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Comment by Sophira | Hacker News Reader

Nah, you're not crazy. I'm also someone who actually reads terms documents, because I find that they're often the only thing that will be truthful about a company's intentions.

And keeping it completely disconnected from the internet should be the default, in my opinion.

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There is absolutely no reason to read those contracts any more. As Louis Rossman keeps pointing out, most of them now include the ability for them to change terms at any time. That's basically the null contract.

Since the legal system has once again failed to protect users from corporations, it's up to users to use technical means for self defense.

Interestingly, in Brazil and I'm sure in some other legislations, those contracts are essentially void because there's a presumption the average person does not have the time, patience, or ability to understand every clause—so they are by definition unable to agree to their terms.

I'd love to have a similar standard applied in the US but I'm not holding my breath.

At the very least, you can be sure they'll never change the terms of the agreement to be more beneficial for you, though.

So just treat it as a best case scenario, knowing that it can get even worse.

Just assume the worse then, save yourself some time.

Well yeah, that's kinda the idea, but sometimes it's nice to know what 'the worst' will entail

At this point every EULA or TOS change should begin with the heading:

We Are Altering The Deal. Pray We Don't Alter It Any Further

PS, my technical means are keeping my TV off the internet.

Which doesnt work. LG tvs will scan for availible networks. Someone setting up a new router within range briefly disables encryption and "your" tv will jump on that network and transmit all the stored data.

It is tinfoil hats time, at least for LG tvs.

Give it a network, but don't allow that network to access the internet.

If it can't phone home, it's not connected.

A technical solution would presumably spoof the spaff but with E2EE and DoH is it possible? So then what, hacking firmware? I guess then TVs get a hard lifespan limit.

I guess you could remove the wifi antenna, or otherwise brick the wifi reception ability (faraday cage, lead block, etc). Or - just boycott LG. I'll never buy any of that corporate espionage nonsense, ever.

Also: the US intelligence agencies used Echelon ages ago to monitor what vast swaths of innocent people were up to. I think it's sensible to presume they've got their hooks into these devices too.

Depends on jurisdiction, just because someone wrote something in a contract doesn’t mean it’s binding.

In Poland/EU we have an (ever growing) list of forbidden clauses that even when written and signed by consumer are null and void. And I think these can be enacted retroactively - when corporations invent new shady clauses, government steps in and tells them these are invalid.

This helps to even out the consumer-corporation field.

That’s great! Because then you’re left with the simple task of raising it up with the government.

It’s actually the judiciary you’d bring it up with, I believe.

The judiciary is a branch of government. But more crucially, some countries have better consumer protection agencies, eliminating the need for people to go through costly court battles for common sense stuff.

Executive branch in Poland and I guess the rest of Europe as well. Bureau for Consumer Affairs. They make decisions, give penalties to corps and invalidate harmful ToS.

Then if a corporation doesn’t like it (and they never do), they can appeal in court.

E.g. PayPal is appealing rn because their shitty ToS were invalidated last year and they were punished for them.

There are governments with working institutions believe or not.

Also, I just read up and in our legal system a nonindividual agreement is nonbinding if “it is drastically against the consumer’s interests or against ‘good manners’”, with free legal help for consumers affected.

E.g. last year PayPal was forbidden from giving out bans and suspensions of user accounts based on vague and overly broad rationales. They were also charged $25M for that, but that’s peanuts.

If you think about, a good government has institutions where there are people whose full time job is to look at hands of corporations and listen to citizens. I know this may sound like sci-fi if you don’t live in a country like that.

> we have an (ever growing) list of forbidden clauses that even when written and signed by consumer are null and void

I'm pretty sure that's true almost everywhere. Law beats contract. The real question is how strong the laws are. In the US not so much because of small government and stuff, especially in red states.

The law matters very little when enforcing it in court often means a multiyear lawsuit against an opponent which employs an army of attorneys, has effectively unlimited amounts of money, will likely cost you ruinious sums of money, and for an outcome that's far from guaranteed.

>The law matters very little when enforcing it in court often means a multiyear lawsuit against an opponent which employs an army of attorneys, has effectively unlimited amounts of money, will likely cost you ruinious sums of money, and for an outcome that's far from guaranteed.

Or when you can't even enforce anything in court as you've already given up your right to spend all your money suing, as binding arbitration is the required and only mechanism to "resolve disputes." To make it extra fair, the corporation pays the arbitration firm for their "objective" decisions and not you.

What could go wrong?

Has it actually happened that someone went to court and the court told them no, you have to do binding arbitration? Or is it just something they put in the contract to scare you? Has anyone argued they didn't actually agree to what the country thinks they agreed to? You could start by just saying no, you didn't agree to that, and the company will have to prove you did.

In the Gamer's Nexus video, he gets drunk before accepting the terms so that it isn't legal consent. A drunk person can't enter a contract.

>Has it actually happened that someone went to court and the court told them no, you have to do binding arbitration? Or is it just something they put in the contract to scare you? Has anyone argued they didn't actually agree to what the country thinks they agreed to? You could start by just saying no, you didn't agree to that, and the company will have to prove you did.

Yes[0]. For over 100 years.

Next question?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbitration_case_law_in_the_Un...

You can do that too. You can show up, represent yourself and pay a few hundred dollar court fee, while the big company has to waste hundreds of thousands of dollars to defend themselves from you. You'll probably lose the case if you don't have a lawyer, but in a place like the US, you don't have to pay the other side's legal fees unless the case is frivolous (which it won't be).

The US is not small government at all. It’s one of the largest governments in the world. It just exists almost exclusively to serve billionaires.

It’s “small government” when it comes to protecting your individual rights, and full flock powered ai surveillance state when someone has an abortion.

I obviously didn't invent that term. And in large part you're right that it means deregulation so companies can do whatever

Funny how the type system works in a legislative framework: null AND void

I'm never going to interpret that one with a straight face.

>There is absolutely no reason to read those contracts any more

For another perspective, check out the comment you're replying to.

I never understood why any of the smartness had to be built into the TV in the first place. Sure, it's useful for the first year, and then the seriously underpowered hardware they installed into it will have trouble with just about anything.

I bought a Philips Ambilight OLED TV probably over 8 years now. Brilliant tv, great quality, I still see no reason to replace it at all. But its built in AndroidTV is garbage.

It's so you buy a new one every few years instead of keeping the same TV for a decade or two. Capitalism cannot survive when products last a lifetime.

> Capitalism cannot survive when products last a lifetime.

This is totally backwards; capitalism would do fine in such an environment (in the same way that evolution does fine in an environment where organisms live more than just a few seconds; the whole reason we have the notion of a "lifetime" is that our germ line comes from a long line of ancestral DNA that made organisms that outlasted their competition.)

Individual companies might have to hustle to innovate or die, but that too is good for capitalism.

Whoa!

I think maybe I stepped on somebody's agenda?

Both capitalism and evolution depend on the fact that over time, on average, less fit organisms/organizations are displaced by better alternatives. You may not like that, but down-voting anyone who points it out doesn't make it any less true.

If that’s true, then why is capitalism still around? Should it have died out in a previous generation in which many products did last a lifetime?

It did. We are currently on the fourth or more reinvention of capitalism. It's like ethernet - every time networking technology changes, the new one is called the same thing as the old one. The current fiber-optic switched Ethernet has absolutely nothing in common with the original vampire-tapped coax with media attachment units clamped onto the cable and a serial-port-looking AUI interface running down from the ceiling to the computer. Same for capitalism.

Because it’s extremely profitable for them to serve ads and sell PI. Kind of like how the airline industry makes more money off credit card shenanigans than actual plane tickets.

Not relevant to the discussion but to your comment, Freakonomics Radio claimed "airline industry makes more money off credit card shenanigans" was not true

https://freakonomics.com/podcast/is-your-plane-ticket-too-ex...

WSJ and Wendover claim it is true.

Similar boat - Panasonic glass fronted TV. Circa 2013. None of the smart works anymore.

1080p, but the picture far outstrips most other TVs I've owned to this day.

I have zero plans to change it, and it's usefulness has outlasted the Chromecast that's connected to it.

Yes, I put the first ads on Smart TVs. Apologies.

I hear you. This is exactly the reason why I have a digital signage display rather than a Smart TV.

Because having the TV play from streaming apps out of the box is pretty useful.

The problem is we've not enforced any strong regulation against ads, downgrade rights or hack ability.

I don't need "better performance" from the system built into my TV I just need it to run Kodi.

> I never understood why any of the smartness had to be built into the TV in the first place.

Because technology got ever more complex. A TV of yore? That thing operated on (relatively) simple physics alone, at the cost of requiring an absurd amount of broadcast infrastructure to make sure a TV signal could be received across the country.

Modern TVs however... digital modulation schemes with a lot of signal processing wizardry allow TV reception with far less broadcast towers and far better quality. You got satellites and with these a myriad of control schemes (DiSEqC, Unicable, ...). You got Pay-TV that requires decryption. You got HDMI CEC to allow your TV to remote control your DVD player.

And all of that complexity requires firmware which means it can have bugs which means you need a firmware update capability and when you're at that point you can just go and slap something Linux on it and get all the apps for streaming services.

Only good until the device starts using a neighbor's LG TV as access point, without telling you, for the sole purpose of upgrading itself and sending this "telemetry".

Really?

Well that is how Airtags work.

Any iphone/ipad/mac nearby will act as a router for them[1]

Given that we have already established that LG is a shady company, I wouldn't put it beyond them to try to use the same trick.

[1]https://lifehacker.com/tech/how-apple-airtags-actually-work

It's also how Amazon Sidewalk works for many Alexa-enabled devices

Yeah and my worry is, TVs like this can use sidewalk to connect to when they are not provided with internet access by the user (either but plugging into ethernet or connecting WiFi). Leaving the TV with an always-available exfiltration channel for it's espionage of the user's viewing habits.

This is a really bad thing for those of us who until now have just not connected our 'smart' shit to the internet.

Where I live in the EU they don't do sidewalk otherwise I'd have to look at ways to fight it (disassociate connections or DDoS the devices providing sidewalk routing)

That is not how AirTags work. They do not reach out to Apple servers at all.

AirTags broadcast an encrypted ID. Phones build lists of ID’s they’ve seen and send the list to Apple.

There is no routing, no ability to send arbitrary data, no active communication of any sort. It’s not a mesh network.

The link you posted makes that pretty clear.

uh, that is just all the iphones acting as a mesh network for airtag ID’s?

it means you can’t block the tracking by doing anything yourself - you’d also need to block everyone else’s devices too.

Mesh network typically means… a network. Unidirectional, best-effort, randomized IDs are not a network.

And of course you can block the tracking yourself, even though nobody is actually tracking because Apple can’t tell who owns what ID. Just turn off find my on your device.

They definitely meet the definition for a network. there is no requirement for determinism, bi-directional communication, etc. at least in the definitions I see for the word.

and turning it off on your device doesn’t actually block the info being communicated, merely the association where you can see it. and hopefully on their backend, but there is no technical requirement for it.

the whole point is everyone’s iphones forward airtag info for every airtag.

Fair point on the forwarding being non-disable-able. But I don’t see any privacy issue there. The forwarder provides observed obfuscated ID and location, which seems less fraught than even the signal strength metadata returned to cell towers.

I had misinterpreted “you can’t block the tracking” to mean of your own phone, rather than of devices that other people want tracked.

It joins phone location + tagid to provide location info of all tags. the backend then (hopefully) filters out tags people don’t want to track.

‘obfusication’ of IDs isn’t a meaningful thing here, or literally none of it would work.

the whole point of airtags is your phone doesn’t need to be anywhere near the tag to find it.

An Apple airtag probably doesn't but it is apparently possible to send some data at a very low rate (the article in [1] says a few bits per hour) over the find my network [2]

[1] https://positive.security/blog/send-my

[2] https://github.com/positive-security/send-my

That's functionally the exact same thing, and if they wanted to send data they could encode it in the "ID".

Forget GPS jammers, everyone needs a bluetooth jammer.

Zealous Autoconfig https://m.xkcd.com/416/

Non-mobile link: https://xkcd.com/416

> I find that they're often the only thing that will be truthful about a company's intentions.

Really? Many years ago, I had to physically sign a license with Microsoft to obtain some software. The license was not consistent with the license included with the software. Both licenses effectively said they were the real license and that any other agreement you made with Microsoft was not valid.

I don't think there was any nefarious intent. It was likely to avoid a situation where Microsoft employees offered terms that were not approved of by the company. Still, it goes to show that it can be awfully difficult to judge the intent of a company.

I guess neither is valid then, you got the software for free.

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