I’m Terrified of My New TV
brennancenter.org
brennancenter.org
"Please be aware that if your spoken words include personal or other sensitive information, that information will be among the data captured and transmitted to a third party."
I don't think there is a prison horrible enough to send these people to. There is NO legitimate reason that an always-on audio feed from your home should be sent to third parties. People shouldn't even be allowed to opt-in to something like that. No one would EVER knowingly allow this, regardless of the functionality it enabled.
I cannot envision a circumstance in which this "feature" was not put in at the direct request of law enforcement. I am extremely disappointed that he did not name the manufacturer of this TV in the article (unless he made it all up to get clicks). If this is legitimate, he needs to post the manufacturer's name and they need be boycotted, immediately, forever. Consumers need to adopt a scorched earth strategy with companies like this.
Voice Recognition
You can control your SmartTV, and use many of its features, with voice commands.
If you enable Voice Recognition, you can interact with your Smart TV using your voice. To provide you the Voice Recognition feature, some voice commands may be transmitted (along with information about your device, including device identifiers) to a third-party service that converts speech to text or to the extent necessary to provide the Voice Recognition features to you. In addition, Samsung may collect and your device may capture voice commands and associated texts so that we can provide you with Voice Recognition features and evaluate and improve the features. Please be aware that if your spoken words include personal or other sensitive information, that information will be among the data captured and transmitted to a third party through your use of Voice Recognition.
If you do not enable Voice Recognition, you will not be able to use interactive voice recognition features, although you may be able to control your TV using certain predefined voice commands. While Samsung will not collect your spoken word, Samsung may still collect associated texts and other usage data so that we can evaluate the performance of the feature and improve it.
You may disable Voice Recognition data collection at any time by visiting the “settings” menu. However, this may prevent you from using all of the Voice Recognition features."
More likely: There is a button on the remote to make users believe they have the ability to disable voice data relay to someone's remote servers.
What are the chances such TVs will have network controlled power-up capability? You only think you turned it off.
It's funny that people seem to be accepting always-on GSM network connectivity of the electronics in control of their cars, but oh my god, not the TV!
The TV can't drive you at 100MPH into a palm tree on remote command.
Just to be clear, I think 'smart TVs with network connected microphones' is a completely insane idea. Another on a long list of hanging offenses.
Dude. I stare at my TV. If it stares back, that's scary! And if it's listening to me!?!? All the time?
The messed up part is that ALL of our devices will soon be watching and listening to us. Our thermostats, our smoke detectors, our TVs, our phones ... I just installed a fancy internet connected lock on my door. In fact, I installed a fancy electronic toilet seat too... oh well.
Shit, I'm not. OnStar freaks me the fuck out; one of many reasons I'll never buy a GM car.
'TV Install Samsung Super Social Awesome App, Yes, Yes Yes'
This is what I don't get. I used to play with Microsoft's SpeechAPI back in 2007 and it was pretty decent at real-time speech recognition - almost perfect, if you limited your program to a pre-defined command grammar. It was all done completely off-line, real-time on a machine that had much less processing power than your average smartphone of today. I don't see anything inherent in speech recognition that would require so much processing power that the phone can't handle it real-time. The only reason I see is that continuous moving of everything to cloud because it's easier to capture revenue stream that way.
EDIT: I'm also one of those guys who's like "no I'm not signing up to X service because they don't need more data about me" but I get the double-edged sword and how more of the right data makes certain decisions easier.
I don't think it's trivial, but I hope to see some regulations coming in the way the data are collected and stored.
Unfortunately, even YCombinator, just like a vast majority of tech companies, are guilty of supporting this notion. There is no respect or regard for privacy and ownership of your person. if it escapes your flesh and bones, it is deemed fair game to harvest by anyone. You and your actions and your speech and your image and your location are a commodity to be optimized for profit. Say moo, mothertrucker.
Of course command grammars are recognized on the device, otherwise you wouldn't be able to turn your TV on using a command or use basic functions in a speedy manner.
And, of course they send audio data to a server -- because your TV does not have a complete language model for up to date web search or even tv guide installed a priori. i.e. good reasons that have nothing to do with "capturing revenue stream".
Sigh...
The issue is not about the intent of the manufacturer. Noble intent or not, the story is about what is enabled by this device. Any time you rely on noble intent of a 3rd party you are putting a lot of trust in them. Especially when those third parties can monetize your data without you ever knowing about it.
Technology provides the tools for mass surveilance and globally undermining trust, but it also provides tools for removing the need for trust, and apparently this smart TV adopts a "just trust us" approach.
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/17616994/offline-speech-r...
Sadly, it appears that Google voice recognition follows yuor network connection, so you can't keep it in offline-recognition mode unless you turn off networking when talking.
Among other things, running the radios all the time to send audio to the cloud would be a battery-killer.
Voice recognition for it isn't always-on - I have to press a button on the remote. It's like siri, surely, in that whatever you say to it gets shunted off to a third party API that recognises words?
Samsung Smart TV's have this feature, so you can turn them on by voice. My wife's parents, sister and brother each have one.
People are buying a TV because they want a TV, not a mini computer. Why would TV manufacturers want to jack up the price of their product with non-essential TV components to have onboard voice recognition?
I am saddened that the data needs to fly off to the other side of the world, particularly when dictation and speaking to a device can be done offline: see Dragon Naturally Speaking, Apple offline dictation on OSX, and a Nokia from 15 years ago that would respond to simple voice commands like BLUETOOOOOOTH (yes, you had to shout it), plus the dumb Bluetooth interface in my car that I have to stop and speak to in order to pair devices with it etc.
They can't guarantee what you or anyone in range of the microphone will say while giving the TV a command, which gets sent off to be processed.
That's enough to warrant the warning.
If I want to provide a real-time audio feed from my home to Samsung, then that is my choice to make.
If government is to do anything here, it's to make sure that there's a minimum standard of notification which is required for these devices. Maybe something like an explicit opt-in for any feature which transmits data to third parties. That's something I could get behind.
But banning it? No way.
The problem is they live in a completely self centered world where profit must be maximized. This is why this results in less secure devices by design. This is why you need regulation.
You leave it to the companies, they will almost always decide based on profit. Even if it results in a totally insecure product. See:http://iss.oy.ne.ro/Aether
For example the choice of accepting Samsung's TOS could be bundled with the choice of flatsharing with someone. Or being a guest of someone. If you need to refuse attending a party because you've made the choice of disagreeing with Samsung's TOS, you're forced.
It is a classic feature of commercial products: Bundle the choice with something much bigger (such as: socializing) so people don't really have the choice of saying no. Worth saying that if phones were invented under a European jurisdiction, they'd be full of infinite more or less relevant option lists. Ironically that's probably why they weren't born there.
You can solve this problem by making consumers being informed – by forcing manufacturers to provide clear information about the services which are being given, and any privacy risks. That's something I thoroughly support.
But I absolutely reject the idea of outright banning technologies. It's not even a slippery slope – it's a vertical cliff.
People like you infuriate me to no end. The fact is that a lot of consumers are willing to trade privacy for convenience, price, etc. Privacy just doesn't weigh much in those people's list of priorities. I'm glad we still have a semblance of free market capitalism because if people like you had their way, a lot of modern technologies simply wouldn't exist. That being said, I personally won't be getting that TV.
Second, I wouldn't personally feel OK with that outcome but I would also recognize that most people do (given your premise) and that I have no authority over their personal choices.
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2011/oct/...
Simply because you don't personally have the wealth to purchase a congressional seat of your very own doesn't change the fact that when 85% of them are essentially decided by the money spent that they are basically "buying" the win at that point.
So to claim the free market doesn't create an Orwellian total surveillance society is pretty much false across the board.
1) In the "free market", you have Google, Amazon, and a number of other businesses that try to build that sort of capability to profile their customers for advertising and sales purposes.
2) In the "government where majority power is purchased through the application of money", we have the NSA which engages in both commercial and military espionage.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/09/nsa-spying-braz... http://www.bbc.com/news/25907502
etc.
So when you say the NSA is divorced from the free market, I think you are delusional and/or ignorant. I find it scary that people don't seem to understand that the majority of power in government is essentially paid for and if your sponsors don't like you...the money dries up. So unless you are independently wealthy [on the scale of being a billionaire] and can just self-finance every single campaign, you aren't really an independent agent but instead doing your best to balance who "bought" your vote to minimize the damage.
For example, if you send an always-on sound feed from your living room (or phone) to Google for voice recognition purposes, should it be subject to fourth amendment protections? Because this isn't possible by technical means or through market competition - it can only be achieved by legislation.
* Edited for grammar
Will you have a choice? If they profit enough, there may not be any non-surveillance models left in a few years.
The free market does wonders, but sometimes laws are a better tool. Eg, you can't sell a house that doesn't meet fire code, whether the buyer would accept it or not. There's too much danger that they don't understand, or that the next buyer won't, or that they're coerced by having no other options, etc.
Or you could just, you know, not buy that crap, and let the market sort it out?
Voice makes a good interface for these devices, but I do agree that privacy is a concern.
I guess if you want more features the smart tv provides this is something you have to get accustomed to.
If you haven't seen Laura Poitras' profile of William Binney recently, watch it again: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/23/opinion/the-national-secur... When this came out (pre Snowden), many techies pooh-poohed the suggestion that phones could be turned into remote microphones. In hindsight everything he says has either been verified or is quite plausible.
So why make it easier for a future big brother by building (let alone buying) internet devices with voice recognition? While they may be cool at a technology level, given the current political path we're building the infrastructure for a future dystopian society.
I can. In an eCommerce app we were thinking of building, we wanted voice search and voice "buy" so that people only had to tap images of what they wanted. We weren't planning to give them an option either. It was scrapped because of a lack of budget and it seemed like the gimmick wouldn't be enough for anyone to care.
The technical limitations of the TV market makes sending the audio data to a 3rd party [e.g. Google's voice recognition servers] a necessity.
That said, I fully expect this feature is capable of remote activation for "tech support" purposes and that it can be enabled at the request of law enforcement. But honestly, if you are getting pissed off about the TV over law enforcement concerns...they can do the same damned thing with your cell phone. Are you keeping it inside a fridge or something? No?
Luckily most things use HTTP so you can actually filter based on the URL it's trying to access. For example, permitting software updates, but denying any kind of analytics reporting.
And with VPN on your phone (especially Always-On VPN) you can filter the requests from your phone with the same granularity, which is even more eye-opening.
Outbound filtering is incredibly useful if you value your security and privacy.
Also, there is no reason why all these functions should be built into a TV. I believe that the TV should be a monitor and thats it. We dont even need to have a TV tuner anymore. Just add 6 HDMI ports or more and I will add whatever function i want.
[Edited]
Some other options include Sonicwall and pfsense, and I encourage others to post their suggestions as well. I haven't used SonicWall, though I have used pfsense strictly as a firewall.
(0) http://www.sophos.com/en-us/products/free-tools/sophos-utm-h...
I don't like the idea of having to keep a desktop/laptop computer on 24/7.
Reading the forums there are some dual LAN Atom based mini PCs that seem OK.
Edit: Also http://store.netgate.com/Desktop-Systems-C83.aspx has some preconfigured options at under $300.
If you do not want to financially support pfSense, you can buy hardware from Netgate directly, starting from $299. Even cheaper as a kit or with older hardware, but you decide for yourself whether it will be adequate for you. I'm planning on buying an assembled APU from Netgate for myself; right now I'm using m0n0wall on a separate P3 PC (Celeron 1000), modded for silence. Probably will try out pfSense beforehand, on a separate CF card I just ordered.
Reviews suggest pfsense runs well, and with 4GB RAM and a decent SSD one could probably run snort and squid as well. Probably about $330 all assembled.
It's almost analagous to the "nutrition facts" that you get on food. A standard baseline so you can know what's going on.
The irony is that as people justifiably push for "more security", more and more of them are going to use HTTPS or other encrypted transports, making it impossible to determine what information they're transferring just from network inspection.
End-to-end encryption is a good thing only if you trust both endpoints and don't want MITMs to interfere. Otherwise, it's security being used against you.
When these smart device manufacturers "smarten up" and start encrypting everything (likely with no options to disable and/or e.g. install self-signed certificates - naturally, because of "security reasons"), it'll be all-or-nothing.
When I said HTTP, I meant to include HTTPS. Intercepting HTTPS and filtering it is actually rather simple, and avoiding certificate warnings only slightly less so by deploying your own CA.
You're correct that some devices may use certificate pinning to prevent me from doing this, but for those devices my solution is simple: They're denied Internet access entirely.
Edit: As a manufacturer/vendor you have zero expectation of privacy from me the consumer. I bought the device, I bought the equipment that runs the network, I pay to keep the device connected to the Internet, I get the final say on which packets your app receives. Any vendor who believes otherwise is mistaken and should be named and shamed.
At the end of the day my current tv does what I need to do (ie act as a big monitor) without an internet connection. Given the number of devices already floating around here for browsing the web, I don't really need my tv to do that. For streaming I have Chromecast or whatever.
I get that tv makers want to sell me something, but they're really bad anyway at the convergence - so the best option for me is just to use it as a screen and get devices to do what I want.
The only real motivation to get a new tv is if the current one breaks. I replace all the other living room devices a lot more frequently than the tv.
But the point of bothering to read the terms is well worth knowing so I appreciate the article.
If I didn't have an HTPC in front of my NAS, I would probably connect it again. But I don't need or want any of the network features. The apps are stupid. Browsing with the crappy remote is an exercise in extreme frustration. And I hardly ever watch youtube from my couch, so "throwing" content to the TV is pointless for me.
I can understand why some people would really like some of the "smart" tv features, but all my other devices that I connect to the tv have enough smarts in them anyway. Quite happy using my tv as a dumb monitor.
I suppose the economics aren't as straightforward, but I'm of the opinion that Chromecast, Roku, AppleTV, etc are the next layer of crippleware. A small form factor Windows box or a Mac Mini are superior to every set top media player on the market in every category but price. I've never seen a better interface on a media appliance. A wireless mouse always trumps a remote. But most importantly, you don't need the manufacturer to strike deals with Netflix/HBO/Hulu, you just need a web browser. The best interfaces for all of those services are the full websites. Not to mention all of the other features you get with a full blown computer.
Don't forget convenience. That is not a little thing.
While I agree that the "media" capabilities of so-called smart tv's suck, it isn't necessarily a conscious decision of the purchaser.
TV's typically fall into various tiers:
Basic Advanced Premium
The Media/App capabilities are usually bundled into the higher tiers, along with other feature upgrades (including size). Eventually as manufacturers find new things to charge money for, what were premium features become standard features on all sets.
In theory, the same could be said for Chromecast, since the casting server isn't something that Google sets up, but rather a feature the media company adds to their own app / service (which is relatively easy to do). For all intents and purposes, it's an app-driven web browser for your TV with the ability to stream video.
Personally, I'm a huge fan of using the actual netflix app to stream things to my television - same goes for youtube, pandora, class6ix, plex, and all the other apps I use to cast to my TVs and Stereos around the apt every day. I don't miss the wireless keyboard / mouse in the slightest.
Absolutely not. I do not want a mouse being used at my couch. I do not want my movie interrupted with Windows Update. I do not want to fiddle with XBMC or some other hacked together, unintegrated system.
I subscribe to the Unix philosophy when it comes to my home entertainment. I have a stereo that only plays audio. I have a TV that only plays video. I have a set-top box that only streams content. I have a DVD player than only plays discs. The last thing I need is a computer sitting in my living room making demands of me that are not related to the function I need it for.
I can read ebooks on my phone or desktop, but a Kindle, as a dedicated device, is much better suited to that purpose. That's why I have a Roku. There will never be a mousepad on the arm of my couch.
Would you at least concede that everything else being equal, there is no faster input to start media than with a mouse? Every TV/Set Top remote interface I've ever used requires at least 3x the steps of the equivalent with a mouse, because you have a D-Pad. Maybe DVD players are even, but any menu based system is crippled by design, because you cant scroll or point.
A mouse is completely unnecessary when you just have a grid or a list, a directional pad is more than sufficient. You can scroll just by going to the bottom of the list and continuing to go past that, which is how all menus work. It's not about how many steps it takes with a remote vs a mouse, it's about the UX of that specific UI. I don't want a desk in front of my couch. That's what remotes solve. I have a computer in my office and a media player in my living room, and I don't want to trade that for anything.
Can media player UIs be improved? Yep. With a mouse? Not in my opinion.
It is _completely_ about how many steps it takes.
It can go the other way too. UI is there to get out of your way. Lesser clicks is ok; but not at the expense of too many option, because I have to think about options. Like the gas pump that asks if I want a car wash. Wha? How did car washes get into the conversation?
I'm happy you have the options you want. I also have the options I want. I don't want a mouse to navigate my media player, and I can't agree that the mouse is the best option for that use. A mouse is great for navigating a web page where the links are scattered everywhere or through a document where you might need to click at any point to begin editing, but for structured lists, even on a computer, I navigate with the arrow keys (and occasionally pgup/pgdn/home/endm giving me an 8-way d-pad). My list is straight up and down and straight side to side, I don't need to go 10 degrees up and to the right.
I use an iPhone and iPad because I don't want to dick around with file structure and patching and rooting and rom'ing. I use a Roku because I don't want to organize my own content and make my own media player. I get enough of all of that when I'm working.
For the 99.9% of interactions with the system the remote is superior to a mouse.
1: http://www.amazon.com/Ortek-Windows-Infrared-Receiver-Ultima...
No remote control is going to come close to that sort of convenience. A wireless mouse certainly doesn't qualify.
Most of these devices are priced at less than $50. Chromecast, Amazon Fire TV Stick, a Roku. I don't know where you're finding multiple hundred dollar devices.
> A small form factor Windows box or a Mac Mini are superior to every set top media player on the market in every category but price
My Roku is cheaper, quieter, uses less power, uses a real remote, doesn't require any installation or maintenance aside from initially inputting my username/passwords. I can search Netflix/Amazon/Hulu from one search bar on my home screen. I don't see any advantages a full PC has other than "it does things unrelated to TV", which I just don't care about. I don't want to write emails or check Facebook from my TV.
>The best interfaces for all of those services are the full websites.
For using them on a computer, maybe. But interfaces need to be different for different devices. What works on a 14" laptop or 24" monitor does not work well on a 60" TV. For example, Steam's Big Picture mode vs the desktop mode for gaming.
Price is a pretty big deal. The SFF Windows box or Mac Mini, however, are inferior to Chromecast in a number of other ways, however: size, power consumption, setup effort, etc.
> A wireless mouse always trumps a remote.
A wireless mouse requires a surface. A remote doesn't. Nor does my phone (the main control I use with a Chromecast). So, no, I don't think a wireless mouse always trumps a remote, particularly for typical living room media control use.
> The best interfaces for all of those services are the full websites.
I've used Netflix on a number of devices, including using the full website. IMO, the full website certainly has the most appropriate UI for desktop/laptop use, but equally certainly is not the best UI for typical living room use.
> Not to mention all of the other features you get with a full blown computer.
Sure, a full blown computer is great, but tying it up as an STB isn't a particularly efficient use of resources given most people's STB use cases. Especially when with many much cheaper set-top devices you can get much of the effect of having the full-blown computer that you use connected to the TV without having it dedicated to that purpose as an STB.
Seems like the old way of "buy a TV, buy a VCR, plug them together" was much better. It's like software: use components so that each can be the best of breed and can be updated independently.
But if TVs start phoning home on their own terms, without my WiFi password or Ethernet cable, then it becomes terrifying.
I'd say, if there's a corporate reason to want data from the TV even if the consumer doesn't connect their Ethernet/wifi, the cost and complexity of adding in cell connectivity isn't very high these days.
None of my tvs have anything but video inputs.
I use dell monitors, and for my large screens, NEC commercial displays. They are as dumb as dumb can be.
Smartphones have virtually all of the capabilities that make the author fear his smart TV, only the smartphone is, if anything, even more dangerous because it is more ubiquitous.
People carry their phones around everywhere, and the phones are usually constantly on and equally capable of monitoring your every word and action that you perform on them.
If you value privacy but own a smartphone, you've already lost.
The more powerful and well connected a device is, the less privacy its users tend to have.
Unlike dumb phones, today's smartphones usually have built-in GPS capabilities, with relatively high-speed internet connections, powerful processors, a wealth of apps for their users to put their personal data in, and tight integration with social media.
There was a time when spy agencies would have killed to plant devices with these sorts of surveillance capabilities on their marks. Today billions keep them on their persons at all times -- willingly, gladly even.
I use Paranoid Android, and I know my S4 can still use its radio to spy on me, but at least the OS itself isn't.
In the so-called Internet of Things we're headed for, computers may be all-pervasive, wearable, embedded in everything, unobtrusive, practically indetectable and inescapable.
They are likely to be always communicating with the other computers all around them, and privacy will be a dream of the past.
Unfortunately, counter-surveillance technology does not appear to be keeping pace with surveillance technology, and since most people don't yet seem to care about being surveyed, there isn't much of a market for it.
On the other side, most companies (and their oh-so-helpful tech enablers) love to spy on their users, and see nothing wrong with doing so (or at least don't let any moral qualms stand in the way of a profit). So there is a lot of incentive for spying and little incentive for not spying.
Consciousness is slowly starting to emerge among the general population that this is happening, but there doesn't seem to be much of a backlash. Few are taking a stand.
EMP ?
I value my privacy, and trust (hope?) that my phone isn't transmitting that sort of stuff. If it did, I think it would be discovered and made public very quickly, and I would switch phones! But since the TV straight out says that it transmits my personal information, and I have no reason to doubt it, I'll be sure to not use that TV, or at least not connect it to the Internet.
We can trust others to safeguard our privacy, as a sort of calculated risk. But this TV is just saying out loud that it won't do that, so I'll avoid that model.
I plan on just blocking it in my router, but who knows if the TV scans around for open hotspots. If I were a "smart" developer Id store everything locally if offline, then dump to the manufacturer if it ever does get a connection. Not my problem if the feds happen to be "selecting" for that dump somewhere upstream...really not my problem if they have a dragnet FISA warrant for the data.
Where is that noble hacker who'll make a tutorials on how to destroy smart TV WiFI radios?!
This stuff doesn't need a butlerian jihad, it needs a DIY surge.
Of course, one could certainly rationally choose to forgo that convenience in favour of increased privacy. I'm just saying the smart features aren't worthless.
Heck, I can DIY it myself but I don't, because smart TVs have the apps and features that are baseline useful. And because it's integrated, I don't need to make sure to turn on some other device to get access.
(Now it may not be designed to do that, of course, but we're both responding to <lurchpop>'s hypothetical.)
But what matters is if someone that is in a position to actually provide such TVs (and do a decent enough job producing and marketing them) to let the market decide. I know the HackerNews community has much more awareness of this issue than most people but it is something a fairly large number of people care about.
Bear in mind the vast majority of consumers never even glance at a privacy policy, and would only interpret a "privacy TV" as "a TV with fewer features"
A manufacturer only needs to provide an opt-out on these smart tvs for the few people who care about their illusory privacy anyway, and that 'privacy tv' market dies before it's even born.
You can already buy non-smart tvs anyway. I have one. It cost ~$100.00 and was made by some company I've never heard of. The only selling point for such things is their cheapness.
Most of the features are also stuff that I don't even know what does, it's just confusing. The plan might be to confuse customers into buying the most expensive TV, so they don't feel like they're missing out on something.
The first manufacturer to produce a cheap TV marketed as "HD TV, it does Netflix too" should in my mind be able to get a good number of customers.
My TV should not require a 30 second bootup time before it can do anything if powered on cold, my TV should not crash because it has been on too long and there is a memory leak in the YahooWidgets/JavaScript engine it uses for apps, my TV should just focus on doing a really good job of displaying images from one or more sources of other boxes which are small and cheap enough to be upgraded every couple of years (unlike a TV which I upgrade far less).
Let me worry if those external boxes are invading my privacy or not, but my TV really needs to be stupid enough that it isn't even possible, if only for practical reasons.
Edit: It was also logging network folders. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6778397
But looking at the way people buy ACs and refrigerators, I think a "privacy rating" of some kind might work. So a "smart TV" that monitors & reports everything you do ought to get a 1-star while another that zealously guards your privacy and uses explicit opt-ins may get 4- or 5-stars.
Disconnecting it from the internet and possibly even sabotaging the wifi module will ensure that prying eyes will not have access to your information.
Caveat emptor doesn't go away with time. And I don't believe trying to use the hammer of legislation on the various hooks of businesses is an effective or even ethical way to try to "solve" it.
https://accessibility.sky.com/privacy-cookie-notice
Not many people know that an entire profile about what program's you watch on your sky box are linked with the websites you browse through their broadband service to build a profile about you. It's one of the reasons their tv + broadband deal here in the uk is so competitive. Personalised tv ads are then served.
They eventually admitted they were working on voice recognition after strong customer demand, because that was much more promising; the machine vision stuff could only detect things like age, gender and income level. Yes, that's mining the content of conversations in the public space (like aforementioned bus stop) and generating ads on nearby real estate accordingly. Launching in Asia in 2015.
Also had a 1 hour conversation in a private meeting room at another conference a couple years ago with three sharp representatives from a certain Asian TV manufacturer that may or may not have been mentioned in this thread. I was stuck by how far they had already gone applying machine learning to their customer activity. They were multiplying their efforts and investments in the space and were very excited about the new generation of TVs that go beyond passively showing you content, because of all the data they would be able to get as a result...
I know this is meant as a pseudo-joke and I know there are going to be a ton of comments here on why the guy is overreacting, but is the tin foil hat really useful anymore? We have demonstrated proof that things like this have been exploited on purpose in the past few years.
Instead of the tin foil being representative of the crazy person - it now almost seems like common sense. Is that scary to anyone else?
I wonder sometimes: if things like this had existed in the 50s and 60s would we ever have had a Martin Luther King? Or would such things have been picked up at their earliest stages by the data miners and nipped in the bud? Would Ginsburg have read Howl in Golden Gate Park? Would there have been a summer of love, underground basement punk shows, raves? What new civil rights movements or fascinating spontaneous emergences of culture are being silently suppressed today? Is that kind of culture jamming really going on? I really do wonder.
I also wonder about the seeming asymmetry. I see protestors in Hong Kong using mobile phones to organize, yet over here it seems as if the same technologies are being used to enforce the most toxic aspects of the status quo instead of challenging them.
Here's a possibly-relevant excerpt from an article I wrote for CNET on the topic (before I left earlier this year to found http://recent.io/):
...Project Shamrock had a "watch list" of people whose conversations would be identified and plucked out of the ether by NSA computers. It was initially intended to be used for foreign intelligence purposes, but at its peak, 600 American citizens appeared on the list, including singer Joan Baez, pediatrician Benjamin Spock, actress Jane Fonda and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr....
In that case, the best thing to do is to return the TV to the retailer explaining exactly why you are returning it. If the result of disabling a possibly intrusive feature is as bad as this person suggests, it's a broken TV anyway.
How can we make the wifi module inside the TV unusable?
I mean something that connects to that WiFi and smothers it with so much data that no other device can get a word in edgewise.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_...
and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_...
there are 87 million broadband subscriptions (likely shared) vs 117 million households. So thats at least 30 million permanently un-TVed households. Which would probably be good for the nation.
My mother in law got a smart TV about three years ago. No internet access for her. At the time I couldn't figure it out, but it makes more sense now.
One interesting problem is there are a lot of TV models out there and none of the software will ever be upgraded in practice, its like Android phones, its unlikely it'll ever be upgraded from what it shipped with. Its likely the "smart" features of her TV are already unusable due to API changes over the years.
Highlight. Names & Shame. "Samsung is recording your teenagers having sex!"
I realize there isn't one culprit. That doesn't matter, pick one and deliver mob justice.
> All members of the Inner Party (upper-class) and Outer Party (middle-class) have telescreens in their homes, but the proles (lower-class) are not typically monitored as they are unimportant to the Party.
http://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/your-tv-watching-you-l...
Nothing happened.
Vizio has a much less intrusive system. Some of their TVs have "Vizio apps", which can trigger popups on the screen based on the content being played. This can be completely turned off. They don't have microphones or cameras, just remotes. Still, the TV does phone home to Vizio HQ.
The article author complains if cameras and microphones in the TV are disabled, it would not function properly. I say, that's the only way it would function properly! I'm ok with my remote, thank you very much, and I don't want to converse with my TV or dance for it. I want it to entertain me, not the other way around.
That's because it's what it is happening right now. See last week's trending HN story, especially the "the FBI provided two blank CDs, claiming the recording devices malfunctioned" bit (yeah, sure):
http://www.npr.org/2014/10/29/359725475/can-authorities-cut-...
http://www.necdisplay.com/p/large--screen-displays/e464
A 46" display, for $769, 1080p and 3 x HDMI inputs and all of the necessary sound inputs and outputs. Additionally it's relatively low-power and doesn't actually look bad.
I can see me buying something like this in future, it fits with how I use TV anyway, feeding HDMI inputs into it and just considering it a display for other devices.
I have one of NEC's 24" monitors (one of the few 1920x1200 panels I could find on the shelf at the time I bought it - 16:10 FTW), and I love it. Aside from my preferred 16:10, the other thing I love about it is that it's matte instead of glossy. Glossy monitors, along with chiclet keyboards, have got to go.
/rant mode on It's likely that it's all about controlling us, and using our profiles to adjust not only our spending habits but also our lives. Just imagine how companies like Google, who have almost unlimited access to our data could show you progressively more left or right-leaning websites in response to your queries. Your Netflix, Amazon, Youtube suggestions are keeping you in a bubble of thinks and ideas you already know and like. And if you always go with these suggestions it will be extremely easy to adjust them slightly every time to push you in a direction that corporations and governments prefer.
We know that the filter bubble already exists, but do they adjust that bubble to their needs? If you're quick to say that this is unlikely, just think about advertisement. Isn't making us want to buy or do something main goal of advertisement?
Of course I don't think that there is some kind of conspiracy to convert everyone to be a tree-hugging left-wing fanatic, but if we have corporations with as much power over our lives as Google, Facebook or Apple it will be easy for them to slightly push us in a direction that benefits their bottom lines. Any company that has power to control our reading and viewing habits has in fact control over us. Now when they know more about our health and location, when they can automatically listen to and analyze everything we say what else is left?
Yes, privacy outside of our homes is gone forever. We will never be able to get it back under control. But what we do, read, watch and listen to, what we talk about in our homes should stay private.
So next time you think that the conveniences of having a website or a movie suggested to you, think if that suggestion is not making you an obedient, gadget buying drone.
Quote of the day.
I just got a great Sony projector and 92" screen for less than an equivalent quality large TV would cost. The only other consideration is the size of the room and ability to limit ambient light entering the room.
To the author: if you have a problem with your TV, especially if you are actually 'terrified' of it, perhaps consider returning it and buying a normal one?
- They are generally not smart
- They cost less than TVs (especially by the inch)
- They don't work well during the day (no daytime TV, only movies at night)
My "smart tv" stays disconnected from the WIFI. Problem solved.
This isn't even the government forcing mass-surveillance devices on its citizens; it's the citizens accepting and installing mass-surveillance devices themselves -- which in some ways is quite a bit more disturbing than the government doing it.
I have a "smart" tv my wifw purchased while i was away on business, but theres no way thats being connected.
Non-techie people assume a TV is a TV -- which is to say, a dumb video terminal. Even "smart" TVs are understood this way, in no small part because most people never bother interacting with their "smart" features. It's all just items on a checklist full of marketing blather, safe to ignore.
I fear it's going to take a serious hack of these devices (or twelve) before people start to understand that their new TV is more like a giant, poorly secured PC that happens to be wall-mountable than it is like their trusty old CRT.
Who's for starting a company that adheres to the moral obligation to not treat our customers, as our product?
http://panelsyndicate.com/ It is a pay what you want directly from the author business-model.
I won't tell why this story is so relevant to the story because that would be a huge spoiler. But go read it. It is worthy!
PS: I am not affiliated, just a fan.
Which seems odd to me. Having a TV with the ability to surveil me is a foul feature and one that'd instantly turn me off a purchase, no matter what protections they put in place. Internet-connected, closed as can be, with a possibly open mike and camera into your living room... fuck that.
Edit: s/that/they
You know what will never stop this? Posts on hacker news. Letters to your congressman (LG can donate a fuqton more to his re-election campaign than you can). Voting with your dollar (people who know what a privacy policy is are few and far between).
You know what will? Taking these TVs into the street, smashing and burning them. Mobs storming Best Buy and smashing the surveillance cameras built into these telescreens. Bricks through the window of every mercenary selling your privacy, selling a live feed right to your living room, to the NSA/FBI/creepy internet hackers.
It's really hard to get people to commit to sustained, long-term action -- that's why boycotts are not effective and why this trend has continued. But people are actually angry about this and that anger can be fueled into displays of acute disapproval. Like burning a pile of spy TVs in the street and then flipping the cop car that comes to defend the surveillance state and burning that too.
Pretty sure this will get downvoted because anything outside the blandly acceptable boring-as-fuck politics always gets downvoted. But just keep in mind that you need to break a few eggs to make an omelet, and the power structures of the world pretty much only respond to Arab Spring-esque events now. We need to make every digital dictator afraid of becoming the next Gaddafi.
And actually Gaddafi was the ultimate non-boring active protester. If you knew what he actually did, instead of the mythological version of events, he is basically your poster child. Gaddafi got got because he wanted to get away from the petrodollar dictatorship.
The reality is that there are very serious challenges, not insurmountable, but problems that haven't actually had solutions engineered yet. And the institutions and even deeper, the belief systems that form our global operating framework, are completely outdated.
Leading edge technology has already made governments obsolete in some sense. Eventually, I believe that distributed technologies will make traditional governments, and a traditional operating mode based on deadly force and amoral behavior, irrelevant and passe.
That's how you get Bush twice re-elected, or believe that Obama is some kind of great "hope".
Plus it's not just LG that wants that kind of data. It's the government itself.
Let's look at boycotts. The problem with boycotts isn't that they're not effective; they can be. My family participated in a successful one against Iceland's whaling policies in the 80s and even though I was young, I never forgot why we did it and that it was right. So what's the problem? They ignore institutional structures that persist despite our actions. If one particular corporation strays too far, boycott pressure is effective. Don't forget how it played into bringing down South African apartheid.
My point here is that we don't need to go looking for new solutions. Good old fashioned organizing works. It does combat LG's bought politicians--remember my friend, we still have democratic institutions and we can vote anyone we want into office. People don't like to be reminded of what really works, I think. We need socialism. We need to vote them into office and make good privacy laws. That's that. No need to reinvent the wheel. Then we can talk about an informal technocracy democratically dissolving the state into libertarian socialist anarcho-communism.
I work on a solution to this particular problem every day. I don't just write on the internet about it.
Put up or shut up.
People see tyranny creeping up all over the West, for example, but it doesn't occur to them that instead of asking our rulers to please not oppress us, we should stop believing in their authority altogether.
You have your activism, and I have mine.
I'm not so sure lack of belief is enough to dissipate authority. As the old saying goes, you may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you. Within my lifetime, the surest way to invite a tiny war into your life is act as if political and/or legal authority doesn't exist. Hell, just implying that authority should change was enough to get projectiles and tear gas loosed in Ferguson MO.
In other words, even if we don't want rulers we still need rules. We need a system. Actually, we will have a system, anyway. even "no system" is a system. It's just not clear how it would actually work at the moment (possibilities ranges from "Libertarian Utopia" to "mob rule", including "gang rule" and "local warlords").
"Freedom" is an ideal, not a mechanism. The question is, which mechanism promotes freedom?
Personally, I currently bet on democracy. Not representative governments, but democracy, which we don't currently have. Like in ancient Athens, where people where chosen by random trial, instead of elections. (Plus a host of checks and balances, before during, and after whatever short mandate was given.)
Freedom just means that no one forcefully intervenes in your life, assuming that you're not harming anyone yourself, of course.
Demoracy is just mob rule. You'll find it unacceptable any time you're being forced to comply with what the majority wants. You know most people are idiots, right? You don't want idiots making decisions that affect your life. Does that help?
Is it really? When has it happened before?
A world with unfettered unregulated markets sounds more nightmarish to me than what we have now.
It's all well and good to postulate a free society, but do you have any idea what a free society actually looks like? (Neither do I, by the way.)
But from our point of view, what's the practical difference between being forced to comply with a King's royal edicts and being forced to comply with a bunch of politicians'?
Cartels can't be maintained in a free society. We know everyone participating in one is a scumbag, and the more lucrative the cartel's position is, the more motivated the participants are to betray the others (because there's lots of room for competing on price and taking away all the captive customers, thus making shitloads of money).
Cartels are a difficult thing to break. The light bulb cartel for instance still exist, even though it has officially been dissolved: light bulbs still only last a couple thousand hours, despite the existence of designs that can last 10 times longer. (Heck, that's one of the few things the centrally planned economy of the USSR got right: long lived light bulbs.)
Strength lies in numbers. Fascists knew that, popular movement know that, and cartels know that. Betraying the cartel is to fin yourself alone. The financial incentive may not overcome the need to be part of the same team. And sometimes, as is the case in the light bulb industry, it is not clear that you could actually take away the cartel's customers: light bulbs are fairly cheap, at face value. It's the planned obsolescence that's the real cost, and that cost is not disclosed to the customer.
You can only make your purchase decisions based on what you know. If the cartel is based on deceit, rather than on price regulation, it can be difficult to convince people based on durability concerns. People don't care about sustainability, because of hyperbolic discounting. (Why do you think we're trashing on the planet with little regard for future generations? It's not because of our rulers. It's because we just don't care about the future as much as we should.)
If the guy is selling X for half the cartel price, and can point to the cartel members and tell people how they've been screwed by them, what do people care aboit what the cartel scum is saying anymore? Nothing. They'll just buy X for 50% cheaper. You know you would too.
Who are trashing the planet? Ordinary people, or big corporations who've paid politicians off to let them pollute? What about militaries all over the world? Do you really think ordinary people are the problem here, or govts the solution? Really?
> Who are trashing the planet?
Everyone of course. Some people more than others, and as you suggested, some people are more responsible than others. But in the end, we're all caught up in this system. Heck even writing and reading this comment takes energy, and sits on top of one of the most polluting industries (computing).
We both know how cartels work. I pointed out that cartels don't last without state support. You don't feel like accepting that, just like you still haven't addressed my point about rulers.
Cartels are created and maintained by governments through prohibitively costly licences that are just denied to pesky outsiders that would actually compete with the other producers.
We're not going to get anywhere if you keep side-tracking the conversation, but that's exactly what staunch statists always do. Why? Because they can't handle reality.
It does. The "freedom of assembly" is very powerful, even if it doesn't get as much attention as the freedom of speech or the press. Seeing that there are others that share your outrage is an amazing motivator, as it shows, in a very personal way, that you don't have to accomplish everything yourself. Even better, it becomes easier to get others to join in and help as the group grows. Many are reluctant to be a first-mover, but will join a group once they see they will have the support of allies.
Unfortunately, FVEY agencies are not stupid. Mapping relationships to find the focal points that start or enable this kind of social organizing so they can be disrupted is a very good strategy. Even just the phone call-record and COTRAVELER[1] are likely enough to be able to find the leaders/organizers among any particular group. If you add in a few of the other tools we've seen recently, it must have been trivial to create a modern variant of COINTELPRO. Compared to the FBI's efforts under Hoover, GCHQ's "JTRIG"[2] is probably a lot easier and far more effective.
So yes, I totally agree - good old-fashioned organizing is something we need, and we need it fast. More importantly, we need it as a sustained effort to focus on a couple key topics, and we might actually see some progress.
I am not sure this is possible as long as "most" people still have food and a roof over their head. Groups start to form and ideas start to spread, but these efforts inevitably get distracted[3] or sidetracked with off-topic political minutia or divide-and-conquer wedge issues. Unfortunately, I suspect that technology will make organizing people effectively impossible until this mess impacts them personally in big, obvious, painful and/or expensive ways.
Of course, I would absolutely love to be proven wrong sbout this entire topic...
[1] http://apps.washingtonpost.com/g/page/world/how-the-nsa-is-t...
[2] https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/07/14/manipulating-o...
[3] For an example relevant to this crowd, see PHK's "PSYOPS For Nerds" regarding yet another useless and distracting "BSD vs GPL" argument.
>It does combat LG's bought politicians--remember my friend, we still have democratic institutions and we can vote anyone we want into office. People don't like to be reminded of what really works, I think. We need socialism. We need to vote them into office and make good privacy laws. That's that. No need to reinvent the wheel. Then we can talk about an informal technocracy democratically dissolving the state into libertarian socialist anarcho-communism.
I have to think this is sarcasm. But it's well-done though. Anarchist communism via liberal reform? Classic. The 'good old-fashioned organizing works' is such a great layer on top of that.
10/10 trolling, comrade.
I like my webcam. I can have a skype video chat with someone halfway across the world. Sure, the NSA might watch me in my sleep, and that sucks (I do think rule of law works), but hey.
I like that google is data mining my emails. Google Now is amazing, reminds me of things like my flights because it goes through it. If that allows them to show somewhat creepy ads, so be it (google is a lot more subtle with their ads than they could be). The service is cool
Also, Rule of Law works. Consumer privacy protection laws exist in the EU, and companies that don't respect it can suffer greatly. So the NSA might not fall under that, but I'm much more comfortable with the NSA looking at me than corporations (though I'd rather have neither). And we _can_ push back on the surveillance apparatus (Church Commission and the like).
Really don't need to burn down everything to get things done.
Personally, I think the reason people aren't up in arms is pretty clear. People get up in arms about things that harm them -- oppressive governments (Arab Spring), desperate economic conditions (Ukraine), etc. Real stuff.
People don't get up in arms about tracking because it does not hurt them. Not: does not hurt them except in subtle ways they don't even notice. It doesn't hurt them at all, with very few exceptions. That's all there is to it.
I love how people set themselves up to 'win' like this if people don't like what they're saying. "If people vote me up, I'm right. If people vote me down, I'm right". Frankly, it's a 'boring-as-fuck' ploy and unfortunately it's on the rise at HN.
Learn to take your lumps like a damned adult, and don't make passive-aggressive remarks about people who might downvote you. People can think that you're full of shit without having to subscribe to mainstream viewpoints.
No, no. The full quote is, "But you can't make an omelette without ruthlessly crushing dozens of eggs beneath your steel boot and then publicly disemboweling the chickens that laid them as a warning to others."
I think you'd be surprised at a) how many people realize they're having their data collected and b) how few people care. Is it a risk? Yes. So is driving a car, but I'm not willing to put up with the inconvenience of not being able to drive somewhere.
One might be fine with having their TV scan their face, but does that mean they're okay with that scan being transported to someone else's servers? Who now owns that information? Can the manufacturer sell that to someone else without telling you?
This kind of information shouldn't be buried in 46 pages of legalese.
Many people aren't aware that Siri functions by sending your voice off to Apple's servers for processing, let alone knowing whether that means that Apple now owns those recordings of their voices. Maybe they do, maybe they don't, but the Average Joe isn't going to read the 50 page ToS, let alone be able to accurately parse it. And if Apple chooses to keep that data for themselves, they aren't exactly incentivized to tell people that they now own this information and can resell it.
It's starting to get annoying, the folks who want to start a "privacy revolution" even when no one's asking them to.
Remember the Holocaust? Well, one thing that helped was an initially mostly harmless ethnic census conducted by Napoleon. Then the Nazi got hold of that data, and used it. Oops. Not that you or your descendants actually risk being put down in the gaz chamber because you turn on your TV, but there's a whole range of nasty stuff that can happen between nothing and summary execution.
What makes people think they have the right to be ignorant and/or opportunistic, when I never asked them to? :P
And I think that's where the revolution foments. Momentum builds slowly, but it seems to be there, simmering and slowly heating over the years. Those folks calling for revolution now are just impatient and louder.
Convenience is winning the war, and that's only increasing. All data points to even more invasiveness of products, and even more acceptance by people. The people you talk to simply don't outweigh the greater voice of the sum total of users of the Internet.
There is no revolution. Nothing is fermenting, and there is no momentum, except from the hacker elite (us), and that's not going to change, if stock prices and usage rates are any indication.
[0] - http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/feb/04/facebook-1...
Anyway, are you saying that you personally have no problem with a TV that listens to you, or that you don't like it but other people might not object?
Letting JDate know my ethnicity isn't quite the same as losing one's agency.
1) It has a webcam
2) It has a microphone
3) You install software all the time that has access to both of these things.
3) Practically everything you do on it is tracked, cookied, and shared. (Sure some companies probably respect Do-Not-Track, but everyone?)
4) Do you realize that facebook knows your age, all of your friends, your demographics, and has like buttons on most pages on the internet. They are also about to launch a big ad platform to help others leverage that knowledge to place ads.
5) Google knows everything in your inbox.
Your Xbox has gesture control and voice command too.
If you are going to smash TVs, you probably should smash your laptop, and your xbox.
I don't think a few burning TVs in the streets are going to change anything. You'll need to think bigger :-)
1) Use a blob-free OS like Trisquel. Heh, your webcam may not have drivers in Trisquel. Or tape over it.
2) Trisquel also.
3) Trisquel also. Another good alternative is TAILS.
4) Use IceWeasel (Firefox source code) and the RequestPolicy extension.
5) Use DuckDuckGo or another anonymizing proxy.
I agree with you though, that we must think bigger than buying TVs so we can smash them.
I can't modify the hardware on a television reasonably, I can't change the operating system reasonably, nor can I modify the loaded software. I can't choose to run the server that it phones home to.
I can remove my laptop's webcam, or order one without. Same for a mic (lenovo/dell/hp have 'government specials' -- laptops without mics/cams/antennas), I can review the software I install, I can change it, etc. I can run my own email server.
One system enables the user to have power over the system itself, one doesn't. We need to stress the importance of users' power and ensure it for the future.
Don't buy such walled systems until the walls are removed so as to enable them to be functioning members of our user-centric society, rather than their profit-centric walled garden.
To most people everything feels like a walled garden, their phone, their computer, their TV. Sure you can install software on them, but very few people actually install new operating systems on anything at a low enough level that it would actually help their privacy.
As the technological elite, something like a TV that has so much embedded junk seems extra walled off. But I'd argue that most people have no clue how to stop websites from tracking them or to protect their privacy on any device. Most people have no IDEA what a cookie or an IP address is.
You happen to be familiar with software. To many people putting a piece of thick tape over the TV screen's camera, and microphone might be much easier than installing TOR. Dealing with the underlying embedded OS is probably super annoying, but hopefully you can still use your TV as a direct display using something similar to a Roku.
If a market for do-not-track devices exists someone will fill it, but I worry that the general population will have no idea that it's necessary or even care.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_knowledge_(logic)
There's something very powerful when I know what you think, and then you know that I know what you think. When mass understanding foments, common knowledge kicks in and there will be (it's already in the works) a sort of large scale adknowledgement that this is the will of not only us as individuals, but also us as masses.
[I will leave my usually blurb about documented programs in the US and elsewhere that specifically target and derail the forming of such community consensus and on the flip side manipulate media to create desirable consensus.]
Posts on Hacker News will only go so far, but as a community that makes recommendations and gives technical advice and knowledge to the broader community - and as patriots and democratic citizens - we can (and I do) discuss these issues without bashfulness to everyone we are close with.
People care. Old people care and young people care. Democrats, Republicans, Centrists, and Populists care. Religious people care. So do atheists.
Information is key and the media has a really poor record - even (especially) with the handling of the Snowden disclosures. The EFF and ACLU can only bring so many cases to court. _We_ need to be the reliable source of information - for those who look to us for technical advice and information.
And we need to demand an option during elections. This next (national) election is going to be another 'security year'. Screw that. Neither Ebola nor ISIS pose a credible threat to the United States. The real issues are class issues, democratic issues, police state issues, social issues, etc.
Your vote doesn't count for a whole lot. But all of our voices (for the most part) do. Man, it's depressing I had to qualify that... Anyway - posting to HN absolutely contributes. It just isn't the only place you should have your voice heard.
I disagree. I think voting with your dollar works pretty well actually. Case-in-point: The recent uproar over the Xbox One's Kinect. The original plan called for the Kinect to be a required component and for the microphone to always be on. Thanks to consumer backlash, Microsoft backpedaled on the always-on requirement pretty quickly, and they've started selling Kinect-less Xbox Ones as well.
Part of this is because Sony did an excellent job of capitalizing on these mis-steps with the PS4. Because there's no reason a competitor can't do the same against these smart TVs. You don't need customers to read the privacy policy; you just need to tell them that "the TV is telling Uncle Sam when you have sex."
>"people are actually angry about this"
So which is it? Do people care or not? Would the purpose of storming Best Buy be to inform the masses or to scare the management of LG?
You just don't expect a device like TV to track your viewing habits where as you are not surprised that various websites and apps will do it. I'm sure you can disable tracking on TV if you have concerns.
Fortunately, leaving the TV unplugged from the internet is still a viable option.
I have a NEC commercial display as my TV. It's great and is built to last forever. Oh and it has no network capability or "smarts" of any kind. It's as dumb as a monitor gets.
RMS was right all along. We need free software, or we will have no control over our computers. And our computers are going to be everywhere.
Free as in beer is the enemy of free as in freedom.
On a personal computer, there is free software to accomplish any desktop computing task. How can you say that it wont get built when it already has been?
Meanwhile, the closed systems people do pay for have a monstrous advantage and will continue to be far ahead. Nowhere are they further ahead than design and user experience, which in my experience are harder and more work to get right than core code. When you make something work you are only maybe 25% of the way to making it usable. That last 75% is the no-fun stuff people have to be paid to do, and it's the stuff that separates products people use from geek projects only a tiny number of enthusiasts play with.
That will not automatically happen for a lot of classes of software. You point out that any desktop computing task can be done with free software. So what? That doesn't even matter anymore. It's 2014 and we can't accomplish a significant amount of mobile computing tasks with free software, and those are more intimately connected to us than desktops ever were.
You make an excellent point about mobile computing. However, interest in free mobile software is growing and we'll see more options available to mirror the demand.
What I'm trying to say here is that I hope to see even more business models that work well so we can get free alternatives in more areas of computing sooner rather than later.
I hope that viable business models that support free software emerge. I have a feeling that the general public will be made to suffer by this surveillance system growing around us, and will learn that like convenient Starbucks, freedom is worth paying a few extra bucks for.
The morality of RMS is an abstraction that is disconnected from empirical truth, just like any religion is.
Maybe he would have done some good (other than the software he's written) if he had actually made the argument that we need open source for privacy reasons.
We should all feel deeply offended at not having that control, if we know what's good for us.
Looking at the current state of affairs, I'm starting to think RMS wasn't radical and fanatical enough!
On the other hand, computers are how we communicate with and consume information from others; they are essentially how we view the world. Thus what power the companies-in-control have to limit, persuade, and otherwise manipulate the population who uses computers is far greater than what they can do with cars.
To come back to the car analogy, if the manufacturers had the same type of power those making computers and their software did, they would be able to remotely control your car to make it go not where you want it to, disable it if you tried to drive to "non-approved/licensed" locations or if you attempted to drive faster than they allowed, carried more passengers than licensed for, etc.
Of course, convenience and control are not disjoint either - and more control can also lead to greater convenience, as users customise the software they use to make their use of it more convenient.
No, we should all choose to use products and services that protect our privacy (potentially by being open source), and educate others to do the same. NOT "get deeply offended." Getting offended is what you do when someone goes against your RELIGION. That is why Stallman's message does not work: it is like a religion.
Even if none to be found, I'd totally pay for a large format display instead of a TV just to save the headaches.
If you think your TV is bad, try powering on a windows phone for the first time and go through the dozen privacy waivers and turn off all the defaults of all the data it sends to Microsoft and Nokia. Pages and pages worth.
(These numbers were stats collected internally by a minor TV manufacturer)
I'm going to get a projector anyway. Of course, they keep getting "smarter" too.
Or some other key phrase to turn off and on voice control with a visible notification light could help solve some of the problem.
They write an entire article on why we should be terrified but then they don't even mention the make or manufacturer of this scary new TV, so we can't check the details of the TOS. It's the hypothetical smart TV that everyone owns.
They also neglected to mention you could just not connect it to the internet - you know, like the ancient TV he just turned in?
Here's the full context of the personal information, for example:
>If you enable Voice Recognition, you can interact with your Smart TV using your voice. To provide you the Voice Recognition feature, some voice commands may be transmitted (along with information about your device, including device identifiers) to a third-party service that converts speech to text or to the extent necessary to provide the Voice Recognition features to you. In addition, Samsung may collect and your device may capture voice commands and associated texts so that we can provide you with Voice Recognition features and evaluate and improve the features. Please be aware that if your spoken words include personal or other sensitive information, that information will be among the data captured and transmitted to a third party through your use of Voice Recognition.
They then go onto say you can disable this.
It's legal speak for working with a vendor to improve the accuracy of their voice recognition, but by taking it out of context you can make a scare piece. It's probably why they neglected to mention or link to the TOS.
"The device will not function properly or allow the use of its high-tech features. This leaves consumers with an unacceptable choice between keeping up with technology and retaining their personal privacy."
But more fear mongering there too. The features that smart tv's bring to the table are hardly so useful that you would declare it an unacceptable choice to turn them off.
Wish I had the money to drop hundreds of dollars on a product, and figure out what it does afterward...