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Comment by shiroiushi | Hacker News Reader

One way to look at this is this: unless you bought a very high-end model, the TV you bought was very likely "subsidized" by ad vendors: instead of the TV maker getting all their revenue from your purchase of the TV, they got part of it from advertisers, Nielsen, etc. It's the same way with pre-installed Windows on computers, where Microsoft gets paid by the crapware companies to pre-install their crapware ("trial versions") on new computers hoping buyers will purchase the full versions. Anyway, if your TV purchase was partially subsidized by the ad vendors, then the price for having a TV that works the way you want it to could be said to be that you need to spend extra time and energy to do these workarounds.

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Perhaps, though the suggestion of using an Apple TV or equivalent and never connecting the TV to the Internet at all is a far easier thing to manage.

Trying to block things in this way ends up being a whack-a-mole situation, and you're also suck monitoring it forever as the vendor deploys things to bypass any blocks, or adds/changes things.

I've done it in the past though it really is an annoying thing to monitor and keep up with. I guess you can use public block lists that can take care of some of it for you.

Certainly, there's different workarounds that can be used to solve this problem, and they all have their advantages and disadvantages. Buying an AppleTV or equivalent will cost more money and may have its own drawbacks (can't install SmartTube on AppleTV for instance), whereas for instance setting up a PiHole server to filter traffic to your TV is probably more work but for less money (assuming you already have something to run it on).

The way I see it, there really isn't a perfect solution for any of this: you can't just go out and buy devices that do exactly what you want them to, because vendors don't want to sell those to you (unless you're a billionaire perhaps, and willing to pay truly absurd prices for bespoke custom solutions): vendors want to make a profit, and they've found they can do that more easily these days by selling stuff to consumers at razor-thin (or below-cost even) margins, and then making money after the sale with advertising and spying. It's like the Gillette razor-and-blade model. So it's up to us (consumers, collectively) to come up with workarounds and modifications and other technological solutions and share them with each other.

> Trying to block things in this way ends up being a whack-a-mole situation, and you're also suck monitoring it forever as the vendor deploys things to bypass any blocks, or adds/changes things.

Just a note, for the linked item I haven't change anything in 2 years and it's still working fine.

That's because it's an allow list, nothing gets through unless it's specifically towards netflix domains and addresses.

It's much easier to manage then the reverse as you noted.

Sure, it could be defeated with effort but it would be visible (updates available or ads or similar), and at that point you start investigating.

It also requires some initial effort to set up if you want anything else from the TV (say youtube or amazon prime and so on)

Fair. I don't think I have the personal will to curate an allowlist :P

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