly.

This isn’t tech problem. This is legal and regulatory issue.

This is totally plausible and I imagine some manufacturers will try it. Alternatively they can simply make the TV not work unless it has been connected to WiFi...I believe there may already be some sets that do this.

Have a look at big "business monitors" like NEC E657Q [1]. I was able to find some 55, 65, 75" 4K monitors without smart functions. It is probably not THAT bad after all...

[1] https://www.nec-display.com/ap/en_display/e657q/index.html

This is a blatant attempt at using their market power to gain a dominant position in IoT connectivity by creating a parallel Network where Net Neutrality does not apply. If this succeeds, only Amazon approved devices will be allowed on this global Network connecting only to aws provided services thereby establishing a monopoly on non-cellular IoT connectivity. After Apples recent move in the same direction with their „find my“ mesh network of apple devices being used to introduce a whole new mode of operation to support their Air Tags the Question of Net Neutrality has to be extended from just ISPs to Dominant Platforms that have the ability to create derivative Mesh-Networks.

I can't help but feel that this is only a net neutrality issue because we've already given up on letting people freely choose what kind of mesh-networks (if any) their devices get to participate in.

I'm not sure I see how the customer is hurt in this case (or in the case of Apple's AirTags)?

The customer isn't the last say in what is good for a society or economy, if Amazon puts a moat around IoT that's thousands of companies, products, employees, and unknown innovation all either gone completely or sucked up into Amazon.

How does this put a moat around IoT? This is creating a network that didn't previously exist. How does that hurt innovation? If you don't want to be a part of this network you can just... continue what you were doing before. Now at least there is an option.

It's really not that hard. The user loses freedoms because of technology monocultures and Amazons move will further facilitate a whole television market that semi-covertly spies on the user.

It really is that hard. Technology monoculture? This is built on the back of existing networks, which will continue to exist when this new network is online.

Your Smart TV already spies on you. Not sure how this helps.

It's literally the same issue as with zero-rating. It's a new "option", but not having it will mean your product has a massive disadvantage.

So the argument is that we should not make improvements to things because making improvements means someone can build a walled garden?

I’m not sure a parallel can be drawn to the Find My network. That one is purely designed for location tracking in an anonymous way, and does not have the ability to transfer data between devices or any other type of tracking.

Not yet, but it could have in a future generation, or even a future firmware update.

Not really. It’s basically a system to store encrypted coordinates from Bluetooth ids seen. There is no mesh networking capability.

https://www.wired.com/story/apple-find-my-cryptography-bluet...

Anything of that sort would be a completely new, unrelated system.

AirTags come with UWB as well as Bluetooth. There's no real reason why they couldn't pass messages along. Firstly, AirTags that come within reach of one another. An Apple version of Nest could do the same, and would supercharge the FindMy network.

Once these systems are accepted they often get upgraded without significant reconsideration.

You're right but it is pushing their advantage from the phone sector onto another and forcing out their competition in Tile. That sounds to me like monopolistic activity.

Tile can have access to the Find My network, as can others. They chose not to.

In fact literally anyone and anything can use the Find My network if they want. Apple can’t stop “rogue” devices from connecting to it without bricking AirTags.

You can get a sense of the protocol here.

https://github.com/seemoo-lab/openhaystack

Unless Find My supports Tile hardware being able to simultaneously connect to both Find My and Tile's own network by default, this access is a Sophie's choice for Tile:

- If their hardware only connects to Find My, then the Tile network (and Android phones specifically) will have fewer connection points available, making the devices less attractive to Android users who will not have access to Find My.

- If their hardware only connects to the Tile network, then their tracker hardware is less attractive to iOS users, who have the larger Find My network available.

If Tile is able to ship hardware (or adapt their existing hardware) to connect to both networks by default, this sidesteps the issue entirely, since it'll work both with cross-platform hardware and take advantage of the first-party tracking network. And the ability to do so by default is hugely important here: putting something behind a toggle will effectively kill its adoption, and will have knock-on network effects.

As far as I’m aware nothing stops them from doing just that. You’ve got the dynamics right, but the hardware is not the problem, it’s the app.

They want iOS users to download the Tile app instead of using the native Find My. If they don’t, coverage will be severely degraded for Android users as you mention.

The hardware is just a dumb emitter. Fixing this would require either:

1. The Find My api to be available on Android, so phones can track and locate tags

2. Find My on iOS uploads tag data to a third party service of the users’ choice

The latter is absolutely unlikely as it exposes user data defeating all of the privacy guarantees Apple developed. #1 is more likely but still a long shot.

At what point is a business making decisions for its own interest not a problem?

We always criticism big companies for their market position. Where is the line drawn between big enough to be successful but not big enough to be unfair player using existing business to leapfrog into other areas?

It seems we are quick to point a finger but its never qualified. We just think "x is big, x is doing y, x is being unfair."

It becomes unfair when domination in one market allows you to directly affect competitors in another different market.

These are private LANs. They don't own a public network. It will piggyback on your home ISP. I'm pretty sure this is just to simplify IoT network discovery

It will piggyback on any Echo (or compatible product) owner's ISP.

There won't be a monopoly on non-cellular IoT connectivity though. There are a ridiculous number of IoT networks out there whether it's Sigfox or some other LoRaWAN solution and more are being built by the day.

Please don’t support Amazon from creating another network-effect product that creates vendor lock-in, and privacy issues. Convenience should not be the end-all goal, as the ad blatantly states, but instead interoperability and open-protocols.

Convenience is way too alluring for the general public I am afraid. But I completely agree.

> Convenience is way too alluring for the general public

Despite being technically-savvy, and ready to hack away at systems for max configuration; I too prefer convenience for a lot of things. That’s the magic of modern life, you can save time on so many “complicated” things.

Disclaimer: I don’t use Amazon Echo specifically.

For me at some point it became an insight that I don’t always want “faster” or even “simpler” , most things are simple enough already that I don’t need to trade privacy, security, speed or even a nice discount for that latest and greatest product that’s actually just a new sales channel disguised as a product or app.

I feel like you’re making a tangential observation, rather than a direct response to the concept of “convenience” being useful in modern life.

Anyways, could you provide some concrete examples of products where you were able to obtain such privacy and security guarantees with minimal friction?

My blender, cutlery, toilet, dishes, and toilet paper. I did have to disable the smart wipe option on the TP, but it was pretty simple.

I usually research any product where it comes from, who owns it, what is the angle of the company. In a way that is convenience to me nowadays. Recently I bought a 3d app, and I first checked what the company did, how did it treat its customers. What does its actions look like? This is kind of my standard procedure these days.

That why I use an iPhone and windows 10 over androids and Linux. I’ve gone more this way as I have gotten older! Don’t want to mess about.

I'd wager that at face value most of the public wouldn't want their neighbors sharing internet, if only for the liability risk (who wants to find out the hard way their neighbors kid was downloading kiddie porn)

I dont know how i feel about this comment. It's almost as if there's the perception that the general public are a bunch of robots/sheep incapable of making their own decisions. I can sympathize with that perspective but need to draw the line and believe that people have a choice. Perhaps I'm being too naive.

If we look beyond Amazon, Apple has basically built their entire business model under the guise of "convenience." It's so convenient that you never will leave their ecosystem. If/when you attempt to leave, they'll make it so painful that you'll give up in frustration.

Threw out all Echos some years ago. Tired of Alexa not understanding what I wanted.

"Alexa, enable privacy" - "I'm sorry Dave, I am afraid I can't do that"

I generally agree, but on the other hand, from a consumer perspective IoT devices have and continue to be particularly inconvenient. After 15 or so years of IoT devices, what do we have that resembles interoperability or open protocols? Maybe Zigbee? Instead, it seems that each IoT device is a one-off effort by a very small team, and that networking is the part where you cross your fingers, close your eyes, and hold your nose throughout the processes of connecting and diagnosing connectivity issues.

I thought you were describing Bluetooth for a moment.

Why isn’t WPS common in IoT? It should solve the majority of cases for the home.

It's insecure.

There's a lot of problems with WPS: https://www.cyberpunk.rs/brute-force-attack-against-wps-reav...

Thread and CHiP

> After 15 or so years of IoT devices, what do we have that resembles interoperability or open protocols?

Thread is what you are talking about. It's awesome.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thread_(network_protocol)

There are a few companies that have "closed" systems that are nonetheless extremely easy to integrate into something like Home Assistant, or anything else. Lutron, for example, exposes a Telnet port on their (pro) hub that you can connect to and issue plain text commands. Sure, open standards are always better, but I'll take documented local control as a pretty close second.

Lol u kidding bro I need to check my IG notifications!1

> Convenience should not be the end-all goal

For who? Even as a tech savvy person, that is ALL I want. I used to tinker around with home projects, nowadays I want things that work with no fuss. I don't want to play IT support desk for my family, I want their stuff to work.

Convenience is exactly what people want who don't understand technology but want to use it for benefit.

I like some privacy to go with the convenience. I want to watch TV, not the other way round.

You're conflating to separate topics. My desire to have things just work has nothing to do with privacy.

You did just say that convenience is ALL you want... and many of the most convenient tech products these days (e.g. Kindles, Ring doorbells, Facebook, internet-connected TVs, smartphone apps, etc) are not so great for people who value privacy.

If we lived in an world where the most convenient products also protected users' privacy then maybe we wouldn't be having this quibble.

Convenience isn't a goal, per se. It's a by-product of sorts. When things work and are intuitive, they're very convenient. Economically, it can be useful to design many things this way.

A good doorknob is ready-at-hand: it's just about invisible to me until it breaks and, suddenly, it's present and bright in my mind. I've been in the woods and become unsafe: everything around becomes suddenly, viscerally present. That's not a feeling I want often. But individual things I attend to (like watching what I eat or trying to ID a bird by its song) make the world much more colorful, and make me feel more a part of it. Plus, as the comments here suggest, immediate convenience can lead to downstream perils (e.g. in terms of data collection).

It is interesting how stark the reaction to this Vs. Apple's "Find My" network is.

Apple's version adds every iPhone to part of their network. It uses battery AND expensive mobile data even when the owner has no eligible devices, and that isn't considered controversial. But Amazon wants to use data on non-battery/non-pay per transfer lines and this is considered controversial (and an "abuse of their market position").

I'm not really defending Amazon here, but rather pointing out the huge difference in response to exactly the same kind of "hijack your device for our benefit" network. Why is one seemingly ok and the other not?

Amazon does not treat user data privacy as a core value. That means there is no floor to police those who use this network for data privacy.

Beyond that, Apple mobile devices have the most efficient battery / processor compute on the market. Nothing to be said for mobile data use, though I would be interested to see analysis of how much new bandwidth usage results from participation.

Also, I would expect Apple to be much more aggressive in curtailing unnecessary data usage than Amazon would be. That's just a gut check though.

Amazon's user data policy is very similar to Apple. They have more of it because of their reach but they don't sell it.

Having a policy is not the same as a core value.

You are right that Amazon has far more data, including purchasing history and intent (inclusive of grocery for some customers)

Most of the concern shown in this thread is this retroactive ToS change for something that to Amazon Echo.

It is reasonable to have greater concern about a ToS governing this data because it can be combined with other data Amazon collects in its other businesses and is inherently more sensitive.

I do not recall Jeff Bezos going to conferences or sitting for interviews where he puts focus on customer privacy. Whereas practically every major interview Tim Cook gives he speaks to the importance of privacy.

Cook was doing this long before the current dispute with Facebook entered public awareness.

Company culture starts at the top.

I am interested in any debate around how any other consumer products company including Amazon might have led Apple in any of the following areas:

  - Identifying privacy concerns

  - Creating simple interfaces for making choices about sensitive data

  - Offering a platform that consistently enforces the use of newly introduced privacy controls by 3rd party applications

Is this a joke?

Amazon certainly does treat user privacy seriously. When is the last time you have heard of any data leaks from Amazon?

Meanwhile, Apple App store still is littered with apps that violate user privacy. Also, did we already forget about the celebrity photo iCloud leak due to poor authentication?

Every customer purchase made through Amazon that is FBA results in the customer's name and address being made available to a 3rd party.

Often Amazon customers do not realize that their purchases result in this information sharing, and since control of the Buy Box shifts constantly there is no obvious way to be informed about this or choose which businesses to exclude.

It is possible to own the Buy Box for a very personal adult item by selling a product at a loss. This allows the creation of highly targeted list building right now.

This list can be used to identify individuals and to purchase of consumer data covering demographic, psychographic, social media and credit rating.

In this way, Amazon offers virtually anyone the keystone to linking the confirmed purchases of its unwitting customers with the broadest array of private data available.

Regardless of the ToS around this data, I suspect a tangible demonstration of the improper use of this data will occur. When that happens, it will be compared to the way Cambridge Analytica exploited accessible but ToS-protected PII from Facebook.

https://sellercentral.amazon.com/forums/t/as-an-fba-seller-d...

...This is not even close to a "privacy" violation.

When you buy something from a store, they get that information without Amazon in the middle by default (billing address, shipping address, CC info). As a seller, you want this information so you can see who is buying your product and optimize around that, in the same way that as a buyer, you want the most information possible about the product and competing alternatives.

Also, Amazon can and does kick sellers off for abusing data.

Meanwhile, when you buy an iPhone or Macbook, from the moment it gets an internet connection it starts phoning home sending tracking info on you, with no way to disable it. And its absolutely silly to be ok with Apple collecting data but not any other 3d party - from your perspective, Apple is 3d party, and if you trust them with your data despite a history of violations, then you probably don't really care about privacy as much as you think.

"Privacy" is not limited to leaking user data. It's also related to what data you collect, what data you store, and how you use that data for ads.

Amazon is the company that gives cops direct access to all the Ring video cameras scattered across the country right?

> When is the last time you have heard of any data leaks from Amazon?

https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-scooped-up-data-from-its...

One is just for finding devices with an encrypted protocol. Only you and your own air tags communicate.

The Amazon one is creating a network that “any and all devices can use to call home to their manufacturers without wifi”

Pretty stark difference

> and that isn't considered controversial.

Well, to me, it is.

Its just part of the general online narrative that Amazon is "evil", while Apple, who still works with Foxconn in China and did things like have poor authentication on iCloud that cause celebrity photo leaks, goes largely unnoticed.

My guess is that tech people just really like the flashy Macbooks so the bias is present.

Apple's PR efforts are important here but I think the more nuanced take I see on this is that it's currently a competitive advantage for Apple to care about privacy concerns.

No clue if that's true. People should generally assume that if a big corporation is doing anything at all (in America) - it is to make money. They will only "protect you" to the level that it makes them money and they'll be happy to change their business model to something a little more like Google/Facebook for something as simple as a change in leadership.

I'm not sure Apple was as open about advertising how their network functions.

First the battery and "expensive" mobile data used is negligible for an iPhone. The data used for sidewalk is not necessarily but could be. Second, Find my is NOT on by default. You have a choice to enable Find My when you set up the phone. Sidewalk is on by default. Third, the data that the iPhone sends is encrypted end to end and they heavily mention that they can't even read it. Amazon does not mention that, even if it happens to be true. Fourth, sidewalk ALWAYS uses your home network. You mentioned mobile data, at the very least, that's completely separate.

If an Amazon device which supports Sidewalk is hacked, and that device has formed an ad-hoc network with my own Amazon device on my home Wi-Fi, then the attacker is now on my network even though they started on my neighbor’s.

There is literally no comparable possibility with Find My. A random AirTag isn’t using my phone’s network connection to talk to Apple. Instead, my phone is telling Apple that it’s seen this random AirTag.

This isn’t me being an Apple fanboy or an anti-Amazon hater. The two scenarios have nothing in common. If a stranger’s AirTag was hopping onto my Apple network, I’d be furious about that. It’s not how that works though.

I love how insidious Amazon are with their products, get the hardware into their homes then just change what it does to what you want. What you didn't read the EULA in the last update?

The latest Firestick software update is a great example of this. The new UI/UX aggressively de-prioritizes apps from content producers in favor of a "feed" that lets them push their own content and intermediate content producers from their customers. They even go as far as to deliberately hide your saved items/watch next items three levels deep in a menu.

They are not alone in this. Google has switched their UI/UX in the same manner. I haven't used Apple TV in a few years but when I last did they were headed in the same direction. Roku is likely not far behind in doing the same.

Apple has made some moves in that direction, but they have a dedicated button on the remote that takes you directly to your queue (for streaming apps that support Apple's unified queue, which is all the major streamers with the notable exception of Netflix).

That said, their UI for recommendations has gotten worse. You'd get some ML-driven suggestions pulled only from services you've marked as connected and don't need to pay extra to access, but they've pushed that set of recommendations further down the interface over time, offering up a combination of paid content, first-party content, and curated content in the mix as well, with no heed paid to what you already subscribe to.

Even worse, I bought a 4k Firestick about a month ago to replace an aging first-gen Firestick.

I had other things come up and did not unbox it yet.

After the first week, I have begun to receive emails from Amazon urging me to setup the Firestick, at least once per week.

This is the opposite of motivating, Amazon.

Amazon is doing the right thing to ensure a healthy piracy ecosystem

Honestly, one of the side effects of this sort of thing, and the splintering of streaming services into on-line cable bills, is that what used to be hard to find movies and tv episodes are no longer hard to find to add to my home collection. So that's a positive, I guess.

This is one of the reasons why I've always been fascinated by people who claim Amazon has a customer focus. It is impossible to get what you awant from Amazon. If you go to Amazon they are going to make sure you get what they want to give you. You're going to watch the content they make, buy the white label goods they produce and click the adverts they put in front of you. It is the most customer hostile company I've ever seen.

"Customer-focus" means focusing on customer satisfaction.

There are many ways to make a person happy at the point of purchase: price, delivery speed, meeting expectations, etc.

In this manner a casino is also customer-focused.

The sense of "hostile" you're using supposes that customers are satisfied in cases where their long-term interests are being harmed.. and, indeed. This is where governments tend to step in.

The definition of a Trojan horse, except you had to pay for it.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately about the benefits of running software you create on your own (for example a forth kernel is conceptually easy to write and build from there) because of how it contrasts your own wishes for what you want your devices to do vs the company or person whose software you merely use, especially when automatic updates are involved. (Also applies to javascript on web pages vs. plain data/documents which you can view with your own software or at least software that works the way you want it to.)

Absolutely I always seen open source projects as a nice advantage but now I am starting to realise open source is a necessity. If I have access to the code and I hate an update I can roll back or change it. The past 10 years its felt like any new tech you have to just accept as your new over lord or exclude yourself from our technological society, theres no middle ground.

Amazon's just keeping up with the Jones. I.e. when I updated Win10 recently it very un-helpfully installed some new videoconferencing app that can't easily be removed. The only helpful advice from MS is how to hide the app from the taskbar so you no longer notice its there. Such BS!!

I do research on mesh networking, and the response to Sidewalk in the tech community has been pretty discouraging. People have rightly brought up Apple's Find My network as a similar application; companies are leveraging existing, ubiquitous devices to create additional network transport layers. See also, the proliferation and adoption of the Thread protocol.

This doesn't mean we have to use these networks! But this is one of the first, easiest steps to make progress towards ubiquitous, decentralized connectivity. I understand that not everyone trusts Amazon with their private data, but do you trust Verizon or Comcast more? I don't!

If there are multiple, competing standards that offer heterogeneous connectivity options, we'll be (relatively) much closer to resilient, censorship-resistant communication infrastructure than we are now. Like TCP/UDP, there are methods to guard the contents of a message on mesh networks as well.

Finally, for those who think that it would be better to maintain centralized, monopolistic infrastructure and legislate privacy through legal means instead, I would argue that the arc of government is long, and bends toward control & surveillance. If a government is the only barrier between users and total control of information flow, then if that government wavers in their commitment, regaining the previous level of freedom is very difficult without the ability to communicate freely.

Thank you. I'm baffled by how positive the HN community was to AirTags, but not to this...?

And aren't more networks a good thing? Shouldn't there be another competitor here?

Also, I'm not sure where people are getting that Amazon is bad at privacy. Amazon isn't Facebook, nor is it even Google Analytics, nor has it been involved in any user/privacy data scandal I can think of. I mean, most of the criticism of Amazon seems to do with worry that electronics you buy might turn out to be counterfeit... but that has nothing to do with this.

This seems like really cool tech, folks.

That's because there's deceptive language here.

There's lots of details out there about the great lengths Apple has gone to preserve actual privacy with AirTags. AirTags have been designed so nobody, not the random device holder, or even Apple, can ever see any information.

But look at Amazon's language on "privacy" - they basically say "everything is encrypted" which is essentially meaningless for privacy. It's meaningful for _security_.

And that is the difference. There's no evidence that Amazon has actually tried to create a system that respects the user's privacy (including from Amazon). Secure, yes. Private? no.

Plus Apple's model is opt-in by default. "Find My" has always been opt-in. Buying an AirTag is an opt-in decision.

Amazon announced Sidewalk with a "most Echoes and Ring devices that have never had a feature like this before are going to support it opt-out by default in the near future". Even if they had the best intentions that sort of planned roll out isn't a great way to assuage people's privacy fears.

> Also, I'm not sure where people are getting that Amazon is bad at privacy.

Oh, I dunno, profiting from selling law enforcement nearly unrestricted access[1] to their existing IOT offerings as part of what they call "the new neighborhood watch"[2] while also profiting facial recognition offerings (Rekognition) doesn't really give me the impression they're good at privacy. In fact, it makes Google Analytics seem down right charitable in comparison.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/11/19/police-...

[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/08/28/doorbel...

What you claim is completely false. Key quotes from the articles you linked:

> Ring, she added, “does not own or otherwise control users’ videos, and we intentionally designed the Neighbors Portal to ensure that users get to decide whether to voluntarily provide their videos to the police.”

> The user can click to share their Ring videos, review them before sharing, decline or, at the bottom of the email, unsubscribe from future footage-sharing requests.

> Ring says police officers don’t have access to live video feeds and aren’t told which homes use Ring cameras or how homeowners responded unless the users consent.

So, please explain how this is "nearly unrestricted access"?

When it requires the owner to explicitly choose to share their own private video with police on a per-request basis?

To the contrary, it is 100% restricted.

"Police can get your Ring doorbell footage without a warrant, report says"

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/08/police-can-get-y...

Yes. But ONLY if the user VOLUNTARILY shares the footage on a per-incident basis. As the article says explicitly.

Guess what? If the police come to my house and ask me for physical photos and I show them photos out of the kindness of my heart, that's without a warrant too. I'm under no obligation though, and neither is a Ring user.

You're making it sound like police have access to footage without a user's consent, or without consent per individual incident. That's simply FALSE.

From their privacy policy:

We also may disclose personal information about you (1) if we are required to do so by law or legal process (such as a court order or subpoena); (2) to establish, exercise or defend our legal rights; (3) when we believe disclosure is necessary or appropriate to prevent physical or other harm or financial loss; (4) in connection with an investigation of suspected or actual illegal activity; or (5) otherwise with your consent.

https://ring.com/privacy-notice

It says both “by court order” and “to help solve a crime”, separately.

Amazon is within its policy to help the police without a warrant.

I'm not a lawyer so I'm not qualified to interpret what (4) means -- its legal purpose or ramifications.

But Amazon has explicitly and publicly stated they don't share Ring videos with law enforcement without user consent (at least not without a court order), and there have been zero news articles about them doing so.

So your insinuation that Amazon is handing police user videos without consent or warrants continues to be utterly unsubstantiated.

It’s a privacy policy. They could get sued but no one is going to prison for “violating” it.

And I never said they’re actively doing it all over the place.

I said they could and be within the permissions they’ve given themselves.

>And aren't more networks a good thing?

No, the internet and mesh networks like these are both surveilance networks. Increasing the number of options availiable doesn't really do much if the end result is the same. So tell that to your folks.

>Also, I'm not sure where people are getting that Amazon is bad at privacy

I think you should forward all your emails, internet traffic, and transaction history to me. Also install a microphone/tracking device in your house, on your kids and on your pets. Why? Well you don't really gain anything, but it will give you convenient access to my new lineup of time-wasting machines. Don't worry, I haven't had any major user privacy/data scandals so it's cool. But if you don't want to do that, it's fine because your neighbors are part of the program and their devices will snitch to me about your TV/Car/Thermostat. Be seeing you.

The internet isn't a "surveillance network". It's just a network. It's deceptive to just make up terms like that.

Also, what on earth does email or internet traffic have to do with any of this? They use secure protocols in the first place, and they all already rely on large companies like Google and ISP's. And Amazon sure already knows everything I've bought on Amazon.

So I have absolutely no idea what point you're trying to make here.

>The internet isn't a "surveillance network". It's just a network.

I posit that the internet is a surveillance network. Not only because its surveillance is a now primary function, but because it was always designed to be susceptible to various forms of surveillance.

It should be clear to programmers that the flaws in the internet and related protocols are numerous and tied to it's fundamental structure. This webpage discusses a number of them: https://secushare.org/broken-internet .

Additionally, the economic incentives adjacent to the internet and related protocols encourage the use of fingerprinting, as they don't otherwise have a means of dis-incentivising unwanted messages (this manifests itself in spam, denial-of-service attacks, botting, etc.)

>Also, what on earth does email or internet traffic have to do with any of this?

That paragraph was to make fun of the parent comment (crazygringo's) statement: "Also, I'm not sure where people are getting that Amazon is bad at privacy". the parent commenter seemed to suggest that it would be a good idea to share a dangerous amount of information with an organization like amazon simply because they are trustworthy (or rather, simply because they have not been proven to be untrustworthy) despite the fact that they have no incentive or regulation to prevent them from abusing that information in the future.

I joked that if crazygringo was so eager to share his personal information with third parties, then he should share his information with a stranger like me, as I've not yet been exposed for abusing my (non-existent) client's information.

>They use secure protocols in the first place, and they all already rely on large companies like Google and ISP's. And Amazon sure already knows everything I've bought on Amazon.

The fact that you would make a comment like this is unsettling. Think about what you are stating. Email is secure? Secure for whom? How does TLS prevent your email provider from reading your emails? How does it prevent the government from reading your emails? How does TLS help if connections can be downgraded to insecure and broken protocols? How does end-to-end encryption prevent attackers to see what you're doing when they need only know what domains you access? How does public key infrastructure prevent MITM attacks (Hint: it doesn't, it just outsources the problem to certificate authorities)?

The exploitation of the internet and related protocols is not some theoretical tsunami. It is a global flood that is occuring right now a million times a second under authoritatian regimes around the world.

I agree that many of these protocols already rely on large companies such as service providers; The fact that a transaction of information between two parties on the internet requres such a great number of arbitrarily powerful third parties is why we must dismantle the existing infrastructure (and replace it) in order to free ourselves (and future generations).

The age of blind trust will end one way or another.

> Finally, for those who think that it would be better to maintain centralized, monopolistic infrastructure and legislate privacy through legal means instead, I would argue that the arc of government is long, and bends toward control & surveillance.

Right now the arc of private industry is to maintain centralized, monopolistic infrastructure and legislate privacy through even less accessible "councils" and "boards", with the same exact negative implications. That's not any more appealing, and it shouldn't be surprising that people want to use the one avenue available to them (government) to right it. In fact, it's somewhat discouraging when someone is so suspicious of government power, but openly embraces concentrated corporate power. We shouldn't trust any of them - Amazon, Apple, Verizon or AT&T. The government is the one organization we have some level of influence over.

Beautiful. An age-old techno-anarchist pipe dream, mesh networking, co-opted by the biggest of corporations. Note the language used. Users are "neighbors". The network becomes "stronger". You "support community extended coverage benefits".

It's like something straight out of Zero HP Lovecraft's fiction.

I wonder how hard it would be to transform this Amazon network into an independent mesh network, out of Amazon's control.

Seeing as the smart TVs update themselves into submission, one would have to be covert enough not to trigger suspicion before disabling all update mechanisms.

So - Amazon want to use 1/40th of my internet bandwidth.

Along with that goes 1/40th of the electric that the router and broadband modem use.

Then there were the costs for me setting up my own infrastructure with my own money.

At this point, I would expect Amazon to PAY me to use my infrastructure - not get it for free. After all, they won't send parcels to me without me paying for them?

This is a bad BAD idea. It will not garner any access over my network(s).

I would like to give Amazon 0% of my bandwidth. This is a harmful “feature” that the masses will unknowingly eat up and make life harder for everyone else.

My whole life I've been 'Off Narrative'. Don't see any reason to change that now. lol

You can disable the feature.

> Settings --> Account Settings --> Amazon Sidewalk --> disable.

Oh man, your comment is so off narrative. This is their sidewalk, you just live there:

Q: What is Amazon Sidewalk?

A: Amazon Sidewalk is a shared network that helps devices work better. Operated by Amazon at no charge to customers…

Didn’t you read it? They’re operating it, not you and your bespoke investment in quality networking. And they’re generously offering it back to you, so don’t look the gift horse in the mouth to see if there are Trojans hiding in there.

… In the future, Sidewalk will support a range of experiences from using Sidewalk-enabled devices…“

See, no Trojans in this horse yet.

---

// In all seriousness though…

- I’m not alarmed by the content of the release itself, but curious about implications and plans.

- I’m happy we do not see (yet) “eero” listed in the devices.

- I’m curious though, as eero supports Thread, whether they’ll lean into an embrace/extend there, or aim to supplant. Presumably it’s not managed Thread rebranded, as AWS has sometimes done with open projects.

“So, Thread has all of these benefits without the drawbacks. It’s basically a plug-and-play mesh network, separate from your home Wi-Fi. It has excellent range, response time, but with low power usage and really the more devices you add, the better.”

https://www.threadgroup.org/

Tom’s Guide says “similar to Zigbee, Z-Wave, and Thread”:

https://www.tomsguide.com/reference/what-is-amazon-sidewalk

- And I’m curious about the Echo/Alexa propensity to want to “discover” everything in your home and tell them about it — will this relay that discovery through every home within EM range in the block. They did already partner with Tile, suggesting one of several practical reasons Tile may not be choosing to embrace the Find My tech.

Helium (HNT) is a competitor in this space, and does pay out (in their crypto token of course, though it has been doing very well lately). We have one at my house, and it has been making several thousand a month in tokens.

> The maximum bandwidth of a Sidewalk Bridge to the Sidewalk server is 80Kbps, which is about 1/40th of the bandwidth used to stream a typical high definition video. Today, when you share your Bridge’s connection with Sidewalk, total monthly data used by Sidewalk, per account, is capped at 500MB, which is equivalent to streaming about 10 minutes of high definition video.

Seems this is not about guest hotspots or the like, but a separate network for Amazon devices.

Or if you're a TV maker with an agreement with Amazon to use this network, it's enough to send content-based media identification information - which report on what is shown on the screen (whether broadcast, cable, stream or game).

That is cool. My upload is capped at 768kbps, and with overhead it seems to be around 600kbps.

So, 13% of my upload bandwidth would be consumed.

This is a bit disingenuous on their part, equivocating uploading with downloading.

Does each Echo device consume 80kbps, or is that total?

If I had 10 Echo devices, would my internet connection no longer function and become saturated?

I recently changed from 1 gbps fiber to mobile hotspot due to a remote work setup, and … blew through 30GB on the iOS 14.5 and MacOS patch day.*

After that, the flagship Unlimited 5G Verizon hotspot is limited to 600 kbps up or down. (Granted, 600 kbps would have been amazing in 1997 so it’s a good reminder of the mess we web devs have made of bandwidth.)

Presumably they’re figuring people with limited bandwidth don’t use Echo/Alexa? Because it doesn’t seem like they figure that from the materials.

* For anyone running a formerly wired household off a physical hotspot device, I suggest enabling (a) Mac Mini or Macbook to cache and reshare Apple updates to the household, or Windows Update Delivery Optimization, (b) turning off Windows, MacOS/iOS and Xbox updates and running the initial update downloads through a T-Mobile Magenta Max plan on family phones (each phone gets 50GB or 150GB per phone for $10 more), then use the cache or local Network Transfer to propogate to other devices. This keeps the physical hotspot dedicated to normal traffic, not slammed by unexpected OS, app, or game updates.

https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/what-is-content-cac...

https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/set-up-content-cach...

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/windows-update-d...

I have heard these stories.

Worst one, buying 4 hotspots and setting them all to the same ssid and pw, and each week, you only use one of the 4, power off the other 3.

4x transfer increase!

Parent comment is not kidding: it may be both the worst and best option.

Based on extended discussions with Verizon and T-Mobile management (office execs, not store reps or call reps), this appears to be the only reliable option available to a non-enterprise customer.

Well known flat rate unlimited rural internet resellers of "red", "pink", and "blue" categorically stop working after "abuse" with a threshold set below normal usage that would keep a family online despite software updates (even w/o streaming!).

As a large enough enterprise, I could buy a "data pool" for the firm to get zero rated no throttle for our device fleet. When you hear raves from colleagues about Verizon hotspots, they may be enjoying this -- I sure do for legit work use. But this isn't technically ethical for individuals, and the companies won't offer it to an LLC or S-Corp with just a few lines.

So, with VZ, for example, by getting 4 hotspots configured the same and putting them on rotation, you end up spending about the same per month ($240/mo) as an enterprise hotspot, to get sufficient capacity for normal household software and game updates.

That would really only happen if you are in an area with lots of devices connecting to your Echo(s) constantly. In reality, you're gonna see that Sidewalk bandwidth taken sporadically. If you're in a rural area, you'll probably never see any traffic from it.

Well, I live in an incorporated city (population less than 1,600) in a rural area, and right now I am picking up at least 9 ssids from other homes.

I also have a decently trafficked street in front of my home with paved sidewalks on both sides.

TBH the title is a bit misleading. Amazon plans to use your internet for API calls related to its devices, similar to Apple’s Find My network. I’m more curious about the location sharing bit.

sometimes I would love to see an A/B test on HN: swap Amazon and Apple here, call it "Find my Homepod" and see the reactions.

Sure. Same reasons “Jeffrey Dahmer invited me for dinner” hits differently than “Mum invited me for dinner”.

The two companies have a different track record on privacy.

The irony of your response is pretty thick.

You can't just swap the words without changing the analysis of what the resulting sentence means. Yes, the reaction to this is different if it's an Apple product vs. an Amazon product, because the two companies are different.

Two identical companies, one in sheep's clothing.

I can't believe you'd compare a corporation to your mum either.

Why an A/B test? Everything Apple and Tesla does is brilliant, everything anyone else does is evil. Thank me later.

Putting that in the HN FAQ would prevent new users losing karma points.

name one original thing apple has done that is even good, besides the original ipod? even that isn't! original

Seems challenging because we’d need to first agree on the definition of “original”, “done” and “good”.

Also, the original iPod had less space than a Nomad. Lame.

It's not limited to Amazon devices

>Device manufacturers interested in creating devices that work with Amazon Sidewalk can view more information on the Sidewalk Developer Console.

Nor is Find My limited to Apple devices. I think the analogy holds water.

But apples is limited to just the findmy protocol, Amazon’s is whatever the device wants

“Preserving customer privacy and security is foundational to how we’ve built Amazon Sidewalk.“

I love that this is the opening line in two back to back FAQ entries. I'm going to make Alexa read it to me for full effect.

Probably best as I'm sure many will have the word "backdoor" echoing throughout my head reading all that.

Back in the early 1990's, when consumers began setting up the first "home LANs" (wired), who would have imagined that one day most, maybe even all (yikes), of the computers on those networks would be computers that are remotely controlled by third parties. I must admit I never saw this coming.

"Amazon does not charge any fees to join Amazon Sidewalk"

Not to the end customer anyway. To organizations and developers building on top of the APIs...

Completely against this idea though its a shame its not... "Get paid for hosting a network using the devices you purchase from us"*

Lastly, it is a cost albeit negligible to the end user who installs the device (power, bandwidth, etc).

*I know it wouldn't amount to anything but its a interesting way to think about it.

Honestly, the end user should be subsidised for hosting this feature. The fact that Amazon are able to spin this as "we're giving this to you for free" shows how far the tech industry has gone in tricking it's consumers into thinking that they're getting something for nothing.

So when I stand up a botnet controlled by a CnC server its illegal but when Amazon does it its "for the investors". Ffs

Modern televisions have made me wish they were just dumb (as possible) monitors with no software interface. Just select the input, power, volume, brightness etc those things no Roku or other smarts.

Amen. I also wish cars would just have dumb push-button or radial-knob controls vs a smart touchscreens. I'm a big fan of things that simply work and work for a long time.

There’s so many products that fall into this category. Stuff designed several decades ago was often more reliable and easier to fix with simple tools (I’m thinking of Japanese cars in the 90s up to the early 2000s but you can apply it to many products). And now with ‘smart’ products, aka internet of shit, it’s gotten worse. I have a modded iPod classic for this reason, keep a NAS for ripped media, keep a dumb TV as long as it lives, use a bombproof Casio instead of a flaky smartwatch, etc. You don’t have to waste mental cycles by complicating your life with unreliable crap.

I hope the GP succeeds with a Kickstarter or whatever, I’d definitely be in the market for such a TV.

Worked in a tv repair shop back in the mid-90s. We would mostly fix aged soldering or replace dodgy capacitors, but even then newer TVs were getting less and less repairable. Just a transformer, circuit board and CRT.

They shut down not long after I stopped working there as there was nothing left that they could fix.

I miss being able to go into those shops! Nowadays, the closest thing that exists is phone repair shops and they generally don't even know what soldering is. I'm not knocking their business; but something inside me remains irritated knowing that we're more advanced yet we make less reliable/serviceable pieces of equipment.

I'd also love a return to physical controls, but my concern with the touchscreens is actually less to do with durability and more to do with tactility and muscle memory. Before I stopped driving altogether, I had a car with a touchscreen interface. It had more functionality than other cars I'd driven and I appreciated that, but it also felt more dangerous to operate at times. Dedicated buttons for all the controls might have been impractical, but I think they should have at least gone with the older style of having dynamic function, phsyical buttons along the side of the screen.

I think that either style interface has its place and can co-exist with the other. For example, in a car, I would prefer to have physical controls for audio and anything mechanical (ie HVAC, wipers, ON/OFF,etc). However, when it comes to preferential attributes, vehicle/user/passenger related settings or diagnostic data/feedback, I would much rather prefer the touchscreen. This goes for things like instrument panel, monitoring tire pressure, situational awareness (sensors/cams), lights on/off settings, etc.

This is more or less my car.

Volume and tuning are knobs and steering wheel controls. HVAC is all controlled through physical knobs and switches for the heated seats and reported on a small (non-touch) display on top of the dash.

The touchscreen is for maps and more detailed radio/audio controls.

Configuration and preferences are configured through whichever system it's relevant to. Driving settings are configured on a small screen in the gauge cluster. Configuring the small display that shows the time/date and vehicle metrics (boost, tires, etc) is done via a small button near that screen. Configuring the radio/maps/etc is done via the touchscreen with the radio/maps on it.

It sounds kind of complicated in the way I'm describing it, but it's pretty intuitive in practice. "I want to configure that thing" = "Use the buttons on that thing".

Please puts us all onto the make and model of your car. Seems like such capabilities are a rare breed nowadays!

Mine's a 2016 Subaru WRX. Cars101 has posted a lot of photos of the interior: http://www.cars101.com/subaru/wrxsti/wrxsti2016photos2.html

I don't know that it was so much a conscious design choice as that Subaru, as a smaller manufacturer, tends to buy/develop a bunch of disparate systems rather than some single integrated monstrosity. Though looking at interior photos of some of the newer vehicles (Impreza, Forester, etc) they all look to have more or less continued the trend and same general design of still having some basic physical buttons and switches.

And yeah, it's great. Along with having all the pertinent information basically in my line of sight without looking away from the road, I can operate most of the important features of the car without having to look away because they're physical buttons and knobs I can feel for.

I occasionally have to reboot my car’s entertainment system when it says it cant adjust the volume. And every time i start it it turns the audio back on even if i turned it off.

So you want a PC monitor with a remote, right? I've always wondered why this doesn't exist.

Who even needs the remote anymore when devices can be controlled over HDMI?

I think those do exist. :-)

My benq monitor came with a remote. They exist.

I miss when Macbooks came with remotes.

So much discussion about this previously

6 months ago, same page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25196521

TechCrunch article 8 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24565259

TechCrunch article 2 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21073841

Amazon apologizing for Sidewalk 'confusion' 6 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25217233

I wouldn't mind opening up even higher b/w wifi. I've got way more than needed so seed linux distros all day long anyway

...however if someone does something illegal with it that'll still trace back to my IP and police will kick down my door, correct?

Use Tor to proxy those connections.

To proxy someone else’s use of your own network, use which you (generic ‘you’) may not know is happening in the first place because not everyone reads Hacker News or the EULA?

Parent wants to open his network to strangers. He’ll be liable to any traffic they’re sending. So it’s a good idea to anonymise this traffic with Tor.

> however if someone does something illegal with it that'll still trace back to my IP and police will kick down my door, correct?

This is a big concern with all the major "public WIFI" systems like this one and others such as Comcast's Xfinity WiFi and it's pretty much never actually true.

For actual Wi-Fi provided by an ISP, the public network will usually come out of a completely different IP (your modem will internally have 2 IPs, or tunnel the public network's traffic straight into the ISP's infrastructure and it will only talk to the public internet from there with a different IP).

For this one, I'm not sure if this is even IP-based at all and allows access to the internet. Seems like all it allows is to talk to Amazon (using some proprietary protocol) and offers no access to the outside internet anyway.

> Seems like all it allows is to talk to Amazon (using some proprietary protocol)

That seems mostly OK then...

on the contrary, if all the devices do that, then you have plausible deniability. they can no longer pin anything on you because it could be a neighbor or even someone out on the street.

the details depend on the country i guess, but at least in some countries there needs to be evidence that it was you before they can do anything.

there was a case where someone was approached for sharing movies. as soon as the authorities found out that this was an airbnb they backed off because they could no longer pin the act on the owner.

Plausible deniability doesn't actually mean anything unless your highly-paid lawyer (you're rich, right?) can convince the judge. The scenario where some random stranger does an illegal thing on your network by hijacking Amazon's network is a bit far-fetched compared to the most common obvious case (you did it), so you'll have to work hard to convince them that's the actual explanation.

I suppose the data transfers would be just API calls back and forth, as opposed to user content.

Amazon published a whitepaper on Sidewalk's Privacy and Security:

> https://m.media-amazon.com/images/G/01/sidewalk/final_privac...

In a nutshell:

- endpoints (eg, smart bulb) doesn't know much about the gateway (which could belong to your neighbor)

- the gateway doesn't know much about your endpoints.

If you're concerned about privacy, also look at the application of the protocol: Amazon's Ring Security Cameras are meant to be used in a Facebook-Like hobbyist surveillance community:

> https://shop.ring.com/pages/neighbors-public-safety-service

"when you share your Bridge’s connection with Sidewalk, total monthly data used by Sidewalk, per account, is capped at 500MB"

Given that it's US-only, where most internet plans have pretty high caps, it's hard for me to get upset about this. I would have expected my Echoes alone to use more than that during normal monthly operation, playing music, fetching news, etc.

I’d expect data caps to be some of the worst in the US. Poorer countries had their internet infrastructure put in much more recently. That said, I also suspect you can’t just look at mean (average) speed to get a feel for that.

Data caps have little to do with infrastructure as demonstrated this the past year.

My main concern with sharing like this isn't the bandwidth usage, but what happens when someone abuses the connection (downloading/sharing child porn as an example).

I don't want anything to do with it if there's even the slightest chance I'd end up on the hook for someone else's crimes.

My understanding is that you aren’t sharing a general connection to the internet, you’re specifically letting Amazon devices tunnel some data back to Amazon’s parent servers. You’d also likely have a pretty good case against Amazon if using their product as directed caused your trouble with the po po

Ah right, so this is more of service channel that Amazon devices can use to connect Amazon HQ? That's not so bad then, but the headline is pretty click-baity.

Besides the 500MB per month data cap it is also limited to 80kbs.

Or run a spam bot from your IP and get you in trouble with Google.

Or get your ip blackholed on AWS

My concern is less illegal and more about device manufacturers using this to bypass any internet settings I choose (eg to block ads and trackers).

Most countries don't have the concept of caps at all except for cellular connections(for obvious reasons)

I have unlimited 5G for £25pm.

Per there account or per mine? I can rotate MAC address pretty easily

> helps devices like Amazon Echo devices, Ring Security Cams, outdoor lights, motion sensors, and Tile trackers work better at home and beyond the front door.

I hope they inform their customers that filming and recording public spots or other people's houses in Europe requires advertising the presence of CCTV and adhering to data protection laws.

I have a feeling that in the coming years the number of neighbours suing each other for this kind of thing will become more prevalent.

>I hope they inform their customers that filming and recording public spots or other people's houses in Europe requires advertising the presence of CCTV and adhering to data protection laws.

I live in the EU and have a camera on the front of my garage, pointing at the street and partially covering my opposite neighbour's house. I'd like to understand more about which rules I need to adhere to, I was unaware of this. Can you point me towards some resources on the subject?

Here are a few links as a starting point:

https://ico.org.uk/your-data-matters/domestic-cctv-systems-g...

https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=e5486933-1806...

https://www.netatmo.com/en-gb/guides/security/burglary/regul...

Thanks!

It's plain illegal in Switzerland regardless of CCTV signs. Even dashcams are in a gray area where it should technically be illegal but it has never been enforced before a court as far as I know (dashcam are extremely rare here anyway). I wonder how it works for Tesla cars that record their surrounding when parked, maybe they don't have that feature here. Surveillance of public areas is only permited with very good reasons (e.g protecting outdoor ATMs) and must be restricted at the minimum required to serve its purpose.

This looks like a disaster, and looks like a hackers wet dream. Wouldn't be too hard to hack an Echo or another device and essentially create your own portable access point and piggyback off of another persons connection.

you'll have to pay Amazon though

With Apple it's called FindMy, Amazon Sidewalk should be christened FindHer: the cost effective solution for spyware integrators, where liability for misconduct is dispersed down to tiny fly by night stalker ware companies.

And FindThem Gov will be a nice money spinner too.

How does this not violate Comcast (for example) TOS?

Edit: Link to TOS: https://www.xfinity.com/Corporate/Customers/Policies/HighSpe...

This is just the beginning of more pervasive tracking. If my neighbours both have echos, it will be a lot more likely that any products I have can be tracked. As more and more products have cheap lower power tags, even something as cheap as a tin of beans can ultimately tracked.

The FAQ says you can disable it -

If I disable Amazon Sidewalk, will my Sidewalk Bridges still work?

Yes. All of your Sidewalk Bridges will continue to have their original functionality even if you decide to disable Amazon Sidewalk. However, disabling means missing out on Sidewalk’s connectivity and location related benefits. You also will no longer contribute your internet bandwidth to support community extended coverage benefits such as locating pets and valuables with Sidewalk-enabled devices.

Edit: Formatting

I am worried that even if you disable it, it might act as a bridge between two Sidewalk networks. For example, if you and neigbors on both sides of your house have Alexa devices, and you disable Sidewalk on yours, it is still serving as a bridge between your neigbors' devices.

You can flip a setting to enable DNT in a browser too. The sidewalk setting may have more of an effect for now, but that is only a temporary hurdle.

They are using MY echo, MY bandwidth, MY data. Why should I give it to them for free? I am going offline with a raspberry pi picovoice. I get all the functionality of voice control without the sewage that comes with today's internet.

Does this spell the end of any prosecution that relies on tying a router IP address to an identity? Seems like it would be trivial to claim that it was actually an unknown third party, connected via Amazon, that was using the network for "Illegal activity X".

I don't understand how it doesn't turn Amazon Echo owners into ISP against their will, nor how a company can decide to use a customer's resources without consent (data usage/quota/cap, etc., electronic fog, etc.).

There are huge privacy implications but anyone who would be willing to understand that already does not use Echo, Ring, etc.

I would say this is a privacy concern, but they are already echo customers.

Two privacy vulnerabilities are worse than one. If I buy an Echo, I may well be aware what I'm getting into and accept the risk of an always-on voice assistant, but do not want the additional risk of that assistant sharing my Internet connection.

There seems to be no greater hive of scum and villainy in technology than the IoT space. Between security issues, obsolescence by (lack of) firmware updates, and companies curtailing services that make any of this stuff work after a few years the whole thing seems like a shit show that showcases all the worst tendencies in modern tech.

This announcement fits that mold nicely. A "service" where an IoT vendor piggybacks their own mesh-ish network on top of products you bought from them.

Are the ISPs actually okay with this? Ideally Amazon would check who your ISP is and then check if the ISP will allow this type of usage, before just enabling it.

If properly protected I don't see the issue, but it really needs to be opt in. The main issue from my point of view is that companies like Amazon automatically assume that a customer is okay with this, without knowing anything about pricing, security requirement and stability of the customers internet connection.

How is this different from having a wifi access point?

I can imagine there's more than one ISP who'd have something to say about open wifi networks.

BT, the UK’s largest ISP, has this feature (Wi-fi sharing on a separate network) built into the routers or “hubs” it supplies, and on by default.

The benefit for people is that they can get Wi-fi in many places — free for BT customers, and a small fee for others. Note that anonymous access isn’t allowed.

Look for “hub hotspots” here: https://www.btwifi.com/find/

For other ISPs who don’t offer something like this, I don’t think they can stop their customers, the main question around customers offering free Wi-fi to others would focus around liability, I think. Who’s responsible if people do naughty things using your Wi-fi? And will Amazon’s solution help identify a potential bad actor?

>The benefit for people is that they can get Wi-fi in many places — free for BT customers, and a small fee for others.

I subscribed to a BT Openreach broadband product, a few years ago, in personal capacity. The service you are describing is called BT WiFi, after being rebranded. For residential customers, it is enabled by default i.e. an opt-out feature, as you have noted. Once you manage to find a way to disable it, you lose the 'benefits'. I found the feature to be extremely disconcerting, especially relating to a pattern of random parked vehicles and people loitering around residential premises at various times of the day, essentially to leech bandwidth off my connection.

It would seem that the ISP supplied router (HH6) was designed to create a splintered guest/public WiFi over a VPN. Although the matter of anonymity and liability was of great concern. However, I did not pursue it any further, due to numerous red flags, relating to degradation in QoS and security; latency, contention, poor signal, connection logs with dubious entries etc. It felt prudent to cut loose, rather than justify any perceived benefits.

To stay on the point, I am not sure if the Sidewalk branding will travel well long-term, might as well drop the facade and call it: Amazon Shodan.

https://fon.com/bt-wifi-with-fon-rebranding/

On the other hand, putting more a ton of pressure on the ancient broadband infrastructure is great. It's one of the few forcing functions we have to push ISPs into actually improving their service.

Two things bothers me here. It is described as free of charge while you should be paid to provide internet connection and power to consolidate Amazon network’s infrastructure. Second is the risk of the protection being too weak to prevent people other to access your camera, voice recording, wifi… this shortcut seem to mainly benefit Amazon while most of the costs and risks are put on its clients.

I would be curious to know what kind of consumer response Amazon anticipates from this. Are consumer privacy, security and freedom factors that were considered in Amazon's decision making process when developing this product?

I know it's not in the spirit of discussion on Hacker News, however I feel I must just add the rhetorical remark: "Is everyone else concerned yet?"

Mods: be good to get the title changed to something less wildly misleading

No one so far has mentioned the helium network which is similar to this. Interesting amazon is moving into this market.

Tech side: according to https://aws.amazon.com/iot-core/features/ the physical network seems to be implemented using LoRa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LoRa which has a range of up to 10 km in perfect situations (so more likely 1 km in urban environments)

Edit: actually maybe Amazon uses a proprietary version of LoRa: https://enterpriseiotinsights.com/20201208/channels/news/lor...

BT has been doing something similar to their customers in the UK for many years, except with general purpose Wi-Fi (i.e. sharing your home broadband on a second network to third parties that walk by your house for a fee).

Joe Public don’t care as long as the Netflix works, but he probably doesn’t know either.

Yeah, I thought they'd stopped doing this, but it appears they've simply removed the option to disable it from the admin screen, presumably keeping it on in the background.

Christ, I loathe BT.

- ed

turns out you can turn it off, but have to log into your BT account, rather than direct from the router.

Unless it errors out on the website, and customer support give you the run around until you go away, because why else make you jump through so many hoops?

They’re utterly horrid, but that’s monopolies for you.

Hopefully we can get Virgin in my area someday.

Every day these companies make RMS look less and less crazy.

I am sure they will build that sidewalk stack into every possible device they can. It’s going to be a terrible thing given how Amazon has no scruples about surveillance and tracking. It will happily build back doors into this to sell to law enforcement too.

Do you want another security disaster? Because this is how you get another security disaster.

I really, utterly and completely, fucking hate this.

This leads to a question. How many other smart device things have a created a mesh network without the owner knowing? Is there a way to detect such networks? I'm actually giving Amazon a break here because at least they are announcing it.

You can always scan your local radio spectrum. Wifi devices generally operate on known and documented frequencies.

If there’s a way to filter out the analytics traffic and connections routed through the Echo after the router but before the connection to the modem/ont, this would be a good opportunity to build a simple device which blackholes this traffic. I’m thinking of a device that you simply connect between your home router and the connection to the isp. We all here can probably figure out a technical solution that works for us, but is not easy for the average person. I’m imagining a turn key device for the average person who is concerned with their privacy and doesn’t want the whole world using their internet connection.

This will probably end up breaking the device.

Probably. Yet, the solution parent pointed out as an opportunity will -- probably -- try everything not to.

I'm using my neighbor's wifi (with his consent). It feels silly that every apartment in a building has its own wifi, I can receive at least 8 wifi networks from my laptop

There are very legitimate reasons for not sharing networks, eg: security, not having latency/throughput issues when others are using the network.

And personally I would need a wired connection anyway, so having a wifi network built in to the network switch isn't really a big deal, since the fiber is to the apartment.

I can already see how this plays out...

Police/Authority: You used the internet to access XXX site You: No, it was the other guy using the wireless...

There are also very legit reasons for sharing networks - the cost of sharing a connection is much less than everyone having their own connection.

Two community-owned wifi connections are more reliable than one individually-owned cabled connection.

ISPs have lobbied for everyone to stop sharing their own connections by over-stating the risks (rather than mitigating them), enabling password protection by default, and allowing risk to the owner to be encoded in law.

And yet, ISPs are now taking some part of each connection for themselves. That's a problem.

We could instead share our connections in a community-owned way.

Yes I know, my father is a doctor, and he's required to own his own and private internet access. But in general, vast majority of cases we don't have those requirements, nor need exceptional speed

i feel the same and would like to see buildings get connected as a whole paid by part of the utility billing or similar. something akin to how central heating is paid for.

That page is so Orwellian... it says "Peace of mind" with an image of a video surveillance camera, ensuring that you never have peace of mind as you are always watched.

"Customers with a Sidewalk Bridge (today, many Echo devices, Ring Floodlight Cams and Ring Spotlight Cams) can contribute a small portion of their internet bandwidth, which is pooled together to create a shared network that benefits all Sidewalk-enabled devices in a community."

If only this logic applied elsewhere

(Citizens) with a (paying job) can contribute a small portion of their (paycheck), which is pooled together to create a shared (infrastructure) that benefits all (citizens) in a community.

Is there some region lock/localisation happening here? I just see a product category "sidewalk bridges" which basically lists 4th gen Echos, but nothing else?

Joke's on them, my closest neighbor is a quarter mile away.

Because shared networks have never been a security issue...

This could present an opportunity! Similar to what used to be a traveling TV repairman. Tubes were before my time, but I imagine a person who used to replace tubes in the TV.

Instead of fixing smart TVs, this "repairman" would go around with a hot air rework station and unsolder wifi chips from working smart TVs.

If I had a TV I would unsolder the wifi chip. Maybe even easier -- just cut the antenna traces on the PCB.

What is up with Amazon being a multi-billion dollar company, yet serving extremely low-quality JPEGs for this marketing page? It looks so cheap.

I'm imagining someone building a utility looking box that can be stuck in apartment complex gardens or in the gardens of office complexes that has some dummy wifi that captures this exfiltration for its own means. If they want to be really sneaky they could put distance between themselves and the fake utility box using a LoRa bridge.

there was another thread where people were like "gamedevs make less money because they're exploited nincompoops and don't know how to negotiate" or other i-am-an-alien-studying-humanity-at-a-distance comments like "the game industry somehow is able to pay people less, because people for some reason want to do that work" and talking about how much more FAANG jobs pay as if it is news to people that don't work for those companies but the reality is

the big tech companies are evil and they have to pay a lot because 95% of people know that they are evil and refuse to work for them for anything less than a small fortune, and if you can't see that the FAANG companies are all bad for society, you are in the 5%, so congratulations on being so detached from humanity that you are unaware of the damage your labor is doing to society.

Interesting to see Tile on the list of devices. Tile is in a rough spot since Apple launched their product that is exactly the same but with a better network, better integration and better fine accuracy. Give me a sliver of hope for their future. Tile is doomed if this initiative fails.

Banks should be being more like Amazon. Send everyone a free $5 gift card. Then convert all those cards automatically into credit cards after three months.

Amazon should be more like banks. Gamify the experience and entice users into your program with rewards, points or "miles".

If you want to disable Sidewalk, here's a quick Tweet I wrote back in November:

https://twitter.com/jxxf/status/1332684843331825665?s=19

Keeps returning "Something went wrong. Try reloading."

Weird, I don't even see the Sidewalk option in Account Settings

EDIT: looks like my Echo is too old to be compatible. Lucky I guess!

If I read the disable FAQ correctly, then even if you disable it, the bridge would still work. So your device would still contribute to the network, you just won't be a part of it.

Given that, I am not sure if its any use to disable sidewalk, since your network is still being shared.

The disable FAQ:

> If I disable Amazon Sidewalk, will my Sidewalk Bridges still work? Yes. All of your Sidewalk Bridges will continue to have their original functionality even if you decide to disable Amazon Sidewalk. However, disabling means missing out on Sidewalk’s connectivity and location related benefits. You also will no longer contribute your internet bandwidth to support community extended coverage benefits such as locating pets and valuables with Sidewalk-enabled devices.

This is worded confusingly. What this means is that you _won't_ contribute any bandwidth, but your (say) Echo is still otherwise an Echo.

I've flagged this on two counts (I don't like flagging stuff):

1. The website linked is just an advert.

2. The title is completely editorialised, regardless.

Not that I think it should be taken down, now there's discussion but it seems poor form as a submission especially on the title.

I am pretty sure this is not allowed in the TOS a homeowner signs with their ISP.....

For $50 Billion Dollars: "What is a global mesh surveillance network?"

Why does Amazon only seem to be able to invent dystopian products? This, Ring, those package delivering drones, Amazon partnering with landlords to put Echos in rental apartments, etc. Why?

What would be a utopian product that would fit into their ecosystem and benefit from their moat?

They used to be such a wonderful bookstore.

The Panoptikon as a product.

It's almost comical how blatant it is scifi villainy.

This reminded me too much of the time Comcast tried to turn customer routers into public wifi APs. Amazon creeps me out enough, Sidewalk is something I quickly disabled.

Here in the UK I know that at least BT broadband modems set up a public Wifi, which is segregated from you own but uses you VDSL link for backhaul.

It looks like this is the same thing.

Sadly not the same thing. This is using bandwidth from YOUR network.

And besides, you can disable the BT 'sharing' capability. May not be so easy with an Echo in the house...

> Sadly not the same thing. This is using bandwidth from YOUR network.

Ah yes, this is from the Echo so the traffic will go over your own Wifi.

BT also uses your bandwidth but it is the one over VDSL.

Is there such a thing as LineageOS for SmartTVs?

Could that be a way to prevent sneaky services from pushing information you don't want out of your TV?

I just read the corporate memphis article, and oh look... Amazon is also using the style right here.

All I can do is sigh, and hope for a brighter future.

I wonder how this dragnet could be disrupted.

Xfinity routers seem to do this. I wonder how many of my less technical neighbors realize I can get on their internet?

A key difference seems to be that Xfinity/Comcast doesn't count that usage against your bandwidth cap and your monthly data cap. Whereas Apple's AirTags and Amazon Sidewalk use your gateway, your ISPs or mobile data providers will charge your for it and/or count it against your caps

I don't know about anyone else, but I'm starting to think maybe tech isn't going to save us after ..

It could, but not in the hands of money.

Agree! We need to regulate markets to prevent FAANG domination.

Why is everyone talking about televisions here? I don't see any mention in the announcement about smart TVs.

Because TVs are smart home Trojan horses. The other IoT stuff you can avoid because they’re totally new categories of thing (smart locks, smart speakers) but TVs are bog standard devices that get creepier every generation. Sidewalk makes opting out of the creep factor harder.

Is Sidewalk included with TVs?

Not yet. But there isn’t any reason why it won’t soon. Alexa is on TVs, after all.

Basically xfinitywifi for Amazon products

“ Don’t think you need Amazon Sidewalk? No worries. You can update this anytime from the Ring or Alexa mobile apps.”

Rotflmao

announced clearly in 2019

https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/devices/introducing-amazon-...

I mean seemed clear what it was from the announcement back then

Is there anyway to opt out of this?

Yes, but it is opt-in by default.

Yeah, don't buy a fucking Alexa.

Just to be clear, I can avoid this by not purchasing devices like the Echo or Ring, right?

I think it's a neat idea, but I don't like the precedence of "Ring" devices sharing video with law enforcement in a way that doesn't require warrants, or deleting the video after some time period, etc. I guess I'll disable this on my network since I don't want to aid that process.

Wouldn't this go against some ISPs TOS about reselling or sharing a connection?

Hell. No.

I foresee a market for new home builds being tempest shielded

"SIDEWALK is currently in invitation only preview."

reminds me of fon.com

Is Tile now a Prime acquisition target of Amazon?

Time for the regulators to step in on this one.

Did anyone ask the lawyers about this one before they committed to this idea? I do not want a situation where individuals can have search warrants issued to Amazon who as a network provider can scan/canvas an entire neighborhood for a suspected crime. Encryption doesn't really cover the fact that it creates a universal backdoor to private networks that work with Amazon products. Just because they claim customer privacy does not insulate them from being served a legal order to produce records/provide access. This feels like a compute crime law nightmare.

"Amazon Surveillance"

Hi, where Amazon, providing services no one asked for and stretching our Internet security even thinner!

If you shared your bandwidth with 8 neighbours, you’d have 8x the peak bandwidth.

Instead of 100Mbps you’d have 100MBps.

What a colossal shitstorm.

whose tech are they repackaging this time?

NO.

free wifi right on

Didn't you see the part where it's been designed to protect your privacy?

It's only there to make sure all the cameras and internet microphones around your neighborhood stay live. You know, to protect your privacy.

“Encryption”

Military grade.

FIPS for days

With back doors

Multiple layers.

(Actual quote from the linked page.)

Without blockchain it's a no-go

None of that actually refutes the parent commentators concerns though. That's what its designed for sure, but his concern is what if it is taken further down the road? It's a speculative question sure, but there is nothing wrong with asking it.

Parent comment was tongue in cheek.

Well I apparently have not drank enough coffee this morning.

Don't worry, when Amazon has fully rolled out Sidewalk it'll be able to prompt you through an Amazon Alexa somewhere nearby that you need another coffee, and would you like to have some delivered.

Not only that, it could shift coffee futures and brand market share by manipulating coffee drinking sentiment. And adjust your insurance premium based on consumption, stress markers in your voice and activity pattern, etc.

> Didn't you see the part where it's been designed to protect your privacy?

I'm probably getting wooshed, but this claim is just hard to believe coming from any company headquartered north of Antartica. No special gripe against Amazon, it's just the default assumption anyone should make these days.

Yeah, the privacy section only mentioned 'encryption,' nothing about personal data or data collection.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27116416.

Just out of curiosity, when do you do that?

There's probably at least three different kinds of when we do this: (1) when a subthread is off topic but the parent comment isn't; (2) when a subthread is a step into flamewar or into more generic discussion, or otherwise breaks the site guidelines; (3) when a comment was posted as a child but isn't replying to anything specific in the parent—this happens a lot, especially when the original parent is the top comment at the time.

Edit: oh also (4) when a subthread is particularly good and on-topic and there's some problem with the parent (e.g. it's downvoted or downweighted) that is preventing the good subthread from getting the attention it deserves.

Edit: oh, also (5) when a subthread is extremely top-heavy and we're trying to prune it to make the tree more balanced.

Often I'll post "We detached this subthread" (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...), but not always. Especially if it's a #3.

This is a corporate take over of the fabric of society. It's sickening that our social fabric is mediated by a giant monopoly. We need a municipal alternative.

This title (HN) is misleading. Amazon Sidewalk is opt-in and can be configured in your Alexa App.

They're enabling it by default, it is not opt-in it is opt-out.

Some skiddie will have a lot of fun hacking the entire neighborhood :-)

Um... you what mate?

I think that's great. Unless you have a shitty internet connection with data caps it should not be an issue.

On a more fundamental note, I think it's pretty ridiculous that every apartment in the building I live in runs its own wifi network, screaming at the top of its lungs to be heard in the noise.

Powerline is your friend

Well, having a bathroom in each apartment could also be seen as a total waste of space and water, just as wifi is, but there are good reasons why people prefer having their own reserved resources and privacy - in both cases.

You can have private networks and multiple access points within the same wifi channel.

Sure, but good luck explaining that to everyone in my apartment building.

You do realize that wifi uses a shared medium and each network only lets one device send at once? If one device is transmitting then all other devices must cease transmitting or they interfere with the radio signals. Having more 5Ghz short range networks is a good thing.

It's the same thing with 5G. More cells, less range.

Should Amazon be paying for use of customer bandwidth?

How about some kind of 'proof of sharing' crypto credit system? I like the idea of a shared mesh, I am not keen on this being proprietary.

There are a few companies trying it, I watched a podcast where one developer in New York had this one: https://www.helium.com/

Thanks, surprised to see so many downvotes on an idea, I expect more of HN.

Good god this title editorializing is atrocious. For those who don't read the articles and only go for the comments... Amazon plans to use Echo devices as some sort of local, extremely low-bandwidth (80 Kbps) gateway for IoT communication. Not some sort of "internet sharing" in a "this is a wifi hotspot" way.

It's a real shame that human selfishness means everyone has to have their own mini WiFi point rather than all sharing.

I wish the 2.4Ghz band had some kind of "at least half the bandwidth of any network connection over 2.4Ghz must be available for use by any member of the public, for free".

That would effectively be the licensing cost for your use of the WiFi band - you use up bandwidth in 2.4Ghz, but provide for free bandwidth to the internet for other people to use.

The problem is that when you share your internet with a neighbour partaking in illegal activities, you may get yourself in trouble.

Not true, see the link in my sibling comment.

>> Not true, see the link in my sibling comment.

Only "not true" if there is some evidence it is not true. I looked at the sibling link and found this:

>> Will opening my network make me liable for others' illegal actions? +

>> This one is a bit more complicated, but the short answer is, "We don't think so." Click here to find out more.

"dont think so" is not convincing. Also not convincing is the broken link on the "Click here to find out more."

I dont think this should be treated lightly -- there is no reason to assume that openly sharing an internet connection is safe given the consequences of illegal use.

The broken page is inlined, scroll down to "Myths and Facts: Running Open Wireless and liability for what others do"

That problem is of our own making by giving the government the power to assume IP Location == Probable cause.

That problem is easily solved (in the US at least) by enacting more stringent 4th amendment protections for people and more properly limiting the governments police powers. This should be done anyway regardless of the proposed suggestions about public wifi

I ran an OpenWireless guest network for a while when I lived in Colorado with no adverse effects. https://www.eff.org/pages/openwirelessorg

Yeah but wifi's not only used for the internet - would've exactly want everybody accessing everybody's stuff (printers, webcams, NAS, etc)

Obviously there are solutions to that but a layperson won't manage it

Well if the law required each AP provide half the bandwidth for public use, you can bet every AP would have firewalling built in and a public/private split.

Just like the LTE network typically has firewalling between users, and stories of peoples phones being hacked via LTE are very rare.

I see a lot of legitimate concerns being voiced here about this being a propriety network.

It’s also a massive innovation, almost, wow the future is so cool kind of innovation.

Why this reaction to focus on all the nightmare scenarios instead of a sense of appreciation, awe even, that a new thing has been invented and is being deployed?

This is how we move technology forward. Sometimes it is open source, but often it is driven by a large company.

I would love it if the internet in general was more mesh. I would love it if my internet provider going down when I’m out of town didn’t equal my security system being rendered useless.

I think it’s possible to keep an eye on the dystopian nightmare scenarios without being knee jerk anti-progress.

Just give me the technology without all the anti-consumer cruft that companies love to bundle it with.

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