It’s way too frequent and runs at random times in the middle of a movie so I always choose Accept.
Give me a dumb TV any time of the day now
Even if you don't suspect malfeasance / advertising / surveillance, a lot of these devices and their software are sloppily developed and highly insecure
Moral of the story is... always double check your router settings to make sure enshittified iot devices aren't making you look like a newb.
Well the real question is why would you buy a connected fridge in the first place. Not that I visit fridges alleys in stores on a regular basis but I have never actually seen one.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45867034
> Which open wifi network are left in residencial neighborhood?
Some neighborhoods are mixed use. Some residences are in dense buildings. Some people configured guest networks with no password. Some ISPs made their home gateways captive portal access points.
I would never run an open network on my home connection, there are way too many legal risks unless you can log who is connect to it and when.
It’s getting so you don’t have a real choice. You can buy a fridge (or any appliance pretty much) that is basic and doesn’t do the connected thing. But often you want the upscaled models because of real hardware features that are desirable. And these are always bundled with the “connectivity” options. It used to be you just ignored these bits. But they’re getting more and more invasive.
delaminator asked what hardware features could not be lived without.
fragmede listed desired hardware features.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQTIuX84ids
It has a large Android tablet in the front door, so it can show you ads – coming soon.
most updates are downgrades in my experience unless it addresses something very specific
Block it entirely, and hope it that doesn't connect to your Samsung phone via Bluetooth or WiFi and use it as a proxy.
I own nonzero such devices that hit 8.8.8.8 as an internet access sanity check so I have to keep just that IP allowed for them and block all other traffic.
For my devices in question I can see the size and frequency of the requests in OpenWRT and doubt it's actually doing so.
If the answer to your question involved giving money to Samsung, then you asked the wrong question, and you need to do better next time.
Obviously buying such a device is bad, but sometimes you get one for free or close to it and it's worth the hassle to not pay hundreds for a better one.
Naturally when my laptop is using its wifi to create a hotspot it isn't actually connected to the internet, so they never actually get access to the internet.
(Doesn't work if you actually want the internet, and not just wifi, related features of course)
I use ControlD and it's blocking 38% of all DNS requests in my household. 8% of that is IoT telemetry. It's unbelievable how much of this bullshit is built into the products we use.
You know, bit like Microsoft forces you to create online account after installation is done
Sure, some (high-end) TVs might do this, but definitely not all of them.
I suspect this will continue. Ads and no privacy for poor people. The wealthy & well educated will have tvs that don’t spy on them.
I have had a lot of friends amazed by the fact that when they connect to my home Wi-Fi they stop seeing ads. Zero of them interested in implementing something similar in their home.
I bought a Samsung watch once, had to reverse it to enable functionality that was advertised a year before but never delivered. It died because the watch decided to suck in water during a reboot while swimming, they quoted me almost the full price to repair it, even though it was clearly a software bug that caused another advertised feature (namely it's ipx rating) to fail.
And while I also wouldn't give Xiaomi iot devices on the network full internet access, at least I can use those things normally.
I agree with you 100% about Samsung. They make nice hardware, but the software experience is among the worst in the industry. I don't know how they can be considered a premium product. I would never use one of their phones again. Straight up adware. I'm surprised they don't inject ads into the photos you take. They have ads everywhere else - even in the phone dialing app. Their TV's are still good as long as you don't connect them to the internet. Once they start putting LTE radios in them to download ads without wifi, I will be done with those too.
Eventually I got fed up, and started using hand-me-down iPhones for second phones.
Maybe this is where the difference comes from?
> Eventually I got fed up, and started using hand-me-down iPhones for second phones.
Wonder how it would be if you tried a hand-me-down Galaxy flagship for comparison - that would be a more fair comparison. Cheap Androids are not in the same category as iPhones.
I was reading this thinking "that sounds awful, I'm never getting a Samsung phone" before snapping back to reality and realising that I'm staring at one.
I've never seen the issues you're talking about. I don't see any ads on my phone. I'm not using the default launcher, but aside from that it's stock. I would've turned off Bixby and whatever other rubbish it has when I first got it.
Ads in the dialing app!? I agree wholeheartedly that Samsung is being enshittified, but on my phone I can't see ads anywhere, least of all when I'm dialing a number.
In fact, I've been exclusively on Samsung phones for over a decade now, never had any experience remotely similar to what GP describes. My greatest annoyances are 1) Bixby, and 2) apps being pretty basic and missing obvious functionality (but then it's not like any other vendor offers better apps...).
I'm going to guess GP is in the US; I'm in the EU, and maybe phones for EU market come with less of this kind of bullshit.
FTFY
At least with a single-purpose device, you know you're not at the mercy of some minimally-funded, likely-outsourced software team inside a hardware manufacturer.
This is deliberate
I stubbornly refuse to ever connect my TV to the internet.
This works until apple enshitifies
Anyone who see anything other than enshittification is living on the same month-to-month timeline that capitalism wants in their consumers.
In my experience, they've been fine for a few years so far.
Unless you have root and can do anything the hardware is capable of, it's not your device. And you shouldn't let any sort of non-owned devices on your network.
Why? Cause devices controlled by other orgs are a foothold situation. And we've had countless attacks of footholds being used as internal points of attack, DDoS, and other attacks.
That also means that all your "cloud devices" should be able to work 100% offline. If not, return them as defective.
Devices that do need to be on the internet but I can foresee no reason they ever need to talk to anything else on the network go on their own VLAN (down to the level of my VR headset since it had a Meta logo on the box...).
My boys gaming PC can't even see my desktop (since there isn't a scenario where it needs to).
Other than the "smart" TV I own nothing "Smart" because I don't want anything smart.
I am adverse to being trapped with rental hardware masquerading as as 'sale'. Almost all corporate cloudshit is that.
As a counter example, I have 2 of these opengarage for my garage doors. They work superbly and integrate seamlessly with HomeAssistant.
And yes, I control them completely. FLOSS and all. And they just work.
Their smart TV stuff used to be marginally interesting. When Samsung TV Plus launched it was fantastic. They weren’t yet sure of how to handle ads so even the ad space was still nice, and marginally useful.
As they figured out the ad strategy, apps started disappearing and new ones appeared that couldn’t be uninstalled.
Then the OS updates started cratering performance. I have a Samsung smart TV from after 2020 that takes about 4 seconds to register a single remote control command in the smart TV GUI.
Just disconnect your current one from the internet.
But Samsung's ad behavior led me to buy a Vizio TV instead.
"This acquisition is not merely about expanding Walmart's product lineup but rather part of a sophisticated commercial strategy to integrate its retail operations, owned media channels and TV hardware into a cohesive ecosystem. This ecosystem is designed to generate and share data, influence shopping behavior and, ultimately, drive sales through an innovative approach to advertising..." "...By owning a television manufacturer, Walmart can now directly serve and, crucially, measure the impact of ads on consumer behavior. This capability significantly enhances Walmart's potential to convert advertisements into retail purchases."
https://www.forbes.com/councils/forbesbusinessdevelopmentcou...
Only saving grace I have is that I bought my P659-G1 in 2019. While it doesn't prevent bad updates, it's a little less likely they pushed deep changes to old models.
And I can't believe it's been over 6 years since I had already eliminated Samsung for their ad behavior, and not only have they not changed, they've doubled-down.
I'm pretty confident you can't agree to a contract if you can't opt out. I don't want new features and I'm fine if everything stays the same. And no, please do not adjust the image settings again... I didn't want the AI frame interpolation then and I don't want it now
[0] with Samsung engineers I don't believe they've tested anything and just assumed the user would accept it instead of deny it 20 times. It'll also get less buggy when I do a reboot, so I'm pretty sure it's a memory leak
We are talking about a company where if I press the exit button there's a 50% chance I get the menu or not. It's literally a random result. If I'm in, say, Netflix, press exit, I'll turn to my computer screen and half the time the Samsung menu will open and half the time it won't.
Also starting the TV will flash my desktop and then go "ops, no signal" and I have to just keep restarting the TV and switching inputs (not touching the hdmi cable btw) until it works. And no, my desktop doesn't sleep and yes this issue is the reason why.
So I am 100% sure it's not conspiratorial, I'm 100% sure they just suck at their job. I'm sure the fridge will be great...