LG says we're fake news [video] | Hacker News Reader

LG says we're fake news [video]

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417 pointsHelloUsername216 comments

This „we own the glass“ idea is completely insane. How does an industry degenerate to the point where they consider acceptable to base their business model on owning part of the product they sell you?

Marketing executives thinking “out of the box” is how. Ethics cannot contain them inside. They have breached the perimeter and now trample everyone for MRR.

Sony and Microsoft fought to own the living room in console wars

If you don't have laws, or don't enforce them, people will do whatever they want.

I can remember when this simple point was obvious to almost everyone.

yep one of the first rules of any market should be

you sell a product -> you are responsible about the product

with a ".. -> you must be honest about the product (/what the products does, provides, etc.)"

to see how absurdly not followed this common sense(^1) is in the us look at supplements

1. provider are not hold responsible, non small parts of sold supplements are harmful in one way or another. Even cases like supplements advertised for pregnant woman with highly dangerous components for pregnant woman existed, no major change followed.

2. high amounts (AFIK 80% or so) of supplements sold in the US are severely dishonest and don't quite contain what is advertised. And this isn't just about it technically containing the supplements, but in a form the body can't absurd. But it goes so bad that "it's just sugar pills" is more on the harmless side... (and even that is dangerous given that many people take supplements for fixing health issues caused by to little of what the supplement).

not only has the US not fixed it when it started going out of hand, they went explicitly out of their way to not fix it.

(^1): (Common sense for anyone looking a bit into market dynamics/consumer protection etc.)

I don't think the supplement information you quoted is correct. There are issues, but I don't think it is that prevalent. I subscribe to consumerlab.com, they do regular testing.

(1) is certainly correct, they're poorly understood when it comes to interactions and they almost never have much clinical evidence for claims (thus they say "support"). There are also heavy metal contaminants in all sorts of things, certainly stuff bad for babies.

Just to make clear that while (2) is at least an exaggeration unless you really stretch the issues with GRAS components not being adequately safety tested, it's certainly true that evidence of benefit is thin.

Personally I'd love to see the FDA actually regulate supplements, including actually testing additives for safety rather than falling back on GRAS sketchiness.

But we can't even test food for parasites and bacteria so I guess it falls to the consumer to somehow get enough information to make an informed decision.

We didn’t have laws but every TV at the dawn of the era came with full schematics and documentation.

That said, I’m not arguing that we don’t need laws today - we do, or at least I have no other idea how to do a course correction from where we are. Preferably wide-range ones that alter the whole consumer-producer relationships.

But the key thing is not the laws, it’s the attitude (individual and corporate) towards others. Can’t legislate that, I’m afraid.

There's probably something to do with volume and mfg capacity. The TV companies were doing everything they could and still not meeting the demand for TVs, so they might as well make them repairable. Signals quality. But now we have much more ability to make TVs than demand for TVs, and making them not repairable stimulates demand.

I'd say: Shortages after the world wars, combined with the teething problems of new technology made customers acutely aware and capable of repairability. That lesson is now forgotten.

It also wasn't universally true. E.g. the story of Mad Munz creating TVs that worked only for 90% of the customers (who had good enough reception and needed less signal cleanup). His idea was to capture 90% of the market with a cheaper product, while shafting 10% of the consumers and shamelessly send them to other vendors when they reported their troubles and he already had their money.

https://www.autodesk.com/products/fusion-360/blog/madman-mun...

I would rewrite it as follows: " If a country had some good and working components a few years or centuries ago, it doesn't mean that it is still working fine today". E.g. If a country had a working legislative branch 50 years ago and it was one of the best at that time, it doesn't mean it is good or even working at all today, despite having the same name.

I'm implying that parliaments in multiple developed countries are rapidly devolving and ceding their powers and/or work to the unelected or unrelated officials.

We do have laws. They are sided with the corporations.

Companies are amoral. If killing people boosted their share price they would issue every employee a machine gun in a heartbeat. The only reason this doesn't happen is it's illegal.

I tend to agree with this in general, especially lately, but I think there is an Overton window of depravity that businesses won't exceed the bounds of unless the industry norms shift it. I think the drift has a lot (or maybe everything) to do with the regulatory environment.

If you do it, you have to be more subtle about it. See Apple.

Lawmakers should have outlawed EULAs the moment they first showed up in software. The idea that someone could sell you a product which is completely broken until you sign away all your rights on a contract you don't get to see before the purchase is the most anti-consumer thing ever invented. Nothing worked like that before software came along.

The fact that it's now infecting other non-software consumer products is a reason why congress should kill this with fire. Companies are putting screens onto products specifically so they can force an EULA on customers.

Big pivotal moment is probably the DMCA and the DRM it's enabled, it's really eroded the concept of ownership in both software and hardware (via firmware), to the point where we've completely lost all control over the devices we buy.

These days devices do what we ask when it benefits their real owners, and refuse to do what we ask of them when it doesn't.

It wasn't an overnight thing, but the temperature in the pot has been increasing for well over a two decades and it's getting more than a bit sweaty.

It's not like Doctorow, the EFF, and a bunch of others didn't warn us. They told us this would happen. Like exactly this.

I brought this up all the time I argued with co-workers I advocated for Open Source because I knew where this was headed and every time it played out the exact way this comic did. Now I just post a link to this comic in discussion about these kind of things. https://xkcd.com/743/

I hate that 2010 is 16 years ago

Open source caused this, as much as anything else did. When you demand that software is free, you kill the market for paid software, leaving only enshittified software to fill the void. This has the dual effect of being worse for both developers and consumers: significantly fewer developers can make a living outside of working for $EvilEnterprise, which have an easier time centralizing and monopolizing the market, and consumers are paying the developers working at $EvilEnterprise with their data and lack of ownership. This is the business model of free software. There was never going to be a world where all software developers worked for free as a hobby, never received compensation, and all software was truly free.

I don't know how you can simultaneously believe that open source is prevalent enough to kill paid software but also non-existent enough that it doesn't itself fill the void it supposedly created.

Because that void is filled by open-source software that, even if it is not itself enshittified, is controlled and funded by big tech. Take languages and compilers, for instance. It is almost[1] impossible to make a living developing languages and compiler software independently or as a small business. So how do compiler developers get paid? By receiving funding from Microsoft, Google, et al. C, C++, Rust, Go, JS, TS, C#, Java, Python are all owned by big tech, who fund them with their revenues from doing exactly the evil big tech things being decried here. Linux funding is the same story. Browser funding is the same story. So too for most open source 'success stories'. There are exceptions, like SQLite, but they are rare. To the extent exceptions exist, it's mostly due to B2B consulting and enterprise contracts, which is not a business model that works for consumer-facing software of any kind.

[1] Zig is, I think, the only living counterexample.

Open Source never meant having to give your software away for free, it was always free as in speech. In that you could see the crap you got and change it if you wanted to.

But you're right I'm sure that if there hadn't been the GCC there wouldn've been a ton of competing compilers. I'm sure that it was the existence of Apache that ruined computing and brought about the enshittification of the web not MS trying to force everyone to cater to IE and then Google doing the same with Chrome, it's all just because of that evil Open Source.

> Open Source never meant having to give your software away for free, it was always free as in speech.

Sure, sure. And how exactly is software not also free-as-in-beer when any consumer can just download it themselves?

> if there hadn't been the GCC there wouldn've been a ton of competing compilers.

As I already noted in reply to your sibling comment, which you conveniently chose to ignore, every single one of those competing compilers bar one is funded by big tech. You can count the number of compiler developers who make a living without being funded by big tech, in the entire world, on your hands. GCC development is itself supported by big tech.

> Google doing the same with Chrome, it's all just because of that evil Open Source.

Do you need to be reminded that Chromium is open-source software? There is no market for competition to Chrome because no browser developer could compete with "free". Firefox is open-source and also propped up by billions in Google funding. There are zero consumer-viable browsers that are not just a Chromium or Firefox reskin.

You even brought up IE, which is an example of the exact principle I'm talking about. It wasn't open-source, but, same as open-source software, it was free, and this big tech-funded free software killed its paid competitor (Netscape). This was a huge deal at the time, enough for the US government to get involved in antitrust. Then MS got let off with a gentle warning, everybody shrugged their shoulders, developed amnesia, and decided actually it's great if we let 5 or so tech monopolies undercut all of their competitors with 'free' software and solidify complete control of the market.

Netscape died because we all hated it. Back when Apache didn't exist yet, we were forced to run Netscape's server. (Even if Apache did exist, we didn't have the $20K per-seat license fee for DEC's C compiler so we wouldn't have been able to compile it anyway). Netscape's license terms were such that we had to open our books to them. They would read through all of our transactions and decide how much we would have to pay them that term. If they saw transactions to a party they didn't like, they would charge us more. They had no competition in our space, so they could name their terms. There was no competition and they liked it that way. When Apache became available we switched to it out of spite.

The freedoms that the GPL gives to users in effect means giving your software away for free (because any single one of them is allowed to republish it openly). I do think there is a possible alternative model which gives most of the user freedom Stallman cared about but which doesn't produce this (something along the lines of being able to view the source code of software you buy, as well as modify it, but only being allowed to share the modifications with others who have bought the software, or only being allowed to distribute the patches as opposed to republishing the full software), but this hasn't really been tried as far as I know.

I guess back when software only came in disks that sounded good business wise. Today if I can get your source I’ll compile it, price a bit lower and publish it in a few hours.

Eh, areas where there was and is still plenty of scope to just charge for a product have also been heavily enshittified, so I don't think you can lay much blame at open source for this.

I don't think "jailbreak and install your own software on your TV" would be common even without the DMCA...and it would still be necessary, nothing would be stopping the companies from writing these stock software systems.

Active regulation of the marketplace is needed.

Without the DMCA you could run legitimate businesses reselling jailbroken TVs with features vastly superior to what the manufacturers are offering.

How is it insane. Owning distribution channels has been valuable since the beginning of commerce. It's no different than a newspaper company saying they own the paper so they have the power to print ads in it.

You really aren't paying attention. They weren't talking about distribution channels. They were talking about capturing user data - "we know who's in the LG household. We know which devices are there. We know what you're exposed to on TV and we know how to extend that reach into mobile."

Having a device that can distribute ads to consumers is a distribution channel. Measuring ad impressions is a core part of ad distribution.

You still aren’t paying attention. They capture data about people in (and nearby) the household that aren’t even using the product.

It's not entirely the fault of the industry. Consumer preferences are part of this equation too.

https://www.streamtvinsider.com/advertising/roku-vizio-lean-...

If consumers are unwilling to shell out for a TV priced high enough that the manufacturer doesn't need to do things like this to earn a (decent) profit, then what we've got is what you get.

You could certainly argue that the industry should've held the line, but that ignores human nature. One "innovative" manufacturer was always going to break ranks then the rest would follow, especially since the typical consumer appears (judging by the lack of non smart TV's for sale at consumer prices) to prefer lower prices to lack of tracking features. I think people very much like being able to buy a 65" tv for USD399.

If you want to mandate the sales of TVs that don't track, get a law passed. I suspect it'd be deeply unpopular once the resulting price rises were known.

> If consumers are unwilling to shell out for a TV priced high enough that the manufacturer doesn't need to do things like this to earn a (decent) profit, ...

The problem is, even if the device is priced at cost plus a reasonable margin, they can make more margin by selling data that they acquire by spying. No matter the margin on the sale, there's still more money to make by selling that data. There is no upper limit that magically prevents the manufacturer from looking for other avenues to increase profit. "Premium" device priced 3x the "reasonable" price? Still more money to be made selling data.

Now, factor in the race to the bottom on selling price, and those data sales just look that much more enticing.

I get what you’re saying but the market had a choice on this, and it chose.

They wanted the “smart” tvs. Overwhelmingly. “We” chose this hellscape when we had the opportunity to say no.

So I think the person you’re replying to is kinda right. We didn’t get forced into this so much as everyone collectively said, “Yeah, that’s what I want.”

Did we actually ever have that choice?

Yeah, and it was a big window.

Have you ever met people that actually wanted to buy a smart tv? I've only ever met one. Besides being dumb, he proved to be a dick, too. Maybe these qualities are related, maybe they're not.

But you're right: obviously there must have been people buying smart tvs in a time when there were still dumb tvs available, but what motivated these "people", where they came from, and where they have been hiding,... it's all a complete mystery to me. Last time I bought a tv, there were still some dumb models available. I may get a new display for whatever computer I'm working on every couple of years, but to me a tv is the sort of appliance you'd replace maybe once every 20 or 30 years at most, so I guess I have only been able to vote with my wallet once. Obviously voting with your wallet is as pointless as voting for certain politicians: so far I have yet to find any evidence that anything people vote for is subsequently reflected in reality in any way.

You're expecting consumers to be able to compare these anti-features that are actively hidden from them. It's like airline seats - airlines get away with continually shrinking them because consumers have no way to actually compare airline seat sizes ahead of time.

What do you mean? I don’t recall ever asking manufacturers if I could trade my privacy for a discount. I don’t remember that at all…people will pay whatever the price is, if inflation hasn’t taught that to you, then I’m not sure what to tell you. The other thing inflation showed us, is that manufacturers will absolutely put a price on what they feel is “decent profit.” Cmon dude. Do you not remember how much we paid for eggs?! Which, i think it was found later to be that the manufacturers “manufactured,” “scam-bled eggs.”

You know, I’ve been thinking, I don’t think im being paid enough! Im giving myself a raise. We can do that, right?!

>I don't recall asking

Companies can develop new products without your advice. In fact consumers often don't know what they want.

>people will pay whatever the price is

Then why do businesses have sales? If prices don't matter why would businesses choose to make less money per sale?

> Companies can develop new products without your advice. In fact consumers often don't know what they want.

I'd urge reading up on revealed preference and product discovery. It cuts both ways in that, sure, a company can offer a product on the market that no buyer asked for and have it sell well, but then, the media can expose some rather unsavory facts about that same product and subsequently (consequently?) have it not sell.

> Then why do businesses have sales? If prices don't matter why would businesses choose to make less money per sale?

It's worth picking this apart. Prices not mattering is usually expressed in economics-ese as price-inelastic demand, and that's usually not what's happening. Sales are a mechanism for drumming up demand for a product, with the hope that the additional volume will compensate for the marginally lower margin.

>I'd urge reading up on revealed preference and product discovery

I'm not sure what point you are contesting.

>It's worth picking this apart.

They were rhetorical questions.

>price-inelastic demand

With this you could argue that the absolute price does not matter, but the relative price between products that can substitute each other do. In this comment chain it is being argued that this kind of device wins on relative price.

>Sales are a mechanism for drumming up demand for a product, with the hope that the additional volume will compensate for the marginally lower margin.

It is for increasing demand, but making a higher rate of profit on the item is not the main reason. Things like being able to clear inventory, or to learn about what the current demand curve looks like (to know if prices should be adjusted) are more common purposes.

Revealed preference only makes sense in a world of perfect information. They don't tell you the TV spies on you. In fact, the revealed preferences is for TVs that appear not to spy on you, that's why they hide that information!

> Revealed preference only makes sense in a world of perfect information.

No??? Revealed preference is dependent on what information is known. The analysis is made easier if the information is perfect, but that is not at all a prerequisite to being able to lean on revealed preference.

> In fact, the revealed preferences is for TVs that appear not to spy on you, that's why they hide that information!

Exactly! Consider though that, as the information landscape changes, so does the revealed preference. Notably, when things like TVs spying on their buyers comes to light, a preference can be revealed that buyers don't want TVs that spy on them.

Like, it's entirely rational for LG to want to hide this fact about their televisions, provided that they have the inkling that this would be unpopular. Their behavior in trying to suppress this press leads me to believe that they know exactly how unpopular this is, and they're trying to get away with it anyway.

This stance is so anti-consumer it's laughable. Are you seriously implying LG doesn't turn a decent profit with their massive empire? There's an issue with capitalism of chasing infinite growth rather than stability, and this is one of the consequences of chasing such growth.

Ah, you have fallen for the bullshit that is "revealed preferences theory", a dependent of "free market theory".

The reason it's bullshit is that we don't have a free market. There are constraints and asymmetric information and inelastic demand and all kinds of other forces at play that completely negate any supposed wisdom you might hope to find in free market theory.

And if the market is not free—if consumers do not have a fully open choice, where every possible feature and option (including things like "lower price in exchange for constant surveillance") is individually selectable, or they don't have enough access to different options, or they don't have enough time and brainpower to exhaustively research every option—then what consumers buy in aggregate is not reflective of what they choose.

It's reflective of what the manufacturers choose to push.

I'm not sure how anyone didn't see this coming.

Literally every business is working towards a solution where consumers own nothing and they own everything. Games, music, movies. They want to sell you subscriptions to use shit like your car or your fridge. They want to double dip on that by making you not only pay for the ability to use the stuff you bought, but also so that they can sell everything you do on it to advertisers. This is even especially true with all the shit people feed LLMs daily for work or personal purposes.

This is the end state of an unregulated capitalist market without consumer protections.

Great question. Reminds me of social networks, but this is in the physical space. It's pretty hard to wrap my head around it.

> How does an industry degenerate to the point

It's called stage-4 capitalism: profit by any and all means.

The actual (and more sinister) answer is that consumers chose it, overwhelmingly, over years.

Alternatives existed. People thought they were getting more for their money with “smart” tvs, and bought those. It was fucking dumb, and nearly everyone participated.

Sony is out there with no ad/data platform to speak of, I believe? And projectors, I suppose. But there are almost no clean alternatives in living room appropriate panels. Even monitors are starting to go the way TVs did.

"Owning the glass" is a euphemistic way of saying "owning the viewers".

> How does an industry degenerate to the point where they consider acceptable to base their business model on owning part of the product they sell you?

Neoliberalism. The only thing that keeps companies in good behaviour are strong regulations and harsh penalties (prison time) for perpetrators. Remove that and corporations will become feudal systems to pay tribute to.

I deeply regret buying my LG. Originally the plan was to never connect it to wifi, and use an external device (chromecast, apple tv, or whatever) but my wife was too excited to try out whatever features. Unfortunately we can't sell the TV for anywhere what we paid for it new (to replace it with a different brand) so we're stuck with it for another ~7-10 years, or whatever the standard TV replacement interval is these days. New "apps" keep showing up on the main screen, which I have to "delete" from the main screen once a month or so (they're not deleted, they're just undeletable apps in some massive library of preinstalled spyware we can fortunately mostly hide). Apparently Sony OLED screens are LG "glass" but without the spyware.

Why not reset it

>Apparently Sony OLED screens are LG "glass" but without the spyware.

Without independent verification from someone like GN, I wouldn't trust "we installed rootkits" Sony not to be spying too.

Since Sony TVs run Android at least you can probably use ADB to remove a lot of junk.

... if they're rootable ...

... if they're rootable without the ability for Sony to revoke that rootability ...

You can actually do a lot without root sometimes. You can revoke permissions and disable apps.

Not if they are system apps installed by the OEM

You can disable system apps as long as they are not marked as critical or persistent apps that must be enabled for the system to work. adb pm disable --user 0 <whatever> is stronger the ui app info disable button.

Yeah but as you said if they are marked as persistent (which for oem spyware would make sense) you cant.

Not all OEM apps are marked persistent. Especially on non-pixel devices, you can disable a lot of apps.

What’s stopping you from disconnecting it from wifi mow?

This is also my question, but I suppose the answer could be that we don't trust LG to actually forget the wifi password (and not use it surreptitiously later). You could also change the wifi info, but that might mean changing a whole lot of devices (including wife's and kids).

The gamers nexus thing touched on this.. Apparently some ignore that choice and connect to open wifi or something like Comcasts modem hijacking wifi.

they stated it technical could. not that they have evidence of that happening.

Technically, they could do a whole bunch of things, including doing multihop routing via other connected televisions or insecure WiFi networks. There's no evidence that they do this, as far as I know, but also no reason why they couldn't do this in the future if they wanted to.

You're right. I think I conflated allegations in the comments with the actual claims made in the Youtube video.

GM did show that the devices scan for open wifi networks, and users in the comments have claimed that it connects without their permission.

Gamers nexus did not make that claim about them actually connecting though.

What about letting it connect to your Wi-Fi and blocking it via firewall? Does it try to find another network?

So change the wifi password.

I did bring that up in the second sentence of my two-sentence comment.

The fact you don't do it means you actually don't care at all about your privacy. It takes 5 minutes to bring every member in an household in the living room or kitchen and assist them to change the wifi password on their device.

You can even prepare for it by printing the details + qrcode beforehand.

Connecting to a wifi network is one of those things every terminally connected non tech savy people are able to do these days.

I think the GP more meant the practice that some ISPs have of shipping default routers that may or may not be able to be replaced with a separate SSID that is publicly available for use by other customers of that ISP.

Not "my network has a default or empty password, I can't make people sign in again."

Is that really a thing? My ISP gives me a router that takes an SSID/password by default (that it gets back to if I reset to defaults) but I can change it any time as well as other parameters (like channels, wether WPS is activated, etc).

Buy a crap router (or find one in the trash), dont connect it to anything, set open wifi, tv connects to the black hole, sorta poor mans pi-hole

Would it detect the lack of Internet and try another one?

Okay, you may want to reread the thread, I'm not OP. I'm not the "you" you think I am.

Also, some people have a lot of wifi connected devices, including stuff like light bulbs. (Again, not me.)

If someone is supposedly concerned about being recorded, having their privacy invaded etc. but they're too lazy to change the wifi password and deal with the trivial inconvenience of changing it on other household devices then in this case the revealed preference really is that they don't really care.

Would be easy to capture wifi traffic if it did though.

Sorry but I don't understand this line of reasoning. You worry about a smart TV going online without your permission and yet you trust it enough to keep it around your home and keep it online???

I don't mean to be rude but it sounds like you just don't want to confront the rest of your household about taking the TV offline and are coming up with excuses to tell yourself this is actually fine.

You're making a huge assumption that it does not remember wifi passwords and that it would actually honor your request. You're assuming it does not communicate with/via other LG devices owned by neighbors. You're assuming it does not communicate via partner apps on mobile and other partner devices over other protocols. You're assuming they won't eventually simply add cellular modems to circumvent all of this.

> You're making a huge assumption that it does not remember wifi passwords and that it would actually honor your request.

I would expect an hn member to be able to change their own wifi password and assist members of their household in changing it on their device.

> You're making a huge assumption that it does not remember wifi passwords and that it would actually honor your request.

Has it been observed?

> You're making a huge assumption that it does not remember wifi passwords and that it would actually honor your request.

Like what? I don't think mobile apps can roll and implement their own protocol on an android or apple phone without specific authorization.

> You're making a huge assumption that it does not remember wifi passwords and that it would actually honor your request.

We are talking here about a specific, already owned device.

You're making a lot of assumptions that would be easy to find out if true.

Block the TV via its MAC address then?

If it does MAC spoofing, then just take it out back and shoot it. That's properly malicious.

Sony uses Google TV. Doesn't inspire trust as far as spying and data collection goes.

My Sony with Google TV is pretty good in "Basic Mode" without an internet connection though.

Google TV Basic Mode is the easiest way to get a "dumb" TV, it's the first thing you're asked when you setup for the first time and works like you'd expect.

It feels like there must be multiple completely different implementations of LG OLED TVs. I would not say that my LG has a "main screen" of any kind. When I turn mine on it shows the last input that had been used or, if that thing is off, it shows the bouncy egg and "No Signal". If I press the button on the remote that says RECENTS and has a picture of a house on it, which I guess is the "main screen", it maintains the bouncy egg but shows a ribbon of apps on the bottom. Those are my installed apps: Hulu, Prime, Peacock, YouTube, Netflix, Apple TV, and Disney+ happen to be today's recents. Where is this "main screen" where unbidden appvertisements arise?

That ribbon got slammed full of advertisements at some point, last I knew.

Mine has been strictly MRU forever. When I look at this video, it does not resemble the software on my LG OLED TV at all. There must be several platforms or generations.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8atmvE0ArA

But how do you know which LG model does what?

I don't. That's the point of my thread. But it's clear to me that not every LG owner is seeing the same things.

Hulu, Prime, Peacock, YouTube, Netflix, Apple TV, and Disney+ happen to be today's recents.

Where do you find the time to post on HN?

Those are just all of the apps I used in 9 years in the order that I last opened them.

Recents as of today

That is WebOS 6.0 or older. Mine is the same. At some point they stopped updating older models. I think all those released before 2021 or so.

Disconnect it from the internet, buy a streaming device, and use the streaming device. It’s really not that complicated.

If you want a bit complicated, you can probably unscrew the back panel and remove the wifi card.

> It’s really not that complicated.

You can do that no the average joe.

The "average joe" can absolutely do that...

It's as simple as buying a TV, never hooking it up, and then buying something like an Apple TV that you do hook up to the internet.

Can we really trust it to honor your request to stop using the internet? After hearing them speak on this subject, I have my doubts it will honor your request so quickly and easily.

You can't change the laws of physics.

If it isn't connected to the network, it can't communicate.

Unless it is factory reset (and even then?) it presumably still has saved wifi credentials?

Wifi exists now lol, and if there are open wifi networks in the vicinity, it can use it.

What do you mean "the network"? Do you mean the wi-fi you told it to not connect to or something else? Because something else sounds like a secondary path. It's enumerating devices for a reason. How many of those devices are LG or an LG partner?

Buy a cast/apple tv anyway and then reset the LG screen to factory. Is that an option?

As others have said, cut off access and/or factory reset it. My LG has never been granted net access, firmware upgrades through USB drives, and streaming through Onn 4K box(w/ a 3rd party launcher) and Apple TV. No surprise ads, apps, or anything.

What do you get from upgrading the firmware? I have a 10 yo smart tv that I simply treated as a dumb tv. Works fine.

Mostly bug fixes relevant to higher end home theatre setups. Typically bleeding edge stuff where a TV is released before a new HDMI spec is fully baked or whatnot. One of my older OLED panels needed a number of updates to get proper Dolby Vision profile support a few years back.

Typically not all that relevant most of the time to the average consumer, but if you’re having a persistent annoyance it’s worth looking through release notes from time to time.

This ignores that the vast majority of consumers actually use the smart tv features like the Netflix app. Then updates start to become far more relevant and eventually mandatory.

I updated my LG C5 firmware via USB and my Nintendo Switch 2 now says “Switch 2” on the home page instead of “Unknown Device”. So that’s nice I guess. Also it seemed to fix something with the 120hz HDR 10:10:10 signal when connected to my PC if I recall correctly that before resulted in poor image quality.

I have a TCL TV where a recent firmware update actually fixed up some Arc power settings and a few other things. I only connect the TV to update it once every 6 months, and as soon as the update is done, it gets unplugged from the network again.

Sony TVs are handled by TCL now, so time will tell how Sony-branded models act (up) in the future.

https://www.tomsguide.com/tvs/sony-just-handed-its-tv-busine...

I have a Sony A95K and have kept it in basic mode because I have a shield I like to game and stream from. The sony is very minimal and out the way, and after many software updates hasn't offered me any ads, or programs to run even while connected to WiFi.

However if you run Android, you have to accept some level of snooping.

Excuse me, YOUR LG?

You can root it and put it behind a PiHole or the like, that should allow you to get rid of the worst offenders. https://www.webosbrew.org/rooting/

Jailbreak it and neuter its network stack

>but my wife was too excited to try out whatever features.

God knows how many millions of people could drive a car from 2004 forever, use small dumb screens and other appliances, etc, etc, if not for other members of their household.

I won't say I like modern vehicles, but I like side impact airbags.

I just set up a second network that can't reach the internet and connect the TVs to that

It's worse than that. I have an LG TV which I never connected to Wifi at all. Instead we use the Amazon FireStick which just contains all the same spyware that the LG TV would've had but sends it to Amazon instead.

In fact, due to DRM licensing, it's not possible to have a legit TV streaming device that isn't full of spyware and still allows you to watch streaming services like Netflix, Disney+ etc in full resolution.

I haven't had any issues with my Apple TV?

Same. I absolutely love my WOLED panel, but the software has gotten a lot worse then when I first bought it in 2022. Back then I could easily install third party apps (like youtube sponsorblock) or do custom scripts like "send mqtt topic when media playback is started/stopped", but they removed those possibilities via updates...

Would love to use a free software alternative.

I’m seeing that the old mantra is alive and kicking: "If the product is cheap/free, you are the product! Pay for the product!" Turns out that now both is true—they’ll charge you a steep price comparative to other brands, and they’ll _still_ spy on you. Why are some still defending corporations?

It’s incredible how these brands are, one by one, destroying any affinity and good will left for them (LG, Sony, Microsoft, etc.). Nowadays whenever I hear a company has a custom OS I think custom what? Custom tracking and ad pipeline? This just makes me turn elsewhere entirely, not want to "upgrade" to an even more expensive product that _might_ not track me. Might isn’t good enough.

I’ll take a cheap TCL panel with all the latest bells and whistles, and be done with it. Sure, the software will be janky, but it will be cheap and just as good at showing moving pictures, if not better. If I suspect something nefarious, I’ll get an old Android box and install a rooted system on there that I control, and use that instead of the inbuilt Android TV. But I _won’t_ be paying extra for the trouble.

It would have to be a fight to the death against trlion dollar companies, It can’t just be “don’t buy it”. What you are suggesting means companies like google meta etc. Get wiped out. There is no way they would go naturally.

I asked Claude to scan my network and check if LG tv is sending data, it said yes. Some domains were blocked by my router some were not, now Claude blocked all lg related tracking/ad domains on my router.

Domains which are blocked now.

prov-lg.alphonso.tv au.info.lgsmartad.com kic.cdpbeacon.lgtvcommon.com au.nextlgsdp.com kic.tv.wiselg.com kic.wiseconfig.lgtvcommon.com kic.homeprv.lgtvcommon.com kic.recommend.lgtvcommon.com au.elastic.lgwebostv.com

I like how you've piecemeal blocked the same subdomain 4 times. Will you do the same for the other 4-component subdomains? In fact, I'm curious what it means to "block a domain at a router".

Really? Did you give Claude the credentials to your managed switch so it could set up a mirror port? Did Claude enable promiscuous mode on your Ethernet interface? Did Claude get a master-mode WiFi AP to intercept all the frames, or did it use SDR? Tell us more about how Claude scanned your network. I am HN-curious about this!

I gave claude ssh access to my router, the router has a block list where you can block domains. It monitored the network traffic from the router.

So in trying to get one big corp from spying on you, you gave another the keys to the castle?

I really don't understand how people give models run on somebody else's server these wide-reaching permissions. Do you really trust Anthropic that much? The government that's hosting Anthropic?

"Giving the keys" doesn't necessarily mean outright cat the private key to Claude. You setup the key, configure SSH config to use it and you can just SSH to the machine without ever seeing the keys. Stop fear mongering unnecessarily.

I wasn't talking about the literal key files, I was talking about the metaphorical keys to the kingdom.

No matter how you set it up, you're giving a cloud service the ability to SSH into your private network.

Surely you must see the glaring security risk this creates?

That is a fair point I should have done with a local LLM instead of Claude.

But not exactly sure what the main issue, how can claude even access the router from the internet. Its not accessible.

How is that any different from calling Claude from any device in your local network? Or is 2 devices that much worse than 1?

You know you can monitor/reject things it attempts to do, right? For anything important I have it write scripts for what it wants to do, then I can review them for anything troubling.

> Surely you must see the glaring security risk this creates?

Enlighten me.

I would recommend reading up on the basics here:

https://www.crowdstrike.com/en-us/cybersecurity-101/cyberatt...

https://www.varonis.com/blog/what-is-c2

I don't see how that's isolated to using harnesses?

Are you going to stop using your browser? It probably has note vulnerability than you can count

> I gave claude ssh access to my router

Jesus.

I have AdGuard running in my home lab and pointed the router to the AdGuard DNS resolver. I have some general block lists and a special Smart TV block list.

I asked DeepSeek to do the same scan, but given everything goes through AdGuard it’s much simpler to sift through it’s logs. This is what I got:

  * br.rdx2.lgtvsdp.com, br.lgtvsdp.com — 1,200 hits: LG’s ad/content-delivery platform (SDP)
  * br.info.lgsmartad.com — 64 hits: LG Smart AD advertising network
  * aic.cdpsvc.lgtvcommon.com — 141 hits: LG customer-data platform (CDP)
  * aic.cdpbeacon.lgtvcommon.com — 34 hits: CDP data-collection beacon
  * aic*.lgtviot.com, *.lgthinq.com — ~410 hits: LG ThinQ / IoT cloud
  * lgtvonline.lge.com — 350 hits: LG online services / telemetry
  * br.lgeapi.com, ngfts.lge.com, aic-gfts.lge.com, snu.lge.com — ~210 hits: LG APIs + telemetry

Of those, these were already blocked:

  * rdx2.lgtvsdp.com (600/600) — LG ad platform
  * cdpsvc.lgtvcommon.com (~370) — LG customer-data platform & beacons
  * info.lgsmartad.com (78/78) — LG Smart AD
  * ibs.lgappstv.com (86/86) — LG app store
  * aic-ngfts.lge.com (36/36)

General list also catches: Netflix logs (6k), Amazon telemetry.insights.video.a2z.com (700), Datadog (600), Conviva (410), Google DoubleClick (98)

Though some domains still are going through, which are now blocked :)

DNS over HTTPS stuff wouldn't be caught by this would it?

Yknow, admitting you have no idea what you’re talking about and coming up with a solution that doesn’t actually work used to be free.

What?

Apparently, nearlyepic is trying to deliver two veiled insults and a critique of judgement or perhaps of the current state of broader affairs. I'll attempt to translate:

- "no idea what you’re talking" = "you have outsourced expertise to an LLM"

- "solution that doesn’t actually work" = "piecemeal blocking leaves many problems still active"

- "used to be free" = "you / others in general now pay LLM services for the outsourcing leading to poor solutions while in the past poor solutions came for free"

Thanks, I’ll work on accommodating the reading-comprehension-impaired in the future.

I wonder if the following scenario ever occurred inside LG when they were designing this spyware.

1. Teenagers exist

2. Teenagers hook up with other teenagers

3. Sometimes that might happen on the couch in front of the TV

If that TV records and transmits anything, who is on the hook for production and distribution of illicit materials? The parents? The kids? Or LG?

PR/legal wise this might be the worst case scenario and might even get some of those legislators and law enforcement people interested.

4. Wait for anyone to come knocking regarding illegal spying.

5. Discover there is absolutely zero enforcement if you are govt. intertwined oligarchy owned conglomerate.

6. Sell collected data (akshully it will be synthetic data "of course", wink-wink) to a legal front to a Nexus darknet laundromat. Also known as "identity verification provider or other somesuch.

7. Insurance companies legally partner with a different legal Nexus front corpo, which will ingest stolen data and make it "sythetic data" again, wink-wink; then provide it to the insurance corpos.

8. Insurance is opaquely "adjusted" to those same teenagers.

9. Profit :)

> Insurance companies legally partner with a different legal Nexus front corpo, which will ingest stolen data and make it "sythetic data" again, wink-wink; then provide it to the insurance corpos.

And, of course, sell it to the Epstein class behind closed doors for undisclosed kickbacks and favouritism.

I have an older LG Smart TV. It was cheap and big. I have never plugged it into my network, never let it on my wifi. When I turn it on, it complains for 5 sec, then displays what's on hdmi1. Works for me.

Who's selling dumb TV's again, Samsung? Who else? I'll happily pay a thousand bucks to not get screwed by my TV.

What you want to look for is called "Commercial Signage Display". These are basically large "TV" monitors that are sold to businesses like sports bars.

On Amazon, you can find a few here: https://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/industrial/18746933011... (which are mostly Samsung).

I used to go on here about Sceptre TVs, because they are relatively cheap and dumb as a brick. Was just shopping for one because of this LG news (wanted to replace my old one from 2014), and while Sceptre still lists them on their website, they tell me to go to Amazon or Walmart to buy one.

Amazon and Walmart say they are out of stock, with no expected date.

My conclusion is that Sceptre, the last holdout in the dumb TV industry, has quit in favor of focusing on monitors/displays for computers. Now I'm not sure if I'm going to ever replace my TV!

panelook.com

In Germany I like the "OK" brand from Saturn/Mediamarkt. They're Ok.

The dumb models are very cheap and the picture is faithful due to lack of framerate-doubler and other picture-enhancement shenanigans.

Don’t you worry, mid/high end TVs cost thousands of bucks and have all the same spyware

TBH only hope at this point is for BOE/PRC panel makers to thoroughly involute and for bare panels + dumb connectors make it to aliexpress, i.e. like we have after market screens for everything else. Buy a screen, buy a case, get your dumb screen. TV manufactures will absolutely not pass up ad monetization, especially Korean ones that can't survive with lower margins.

Projectors if they work for your home

Dell sells a monitor the size of a small TV (U5226KW). It's more than two thousand dollars, though.

I’m looking for a TV and it seems like dumb ones simply aren’t available anymore

Seems like the only options are:

1. Buy a smart TV and not connect it to the internet and/or physically neuter it by unplugging the Wifi/Bluetooth module. I wish there was more info about this out there as I assume there are some models that don’t allow this

2. Buy a projector. I’ve been using a cheap $80 projector for a few years due to space constraints in the apartment I was living in. Now that I’m in a larger apartment, I wanted to buy a TV. But all this has me wondering whether I should just buy a better projector

It does have the “drawback” that it can only be used after sunset (assuming you don’t have a basement or blackout curtains or something). But I find that this provides a natural hard cap to the screen time that everyone is trying so hard to cut back on

https://impecca.com/entertainment/televisions.html

These are nicely dumb and cheap.

Just keep it disconnected and enjoy the "dumb" TV with a streamer box.

The reports of user-disconnected TVs jumping on open wifis or Amazon sidewalk by themselves are not credible. All of the problems stem from connecting the TV so don't.

I would be surprised if a truly dumb TV would be as good quality as modern LGs etc for the price. Maybe I'm wrong. But please don't pay _more_ for a dumb TV.

I just got a new TV and agonized over how to get one that was dumb. I wasn't confident that it would be sufficiently dumb at the time of purchase, but I got a TCL QM6K. This was incidentally recommended by the 4K TV subreddit as one of the cheaper "good" TVs that you can buy this year, which I was glad to read, because I don't particularly care about agonizing over TV hardware details and I was glad to outsource that train of thought.

I set the TV up and was immediately pleased. The first thing it did was ask me if I wanted "smart" or "basic" mode. I selected basic mode, skipped the network connection, and disagreed to as many policies as it would let me. One week in, it hasn't nagged me a single time to connect to the internet or tried to push any other BS on me. I have it hooked up to an Apple TV and my Switch, and it seems to just work.

So yeah, I hope I'm not jinxing something here, but TCL was a great way to go for a delightful dumb TV experience.

Basic mode is a feature across Google TV: https://support.google.com/googletv/answer/10408998?hl=en

So lots of manufacturers support this.

This Linus Tech Tips video from ~4 months ago is probably useful then.

"I bought a TV with NO 'Smart' Features": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJh72_O4pXE

It's pretty much "this is cheap, but the picture quality turns out to be crap". :(

If you only watch at night, then a pull-down screen and a projector work great.

Until smart projectors are a thing, I suppose...

Boy, how I would like LG to be sued out of existence.

Not possible. They are part of the chaebol [1], meaning they are essentially part of the South Korean government. They can't really fail as long as the country exists. There's an old joke that South Korea isn't really a country, but five families/companies pretending to be one and there's some truth to this.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaebol

It is possible because South Korea does not have control in other states. Even if chaebol is powerful they still heavily depend on export profits. They can't help themselves if EU/USA consumers and governments take this scandal seriously.

Bankrupting a whole, large national economy is a bit trickier than boycotting a company.

I mean, someone like Trump is probably capable of doing it from the inside, but Korea's educational standards are too high to elect him...

Remember the story about the South Korean female president or whatever their title is being a brainwashed puppet of a radical feminist cult and thus had to abdicate as this came out? I don't remember how many years ago that was, but it's not like their education prevented the situation.

~"ACR is an OPT-IN feature"

If ACR is turned on when I install an app, and click 'next', 'next', 'open' then that is not an OPT-IN feature.

If I have to perform an action to not have ACR during normal use of the TV then that is OPT-OUT in my opinion.

Is there an open firmware for LGs?

I think this is the important question. I've been searching, but all I found were deprecated and incomplete projects. If anyone knows some actual current development, even incomplete ones, let us know.

Huh. I never considered this. Hacking TVs with firmware would be a great project for LLMs to fuzz.

Heck, it'd be a great project for people too.

Gamer Nexus videos are hackneyed and their methodology is haphazard. There was no systematic analysis or procedure. There was no structured explanation of the situation. Various risks and capabilities and actual activity has been conflated.

If IoT devices like this do connect to open WiFi and use those connections, without asking or notifying the user or seeking consent, then that is a breach of ethics. My neighbor's open WiFi, my employer's open WiFi, have not authorized LG to access.

But if LG does connect to random and unknown networks, then they should not be surprised when they find themselves in a forest of pineapples, so to speak. I would like to see some Smart TVs set up in a cyberwarfare range, and what activity could be elicited when they elect to connect to a non-standard network.

The hours of video evidence overlaid with network capture and interviews with security researchers and lawyers they released is not enough for you?

I’m curious, what would meet your bar for investigativ journalism if that didn’t?

The crazy part of this is that LG did not fear flat out admitting they do fingerprint the audio of what you watch. I already knew that, but I can't imagine it's common knowledge yet. How long ago was it that that would have been the crazy untrue accusation?

Not defending LG's stance, but hasn't LG always said they do this as part of ACR (automatic content recognition) for the purposes of targeted advertising?

LG says it's opt in, and I think the devil is really in the details about what the consent screen says, but the only way I think it would be a "crazy accusation" is if LG was doing this without consent.

They're not doing it with consent. LG still covertly takes screenshots of everything you display on your screen even when you set every available option that's supposed to stop this:

https://www.reddit.com/r/LGOLED/s/x8iBNCPya5

And there are cases of LG re-enabling these ACR options without your consent when they push firmware updates, and even randomly without updating, at which point the TV will send all the past and present ACR data it's harvested from you to LG, without your consent:

https://www.reddit.com/r/webos/s/Vn0jFhKsXO

https://www.reddit.com/r/LGOLED/s/wRFMmQHXHG

ACR is a documented feature so they can't deny that it exists. https://lgads.tv/technology/ https://www.consumerreports.org/electronics/privacy/how-to-t... (note that this is from a year ago)

Devices that connect to open wifi networks is insane; not sure if LG does, but other devices do. Scary, as this is illegal/leads to legal liability, exposure, leakage, etc when you are close to a neighbors open network.

Honestly an incredible and educational video. The sheer effort of what went into this is astounding.

All my TVs are LG and I bought a fancy one for my mother and sisters. Now I'm having nightmares and trying to figure out what the hell to do.

Taking them off the wifi and changing your wifi password seems to be all you need to do. While they are technically capable to look for open wifi, this is not something they do out of the box, as far as my understanding goes.

Correct, no one has ever provided a case of this actually happening on any TV model.

But that doesn't stop people from repeating it any time someone gives the incredibly straightforward suggestion to just disconnect WiFi if you're concerned about intrusive monitoring.

Somewhat off topic but also ironic - I recently upgraded my version of Android, and when I opened YouTube for the first time on this video it asked for permission to detect nearby devices. I get why it would need that to cast, but at this point it's not paranoia to think that granting that permission just means it would scan whenever I have the app open and upload the data to YouTube servers for no good reason.

YouTube can cast to TVs on a local subnet and is looking for them. This isn't new. What's new is that Android now warns when an app starts poking around on your LAN.

Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49645480

I'm so tired of "smart" tech. I don't want my TV, or fridge, or dryer or anything connecting to wifi and bluetooth and having an app to manage settings. It's hard to believe there's demand for any of these terrible "features". The peak of smart tech were watches you could do math on.

Oh no ... I think you do actually want those. It's quite amazing to receive a notification from your dryer that it finished its cycle.

What you do not want instead is :

- being mandatory

- requiring a proprietary application

- expecting the app to force onto you services

- expecting the setup to fail and making the hardware unusable over time

because honestly when it does work, it's great. It's really not the features that are problematic, it's the predatory surveillance and locking down way to provide them that is absolutely horrible.

> I think you do actually want those.

No, I rather know I do not.

> It's quite amazing to receive a notification from your dryer that it finished its cycle.

It’s really quite useless to me.

What I may want is an ODB so I can plug in whatever external observation and possibly control plane I wish, were I so inclined (I am not), and could make my device smart. Hell for a dryer you could probably have a plug or panel feeding into HA and send an alert based on load.

Anything that’s “smart” out of the box is rife for abuse and will eventually sink into that.

Well that's the point, you do want information in and out, including the ability to send instructions. Call it "smart" or "connected" or whatever marketing words you prefer, the point is having affordances that give you agency.

So yes I insist you do want those, just not in the way it's been currently forced. IMHO you are right to reject this as it is but wrong to reject the possibilities when done right.

We are just so disgusted by the way it's currently done that we reject the entire possibly. Quite sad really.

Edit: I have been using HA daily for years now. Smart plugs work and are useful but it's rarely enough. You can infer the device state based on instant consumption but you can't convenient control back.

I have a speech recognition standing fan with touch button. Its terrible. The voice is loud, the touch controls dont register very well, give me a dumb thing with physical buttons please!

I'm not advocating for touchless smart devices, I'm advocating for optional interface we can use to operate our appliances without having to rely on the manufacturers app and/or server.

But that's the problem: as soon as you move control inwards to the software, and add more accessibility (smart watch, voice control, whatever), you have a sophisticated, hidden control layer.

How do you know that your dryer won't lock onto an open wifi? How do you know that your smart TV won't download malware? You don't.

Contrarily, if you accept that you only hear the dryer "DONE!" bell if you are within 20' or so, you can be certain that the dryer is yours and yours alone.

I think I agree with the parent more. For one, not all "smart" appliances are made equal. You can see the appeal of some of them if there was no customer abuse, like with smart TVs. But things like smart microwaves are a harder sell. In practice, lots of smart devices are made with one purpose - to remove methods of configuring it on-device and instead forcing you into using the manufacturer's app. Many of them offer no benefits over their non-smart equivalents, and whatever benefits are there are usually solutions in search of a problem.

And I think their point is that, even with strong legislation, giving every device unlimited internet connectivity is a siren song for the corporations which will always be incentivized to shoehorn their interests into the product you own. Things like control through external connectors, on-device modifiable configurations, only local connectivity or flashable firmware would not qualify as 'smart' but would go a long way to do the things you're looking for without giving them the physical possibility of future abuse.

Internet connectivity as a requirement is an instant red flag ... but it doesn't mean we should have appliances we can't control.

This false dichotomy is precisely the problem. I DO want to program my hardware, even ones with actuators, but I do NOT want for this to happen to rely on the infrastructure of the manufacturer if I don't explicit ask for it.

My dryer makes a "beep" sound when it's done. Not sure what would I gain if it played on my phone instead.

Some people have their dryer far away from where they usually are and cannot hear it, like me. Although I do put a timer for N hours to remind myself rather than having a "smart" dryer.

I do like "smart" lights that are based on presence, and various sensors and "smart" automatic irrigation, but don't see much point in home appliances being connected to my phone/network.

What if you could start the drier at ~1pm when the solar panels are at peak capacity even though you are not home?

I think we tend to forget that many things can be implemented without "smart" features / wifi access / apps. Ie my 20 year old oven has a "start time" feature. It just uses the built in clock.

I don't think I know of any (big) appliance, e.g. dish washer, drier, washing machine with that option but to be honest I didn't dig deep, is it possible?

Timers have been on appliances since Desi first yelled at Lucy. Yes, it's possible.

Question: if these run Android, and are rootable (unknown to me) is there open source software that can provide basic TV functionality?

Original Youtube title of the video I got a few hours ago was: "LG’s Manipulative, Gaslighting Response to GN Report"

Either they changed it for some legal reason, or Youtube allows for A/B testing of multiple titles for engagement.

YouTube encourages A/B testing of both titles and thumbnails, but it could be either.

It's almost certainly A/B test. Essentially everyone does it.

You can even sometimes see when a list of videos on YT first loads and a given video has one title, and it suddenly switches to another without you reloading the page.

On several channels I watch, I've noticed the top comment is always along the lines of "who was here when the video title was XYZ" because you know it's going to change.

Have you noticed that has become more common recently? Because I have. It seems over the past 3/4 months, reload and see a new title happens pretty much daily to me (it also seems to work because sometimes it causes me to click the video I didn't click with the old title).

It was announced in December and took a while to catch.

https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/393332200/you-can-...

Youtube allows you to AB test with up to 3 titles and thumbnails.

I hate how this has become so normal. It degrades trust when people are fed different versions of the same experience without being informed. How are you supposed to reference something when the title changes without notice? Makes me feel like I’m going crazy sometimes.

We should start whitelisting the domains that is allowed from router. Otherwise, these smart shitty ads companies will never take responsibility.

I just had a crazy idea: Are there any ways we (consumers) could leverage the (bad) DMCA "anti-circumvention" laws?

Ex:

1. The noise happening in my house is copyrighted.

2. I protected my copyright by blocking the TV from transmitting it to known manufacturer domains.

3. By switching to obfuscated domains or alternate transmission paths, the manufacturer started circumventing my copyright controls.

... I suppose the boring answer will be that the literally-unreadable stack of Terms Of Service has some "everything we ever do is permitted by you" clause.

No.

Now bend over, citizen

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