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Comment by ollien | Hacker News Reader

I recently bought a TCL TV specifically because I trust Roku to maintain their software more than someone like Samsung. The ads drive me insane, even if they're relatively unobtrusive. At least in that case the TV was much cheaper (~$500 for a 55" TV)

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Roku watches what you are watching and shares that data with their trusted partners. Same as Android TV (whatever it's called now) and Amazon Fire.

AFAIK, the only mainstream streaming device that doesn't do this is Apple TV.

That doesn't surprise me at all. I just also know Roku has been around forever, so I trust that if a new service is added, it will be there. I don't know that I can say the same about other manufacturers (not that they _don't_, I just don't have the same level of trust there).

Eventually it should be there. For example, it took a long time for HBOMax to make it to Roku because they couldn't agree on how much of a cut of the subscription fees Roku should get.

This is called ACR and you can disable it in settings. The FTC sued Vizio when they added it to their TVs without a way to turn it off.

You can block them talking back to the mothership using Pi-Hole or PFBlockerNG.

I got screwed by Sony for a smart TV that was abandoned within a year. Then none of the streaming sticks worked on it due to HDCP compability issues.

In the end I bought a broken Samsung 32" 1080p mostly dumb TV on ebay for £0.99, fixed it (power supply capacitor problem) and steal all my content and ship it on USB sticks to the TV which will quite happily play h264 / mp3 encoded stuff.

Fuck the whole industry.

This can be disabled in the setup/settings

I read some other thread on here some time ago that talked about the option of using a Pi-hole (or so?) to block smart TV ads.

Some TV manufacturers have gotten wise to this (sigh) and started hard-coding their DNS lookup IPs.

I remember having to set up a firewall rule to drop or reroute all DNS queries through my PiHole. What a pain in the ass to have to jump through hoops for a device I paid over $1k for.

> Some TV manufacturers have gotten wise to this (sigh) and started hard-coding their DNS lookup IPs.

Is there a list of such manufactures? Don't want to accidentally buy one of their products.

Well that's easy enough to filter - just nat all outgoing traffic to UDP/53 to your preferred device.

Of course google and other spy companies are pushing DNS over HTTPS, so once that becomes popular in these devices, you're screwed - you simply have to block all traffic (in which case you won't be able to watch netflix/disney/whatever using that device. For a TV that's fine, as you have a PC plugged into it, for now)

Not only the DNS lookup IPs are getting hardcoded, even the ads themselves may be shipped on the device, in case it cannot update the ads (e.g. no internet connection).

I once had a so called "Radio Roku" where the main service has been discontinued (the website where you could put in your favorite stations etc.), so basically the answer is don't trust no one.

I think the answer is "don't rely upon an external service".

BTW, Roku supported the Radio Roku service for 10 years after the SoundBridge was discontinued, plus the device isn't locked down -- there are community-based efforts which still let you use an old SoundBridge, with a little effort. However, I'd argue that SoundBridge-era Roku is a VERY different company than streaming video-era Roku.

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