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Open source all you want! It doesn't change the fact that they're spying the contents of your screen no matter what input is being used with Automatic Content Recognition (ACR) technology

https://docs.roku.com/published/acrservicepolicy/en/CA

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The original idea of open source or rather free software is to bmactually "own" the code in a way that you can modify it to your needs. Guess this is not the case here, then. But I guess also most of android falls in that category that by now. I guess we should be using better,more attributes when describing open source

"Free software" has always been a misleading term, unfortunately. Maybe calling it "Freedom software" instead would be clearer.

But when you conflate free software with open source, you get confused people cheerleading their own abuse. Android is probably the worst offender here. Google Chrome, VSCode are others that come to mind.

There's at least:

source available - whether you can read the code

open source - whether you can run (a modified version of) the code on some piece of hardware you own

open hardware - whether the hardware they sell you lets you run modified versions of their code

open contribution - whether they want your modifications

free software - whether your modifications have to be open source too

If it's at least source available, it can have any combination of these.

open hardware to me means that you have access to all of the specifications for building the hardware. Things like when the laptop company Framework posts github repos full of CAD models. Or, initiatives like RISC V.

And, alongside that, there's also open firmware.

Unlocked hardware is maybe what I would call hardware that enables swapping out the software. Although, historically, we didn't even need a term for that, because that was the default aside from outliers like Apple.

I think your definition of "free software" is too strict, otherwise public domain software would not be free software

Your definition of free software conflicts with the FSF's:

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#SoftwareLicen...

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

The idea of free software, yes, is to own the code in a way that you can modify it to your needs. The idea of "open source" as a mantra is to confuse and muddle the ideas of free software in order to subvert the ideologists in that camp into supporting and furthering the goals of billionaire corporations. "Open source" as a calling card is intended to kill free software.

Actually they don't want to open source it. This is the result of a lawsuit.

My router has a separate network for "appliances" (roku boxes, thermostats, etc) that has a very restrictive firewall that only allows internet access according to a manual allowlist.

I feel a cold, dark anger everytime I see my fridge has a wifi connection. I live in a rural area, with an acre+ of land, but suspect my neighbours can still see it.

And maybe an open wifi network of theirs can too.

   you can disable this feature by going to Settings > Privacy > Smart TV Experience.

can you ? can you really ?

it’s open source now so presumably it’s harder to outright lie about how their system works.

it is amazing to me that the data collected by things like this is valuable enough to even consider implementing these things.

advertising really has gotten well out of control.

advertisers keep escalating, and i don't think that will ever stop. at some point the medium of television will be ruined, a lot like how mobile web browsing on ios is today.

it seems like it will be necessary to ban this kind of thing, if advertising itself isn't banned entirely. they will not stop until they must break the law to proceed, and even then i'd give it 50/50 on them stopping collecting personal data.

Samsung does that too and use it to sell you stuff, show you ads, and retarget you across devices! (Not saying it’s a good thing, but rather pointing out how common this is)

I'm really sick of the enshittification of smart TV's.

A while after I've had my LG TV, and found every arcane different menu you need to remove all the ads. They started sending me ads via the notification pop-up.

This continued even after finding and removing the consent for advertising (that I'd missed in one of the consent pop-ups.)

I've considered and looked into "dumb" TVs, but I don't think they're for me. I just want one that's not enshittified!

I just don't bother with television full stop.

I can't say I have either since they tried to change the format to cinema from electronic theatre.

This is not "enshittification". That implies it's gotten worse over time. Smart TVs have been doing this from the beginning.

Smart TVs are the enshittification of regular TVs. An attempt to extract more money from the customer without providing a useful benefit.

I disagree. It's definitely gotten worse, notification ads for my TV for example.

LG also didn't used to have home screen ads, but that's a long time ago now.

FWIW I’m pretty happy with my Panasonic OLED (2019 model), it has totally optional smart features (ie it has a Netflix app), works well offline, and turns on instantly.

Why not disconnect your smart TV from the internet and use [insert favorite streaming box]?

I use Apple TVs on all my smart TVs and none of them have ever been connected to the internet. No ads with consistent interface across TV brands.

the only good smart tv is one with no network connection. As long as the manufacturer has any control of the compute on your device they will always be pressured to abuse it to grow revenue. You need to budget 200 to 600 additional dollars for a linux box and use that

That's still not good. I recently switched from a Sceptre dumb TV to a top of the line LG OLED model, and it is sooooo slow. Everything takes forever because it's got to wait for the network connection which doesn't exist, play all its stupid animations, run the "AI" bullshit, and attempt an internet connection again.

Then you did it wrong. The tv should be turned on and set to display one port, say hdmi1 then never touched again until its time to shut it off. Volume should be handled through hdmi-cec from the tvs perspective it should get an on or off signal and maybe some volume signals and it should display hdmi and that is the entorety of its existence.

I guess that's fine if you only have one device connected to your TV, and it supports CEC.

That is not my use case though.

then put something like the OREI 8k HDMI 5 in 1 switch in front. Costs less than 60 dollars, you can control it with whatever universal remote you want or the remote it comes with. If I needed that I would just map it on my flirc skip remote and continue operating my whole setup from that one remote very easily with the tv only ever getting on/off and maybe volume signals. The nice thing about this solution is it lets you run everything at hdmi 2.1, which is often impossible on even newer tvs because only one or two of the ports are hdmi 2.1 on many tvs.

So your answer to "TVs suck these days" is "lol just buy more crap."

You are exactly why TVs continue to suck.

No, my response is protect yourself from the reality of the market via mitigation because you and i cant affect change because the incentive is to get worse for the corporation and minimum efficient scale is too high to have enough competitors to change the benefit math

Is it really enshittification if it was shit from the beginning?

I disagree. I much preferred it when they didn't pretend that TV should be the same as cinema. Even the mistakes are entertaining whereas on modern TV, they tend to stand out.

Is this their dongles, TVs, or both?

Both, and the speakerbars. Roku's business model is not selling hardware.

Yeahhhh I had to disconnect mine from the internet due to this (I don’t want a display ad on the menu screen when I turn on my TV like WTF, my TV just enshittified itself randomly with an update that added this a year or two ago). Which would be fine but you can’t change the TV menu tile layout if you are disconnected from the internet… Just incredible layers of design stupidity here.

I use pfblockerNG(like pi-hole but for pfsense) to block ads to my roku. And I set up pi-hole at family members houses to block ads and telemetry on theirs.

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