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Comment by aerhardt | Hacker News Reader

I also had to take this approach with my LG TV. The OS actually had its use for a while but Apple TV has become my driver. I no longer wish to consent to LG’s EULAs which are starting to look like the legal corpus of a small nation. I’m also not interested in their software updates. Internet privileges: revoked.

It’s concerning nonetheless as others are pointing out that in the current trajectory the TVs may soon refuse to display any content unless connected.

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I’ve read reports of these devices turning on wifi and auto connecting to known public wifi networks. Seems we went from a generation of technologists dismissing Stallman as paranoid to one living in his nightmare and not being appropriately familiar with his work, issues of art vs artist aside.

Stallman has always been right. Hes a radical, but he was always been right. He is basically prescient with seeing how private software would be used. He was just so early that people thought he was a crazy radical, but now he seems to be stricken with a case of being Cassandra.

There hasn't been open public wifi networks near where I live for over a decade. It also seems increasingly rare for businesses to have them (they usually have an SSID and password posted somewhere). I don't think this is a thing.

But here's where it might go.

Verizon and other cell companies bundle streaming apps with their plans. It's really not a far leap for them to bundle a TV as well. Especially if TVs get really expensive due to whatever factors - get a 120" TV for just $30 extra on your bill over the next 5 years. And Verizon could contract with an OEM to make a Verizon-specific model, and put a 5G modem in it, and lock it to Verizon service. Verizon's just an example here, AT&T, T-Mobile could do the same.

Business idea: a signal-jamming cover for your 65-inch TV.

It looks like shit, is difficult to install, and costs an arm and a leg, but at least it prevents egregious privacy violations from your average chaebol or CCP-intervened corporation!

Why not just change your wifi password so that the TV can't connect again (after you've got your OTAs but I guess you could have loaded them on a USB stick to flash instead of wifi)

How would you look at the panel, then? Do you think it is impenetrable?

I'd doubt that any such coating would be good for viewing quality.

> How would you look at the panel, then?

You only view your TV from inside the Faraday cage, of course.

Living bunker-style in a SCIF just for TV? Nah!

Don't forget your car. Definitely can't trust that without airgapping it.

I'm using a nukkular subterrene. No worries there.

It's simple: not buying them is the way. There is enough competition to just buy a screen that will not do that.

There is not a ton of competition in the OLED TV space

Who cares? Companies are using your need to have the latest and greatest against you. It's overt manipulation. I'd rather watch an old CRT or nothing at all than allow some company to forcefully show me ads.

> Companies are using your need to have the latest and greatest against you

This is a false dichotomy.

My love of cinema drives me to have certain features in my TV: 4k, OLED, HDR. My hatred of ads drives to me buy certain products to use my with TV: Apple TV.

You don't really get a lot of options anymore. When people around don't really care and just buy this junk because it's cheap, and they "need" a new TV ever three to four years, for some reason, then you get priced out of the market pretty quickly. Even if you look for TV, and yes I want a TV, not a monitor, without all this junk, there's not really any options available locally anymore. I believe my only option is the Thompson Easy TV, which is great, if I needed a 43" TV or lower.

Apparently I can attempt to import one from Romania, but that seems fairly complicated. Even sites that recommend dumb TVs just recommend SmartTVs that works well as a dumb TV.

fewer competitors every year...Sony gave up as well :/

It's ridiculous that going to a Target/Bestbuy/etc you cannot find any non-smart TVs generally. I have had several older models of non-smart tvs that suddenly stop working after a few years. It's disgusting

It's either because the non-ad-driven tvs cost more, resulting in too few sales to sustain (because no lifetime revenue from data sales) or the lifetime revenue from data sales is so profitable that companies take the risk on being undercut by a market entrant that will sell dumb tvs.

My guess is that the vast majority of people will trade data for a cheaper price point every time (my wife is certainly one of these people), so the market just can't support the volume of sales necessary to make the price point of dumb tvs competitive.

A smart TV just means one that can show you advertising and hoover up personal data. This is additional revenue. What company would sell you anything else?

LG TVs may be rooted. You probably can also run a pi-hole sort of thing to block any traffic except whitelisted domains.

Not that I've done it, I don't get enough value out of it to justify the hassle or the privacy intrusion.

According to Root My TV, it seems like all methods of rooting recent LG TVs have been patched.

[1] https://rootmy.tv/

You mean there is no way to break it even though you have physical access to it? How is that possible?

We don't really have physical access to it - in the sense that on your desktop computer you can boot off a usb drive and reinstall the OS. There is no way you can boot your TV off external media. So you have to hack the existing OS while running it.

The way rooting working on a TV is that you run some javascript in the TV browser that targets some vulnerability in the browser/OS to run some code that then gives you a way in. Or if it has a USB port (to watch videos off a usb drive), you play a specifically crafted video that targets some vulnerability in the media players, to again install some program that then lets you do more serious changes to the OS.

Over time, LG fixes these vulnerabilities.

The thing stopped being so needy when I neutered its internet access. Maybe it’s still exfiltrating data but at least it has stopped making me anxious that I may need to consult a civil rights lawyer every time I saw their EULA.

They patched that out many moons ago. If you havent updated in a few years you might have a shot, but most people cannot.

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