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Comment by donclark | Hacker News Reader

Or is there a process to turn a "smart tv" into a dumb tv? (per brand/make/model)

Don't give it WiFi credentials. (I've got a 5-year-old Samsung that's never connected to any network and it works fine.)

And don’t plug in an ethernet cable

One would think this would have been more obvious.

> One would think this would have been more obvious.

Devices can refuse to function without a network connection, and the profits to be made from simply including a cellular connection of some sort for ad refresh + tracking are too high to be ignored forever.

So this isn't a reliable, long-term solution.

I have to think that far less than 1% of STV owners don't connect them. Adding hardware to capture whatever % of them it actually is seems extremely financially dubious to me, especially given how unlikely they are to have positive ad conversions.

These are all hypothetical situations.

How do you then get the software update, to fix buffer overflows while decoding the video stream?

(ok, most TV vendors won't bother to fix and most video sources ate somewhat trusatable not to exploit ... especially as an exploit can't do much unless it is connected to a network)

You could just update once in a while then unplug again.

> How do you then get the software update

Some of them allow updates via USB stick.

If you are using them at dumb displays, you aren't decoding video on them, you are sending them HDMI signals that were already decoded by your other thing.

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