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Comment by lmilcin | Hacker News Reader

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lmilcin·

I worked for Samsung. Let's just say, I am not letting any "smart" TVs in my home.

Given choice of "smart" TV vs no TV, I choose no TV.

Currently I have an old 30" monitor filling the function of the TV.

I would love to have nice shiny screen, but the price is just too high.

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Can you block samsung.com at the DNS level and be alright or do the issues go deeper than that? Honest question as I don't have a Samsung tv...

How about never connecting it to a network?

I once had a Samsung smart TV that was on the lower end of the price scale. It had Ethernet but no Wi-Fi (this was back in 2014ish so wifi was a “premium” feature). I didn’t have an Ethernet drop near the TV so I bought a USB wifi dongle and used that. A year or two later I was messing around with a Raspberry Pi and needed a wifi dongle, so I took the one from the TV. Lo and behold the smart tv features kept working. It must have had wifi hardware that was disabled in software and the wifi dongle somehow tricked it into working…long story to say that I bet with 5G TVs will start phoning home and nothing short of a faraday cage will be able to stop it.

I've seen comments report that it gets ethernet over HDMI if they plug in their internet-connected gaming console.

This is one of these things were people once heard that it's in the standard and then are convinced its happening, but nobody can ever name a single device that supports it. (Happy to be proven wrong though, but for now this seems to be pretty much FUD)

Insight into how bad the TV is spying on us?

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