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Comment by wincy | Hacker News Reader

Do people still let their TVs connect to the internet? I had to factory reset my LG tv to get it to stop trying to connect to the WiFi.

I’ve also got a block using my router, since my wife connected it to watch PLEX at one point, and it updated the OS, then it “helpfully” started showing ads in the bar AND auto connected to my network share that I had forgotten was sharing some adult content (luckily I caught it before anyone else did!)

I use a PS5 for a media center now, I figured it’s the most powerful commodity media machine you could get. Overkill but hey, it doesn’t lag, and it has PLEX on it. It’s a bit annoying that the remote has non programmable buttons for media services we don’t use, but you just can’t win them all these days.

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I connect my TCL 4K HDR TV to the internet because that's how I use the remote. It has a Roku TV interface and when I turn it on it automatically goes to the input that has my m1 Mac mini (8gb RAM 256gb storage) connected to it. I hate using Plex and all I do is open up finder and go to my network attached storage (3950x with 32gb RAM and 9tb of solid state so far of mixed sata and nvme running rockstor) and load movies and TV shows and anime off of that. If I need to play PC games I use parsec to stream my windows desktop (5900x with 128gb RAM and 2080 Ti win11 pro for workstations) which is in my bedroom to the m1 Mac connected to the 4K TV and that all happens over lan and has zero latency essentially and I could play games at 4K for the most part sometimes I have to go down to 1620p. You most definitely can win these days. Having a full-fledged computer hooked up to my big TV lets me do everything from my living room with no compromises at all and my Smart TV doesn't do anything untoward. Most likely I'm not seeing anything going wrong concerning ads or excessive traffic because my router is my old retired computer, 9900k and 32gb RAM, running PF sense and I have PF blocker running on that.

Who do you define as “people”? Because there are the HN people who probably could even install a separate firewall to block/monitor all outgoing traffic, and then there are normal folks who don’t even know that their TV collects data. The majority of people are technologically illiterate who certainly can’t go into all the trouble of blocking ads and changing dns servers and installing firewalls and what not.

My samsung TV's (one from 2018, one from 2022) are used for Youtube 99% of the time. I don't know if I'm just numb to them or something, but I don't directly see ads on them. I'm sure it's phoning home a buncha stuff though.

I suppose I tolerate it if it's in the background, but the moment random stuff pops up on me I'd definitely make sure the TV never connects to a wi-fi.

Disconnect that 2022 model as soon as you can. Samsung can and does deploy permanent, unremovable ads on the system menus that are cached even if the connection is lost. It’s terrible! The only way to avoid them is to not receive one in the first place.

Do they hang on after you "factory reset" the TV?

I've got a TCL TV and wanted to see if I could stop using the Amazon FireTV. It was a laggy mess and started showing ads, and kept showing placeholders and crap like that after I disconnected it. But this all went away after a factory reset.

This is the same sort of feigned ignorance you use to see on Slashdot.

“Do people still watch TV? I haven’t owned a TV in 15 years “

Yes most people these days have a Plex setup, a PlayStation as a media player and their router configured to block ads…

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