Nearly half of LG smart TV apps contain residential proxy SDKs

If you do this, connect it to the internet at least once, because most smart TVs ship with missing features that aren't activated until you do a firmware update.

I wanted more control and no UI. The commercial ones do that -- I think this was like $150 more than the "samsung smart ui" one... Never seeing a smart TV interface was worth that for me. YMMV.

I have a TCL Roku TV that I use disconnected and with an Apple TV. It still has annoyances here and there, like pausing for three seconds or so on every startup before it switches inputs. I’d pay a mild premium to not have that.

I use HDMI on my Smart TV and just disabled wifi because I realized it was downloading more than half my bandwidth (a small amount, in fact). It could have been doing an update but I found no reason to leave it on. Occasionally I'll use YT or Prime since it doesn't have to be tethered to a PC, but overall it's nicer as a monitor than a streaming app.

Some instead assert TVs might connect to the first open network available, like if a neighbor briefly opened a hotspot, which sounds more believable.

I don't think you can use the ones at wal-mart without an internet connection of some kind

These days a lot of them will nag you if you don't connect them to the internet and only use them as a dumb display.

This would be my dream tv. I like the matte look of the Frame a lot (I have one), but it's not at all worth the being subjected to the terrible Samsung software experience

Why should they? It’s an absolute cutthroat business with next to no profit margin.

All you gotta do is add an Apple TV and you got everything they would give you. And they make nice margins.

Apple seems to have next to no interest in making displays at all. We are lucky whenever a new one gets announced.

Last time I looked, I couldn't find an OLED commercial display like that.

I'd recommend a Samsung S95. Great matte OLED screen, the TV works just fine even if you never set up the not-so-smart features.

Huh?

“Get off your high horse” is the phrase I flipped because I was grandstanding.

What phrase are you referencing?

I remember seeing reports a few years ago about some TV that would constantly complain if it wasn’t connected. I don’t know what brand it was.

My concern is your telemetry may have been stored up to that point, then forwarded upon connecting.

This looks great, it just needs some hardware to run on with a nice remote. Does any hardware like that exist?

Having 2 remotes is so much easier than trying to flash custom firmware on the TV

this is a solved problem on basically any modern tv: HDMI-CEC lets your appletv control your tv without using the tv remote.

why were you using 2 remotes? did you have other systems attached to the television, such as a game console, or cable?

the Apple TV provides hdmi cec, which should control your television through the hdmi cable.

Put the TV remote in a drawer and only use the Apple TV remote. With CEC enabled, that one remote will control power and volume for the TV and any connected audio devices. It'll also switch to the proper input when the Apple TV is turned on.

I only use one remote. The tv remote. I just enable HDMI-CEC

I keep the Apple TV remote around for extremely rare situations where that doesn’t work but even then, my cell phone has a built in Apple TV remote as well, which makes it even less necessary

> A better solution would be to root the damn TV and neuter its spyware/adware crap.

That sounds like a lot of work. I don't want to sign up to this much work for every product I own that I want an iota of control over.

So I would argue if this is "better" by any stretch of the word

This. The only "smart" things allowed in my home are those under my control. This means devices that work over Zigbee, or that that run free firmware natively (like ESP32-based devices), or that can be hacked to run free firmware. Everything is orchestrated via Home Assistant and in its own VLAN. It's surprising how far you can get. For example, I recently set up a voice assistant by wiring together a few Home Assistant components and a small local LLM (Qwen 4B). Response times are basically on par with commercial solutions like Alexa, and all processing is done locally.

In the article they mentioned that Amazon and Roku block apps from using these SDK’s, and specifically after Roku recently made a change to disallow this kind of thing, many of the affected apps were withdrawn from the Roku app store. The implication is that those other smart TVs don’t have the same third-party apps because these apps were specifically created to act as a foothold for these residential proxy networks.

The LG WebOS Store is a different beast.

Just browsing the list of apps raises eyebrows for even the most non-tech audiences. 99% of it is spam, with maybe 1% being well known apps like YouTube.

The rest are weird IPTV Players, Wallpaper apps. It feels like a portal into 2009 apps, but its not.

Vizio was caught taking screen grabs and sending them to a server a few years ago.

I think the person you were responding to was being sarcastic.

I did. Israel is with North Korea at the bottom of the list of countries I'd do business with.

In fact, it's worse: my problem with NK is with its leadership, as I don't have anything against its citizens. I can't say the same for the state of Israel. May they reap what they've sown.

This is why I don't run a tor endpoint; possibly objectionable traffic I don't control sourced from my network. All it takes is one horrible request to come from your IP and you're on a list

From the content hosting side (getting reamed by scrapers overloading infrastructure), the problem is that we have to be able to set "reasonable" ratelimits to share finite network uplink and server cpu resources between all of our real users and these scrapers.

When you can identify the nature of the traffic (quickly in realtime, based on simple deterministic rules), you can protect the resources: you can rate/concurrency -limit the AI scrapers in the name of saving resources for the real humans, effectively putting the scrapers in a lower priority band (which is how it generally worked for search engine scrapers before!).

The problem is they're using resiproxies to disperse and whitewash their traffic, making it extremely difficult to tell their requests apart from the legitimate human requests. They're basically lying to us about the origin, and thus denying us the ability to put them in a lower priority band than humans.

They may scrape us at, say, 25K reqs/second, but it's coming from 50K random residential eyeball IPs at an average rate of only 0.5 reqs/second/IP, and then they're intentionally lying with the UA and headers and other fingerprint details as best they can to "blend in" with the humans so that we can't differentiate.

Let's do an analogy: Imagine if there was a neighborhood grocery store you and all your neighbors rely on for food. It's cheap because they keep their margins low, and more importantly the next store down the road is like 50 miles further away. That store 50 miles down the road also charges double the price. Now they've decided to play arbitrage: they load up 100 employees in the back of an air conditioned semi, clothe them to look like local shoppers, park it 3 blocks from your neighborhood store hidden inside a fenced property, and have them all go in and buy out all the inventory in the store over the course of a couple hours. The store just looks like it's having a great sales day at first. All these customers waiting in line, each getting just a few things at a time. But two hours later, the store shelves are empty, the semi is loaded up, and they're headed 50 miles back to double the price and sell it to someone else. You go in to buy some veggies to cook dinner and there's nothing to buy.

We've been playing this game with AI scrapers and resiproxies for way too long, and someone needs to hold them accountable for their fraud.

Does there need to be a principled justification beyond that? I used to be on the side of the traffic, as in, it does not matter where traffic originates as long as it's not abusive. But the fact is that too many scrapers exist which are, in fact, bad. Their behavior is bad, their programming is bad, and they result in way too high costs for free infrastructure, thus they are morally bad.

I expect AT&T and Comcast to offer a residential proxy service any day now.

To parody the Arthur quote [1]

Do you really think somebody would do that? Just go write apps for the love of programming and not to make money?

[1] https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRGIV3u...

Yes it's possible for the apps to exist but not the apps programmers if they can't make money to eat

Not ironic at all, and you want apps you use to be monetized because otherwise there's no incentive to support them. I feel like that's common sense.

If you're not paying for the product, you are the product.

If you are paying for the product, you're still the product.

Indeed, if you're a paying customer, there's more incentive to push ads at you, not less, since you obviously have more money to spend. The only winning move is not to p(l)ay.

I solved that by paying for premium.

Yes. For instance, Bright Data describes itself, on its home page, as the "all in one platform for proxies and web scraping".

Exactly. This is like that Sci fi show where the whole world is taken over by an alien organism and everyone you meet is basically the same one person. The AI is also off-puttingly nice, just like the alien.

Here's a bookmarklet which fixes that:

  javascript:(function(){const e=['wheel','mousewheel','DOMMouseScroll','touchmove'];e.forEach(e=>{window.addEventListener(e,function(e){e.stopPropagation()},{capture:true,passive:true})});const t=e=>{if(!e)return;e.style.setProperty('overflow','auto','important');e.style.setProperty('overflow-y','auto','important');e.style.setProperty('overflow-x','visible','important');e.style.setProperty('scroll-behavior','auto','important');e.style.setProperty('position','static','important')};t(document.documentElement);t(document.body);const o=document.createElement('style');o.innerHTML='html, body { overflow: auto !important; overflow-y: auto !important; scroll-behavior: auto !important; position: static !important; height: auto !important; } ::-webkit-scrollbar { width: 12px !important; display: block !important; }';document.head.appendChild(o);})();

It's been a very long time since they were given an option.

I'm not sure the adtech is even enough to subsidize the price in a meaningful way.

Google’s global ad revenue equates to roughly $61 per user per year, most TV manufacturers would be unable to extract that much out per user, even with crazy levels of tracking, ads, etc.

I haven't used a modern TV in a very long time, but I can't imagine LG is extracting over $20 in ad revenue/data revenue per year. It might move the needle on <$500 displays, but when LG displays costing over $5,000 still have this spyware its hard to defend.

TVs were unsubsidized by ad tech up until 10 years ago, and I’m pretty sure most people bought TVs back then.

Aren't consumer class dumb TVs gone?

For example OS running on Amazon fire stick 4K kills your background processes after ~20 minutes.

Specific to LG tvs:

https://webostv.developer.lge.com/develop/getting-started/ap...

Botnets to bypass Cloudflare. Nobody is using residential proxies for DDoS because incoming bandwidth == outgoing bandwidth.