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Comment by reaperducer | Hacker News Reader

Out of curiosity, do you happen to know the differences for the Costco Sony TVs?

On a related note, the LG TV I bought at Fry's Electronics was a Fry's-only model.

Investigating it, I found out it was actually a Brazilian model with the built-in DVR disabled for the American market.

I thought about trying to hack it to enable the DVR, but realized it would have to connect to the internet to retrieve program information, and there's no way I'm going to let my TV connect to the internet.

(And before a bunch of HN smarty pantses tell me it will just latch onto a neighbor's wifi, that's not possible in my building, as we're all on the same building-wide VLAN, and you have to register a new device's MAC address in the portal to allow it in. I'm also too high up to pick up any street-level wifi.)

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1) Tenants are required to use building wifi? Nobody can choose to use cable/dsl and run their own wifi AP?

2) Eventually some sneaky TV vendor is doing to work out a deal with a cell phone network to periodically run cell phones in wifi AP mode so they can retrieve telemetry from TVs that aren't connected to the internet. You could even wait for the phone to be connected to a charger, if you wanted to be nice and not drain the battery.

Tenants are required to use building wifi? Nobody can choose to use cable/dsl and run their own wifi AP?

No DSL or cable because the building was never wired for POTS or cable. The building runs Cat6 and satellite TV to every room, and it's included in the rent. Why would you pay for another service when you're getting 250/250 service plus video at every large wall?

And what happens when some idiot like me double nats and plugs an access point in.

It is not really a big deal, and to be honest it sounds like the ideal multi tenet building wiring. put a baby IX in the basement, run high quality cable to each location. and let the tenants figure out what they want.

But the point is networks are complicated versatile things. and just because there is no real need for a private access point does not mean there are no private access points.

multi-TENANT

And what happens when some idiot like me double nats and plugs an access point in.

Then the IT guy figures it out. It's a large apartment building, not a campground. We're not left on our own.

He actually lives in the building and if you need help, that's what he's for.

For example, if you're elderly, or if you have something you want to hook up that doesn't have its MAC printed on the outside, you make an appointment and he handles it for you.

Isn't this what amazon's Whispernet is for? Always on low power bluetooth listeners embedded in echos and other amazon devices. If the TV supports it and you don't have an echo it can use your neighbor's echo/internet to send telemetry data.

Now imagining somebody planning to use metallic conductive paint on their TV, grounding the paintjob...and eventually painting the whole flat with it (with ordinary paint on top, for appearance).

Adversarial built-in AirTags.

> And before a bunch of HN smarty pantses tell me it will just latch onto a neighbor's wifi, that's not possible in my building, as we're all on the same building-wide VLAN, and you have to register a new device's MAC address in the portal to allow it in.

Extremely unlikely that LG would be doing this, but at least theoretically the TV could listen for communication from other devices and then reuse a MAC address from an authorized device when that device is not around.

Don’t even worry about it. No one has ever been able to provide any proof of a TV doing that. At this point it’s just a spooky tech tale akin to the hitchhiker with the hook in the back of the car.

I have proof.

Because I am an idiot I like to run an open accesspoint.

The only user* so far has been the neighbors samsung tv sending status updates. I should probably be a better person and block it.

*probably because I am not a complete idiot and the open network is throttled down to just about unusable. enough perhaps for a webpage and a message but pictures are unpleasant and video is right out.

Do you know that the neighbor didn't intentionally make their TV do that?

Hard to say, the link is slow enough that video is unpleasant. But sure, it could have been someone fiddling around in the config when they first got the tv(onboarding process?) but does not have any streaming services so does not care that the link is garbage. But I think the tv was just happy to find a open network and started using it for telemetry.

Planes, open wifi drones, someone setups open hotspot from their mobile.

Planes

Are you under the impression that airplane wifi reaches the ground, or that apartment buildings are 20,000 feet tall? Even if that was true, planes move at hundreds of miles per hour, so clearly you're not posing a serious argument.

Are you under the impression that all aircraft travel at 20,000+ ft, and travel at hundreds of miles per hour?

Name a commercial aircraft with wifi that flies under 155MPH. Go ahead. I'll wait.

Almost any aircraft can be operated commercially.

A Cessna 150 cruises around 100. Cessna 172s are used regularly for scheduled commercial service, and cruise under 150. No issue putting a small wifi ap in one of those. If you want I can turn on my phone tethering next time I go flying to prove my point.

Plenty of small aircraft cruise around doing survey work over cities all day every day.

Look at project loon from google, those guys travel around at an airspeed of nil providing internet.

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