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Comment by mgr86 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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.

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