Leveraging people’s property to trash their privacy and serve them ads is really a good way to get me to avoid an entire brand for everything.
I agree, but with TVs (or large displays" we’re at the point where there are no good options. Commercial displays are over engineered for the home and lag in technology Vs home TVs. So they’re not an option. Lg and Samsung are the display technology leaders, but their TVs are full of crap— so no. Monitors don’t go large enough for the living room.
Guess I’m stuck with what I have.
Monitors are still bigger than TVs our parents had in our childhood, no way I’m buying such a surveillance machine just for a bigger screen.
For real: I’m using a 38" ultra wide, and if you had told child me that a 38" monitor would be the smallest display in the house I’d have told you that you’re full of shit.
Damn you for making me feel old by realizing my computer monitor is bigger than my childhood CRT TV.
Here, take it:
)Why would you ever accept this anti consumer bullshit for a slightly better screen? It might not even take a year before the current cutting edge not “the best” anymore with how fast tech cycles. I would absolutely go out of my way to get a device I can deprive of an Internet connection and still use.
This Samsung is out of stock, but there are options. You just need to look for signage displays or hospitality tvs.
Huh, I’ve heard that commercial displays are the way to go. What do you mean when you say they are over engineered?
Get a projector. Cheaper, bigger display area, less obtrusive.
I recently bought an LG TV. I didn’t connect it to the Internet, I just use it with my Chromecast or Switch. Works great, no ads, no AI BS.
Coming soon (if not already): TVs with utility cellular connections or corpo network (like Amazon sidewalk) access that your neighbor may have not opted out of.
I find it highly likely that TVs will soon cease to function without an internet connection, complete with some BS explanation about protecting your privacy or security.
I can’t set my dryer to medium heat unless I do so with an app over the internet even though the controls exist to do it on the unit. I bought a window AC unit and the only remote control is an app - thankfully I was able to put that on a subnet with no internet gateway and it still works.
Name them. Bosch does this with some functions too. I bought the model below and didn’t care about delayed start or whatever. I am not loading your app!
I swear we need to start some appliance hacking clubs or something to sidestep this crap.
It’s an LG dryer.
I’d have to go look up the window unit. Its almost certainly a white labeled OEM who’s advertised brand no longer exists, though.
such things should be brought back to the store as defective
Why did you buy those devices?
Neither mentioned a network connection was required. The AC unit didn’t mention it at all, and consumer reports mentioned the dryer had “smart features” and an app but never said basic controls were locked behind a network connection
complete with some BS explanation
“For child safety!!!111”
I mean, a camera is an easy thing to block, as long as you’re aware of it, understand the implications, and have the desire to block it. Just obstruct the lens. Roll of black electrical tape, put a strip over it, done. Now, most people out there may not actually do so…
Only becomes an issue if other services that you actually want are tied to the camera, or if the TV refuses to operate without a usable picture of the viewer or something.
Pictures are far from the only thing to worry about.
Luckily my neighbors are way out of WiFi range and there is barely enough cell service here to send a text from inside the house.
How close are you to a starlink constellations orbital path, now that they can be connected to via cellular modems?
That doesn’t support data yet. Data will probably cost a fortune when they enable it. I doubt anyone will be willing to pay that much to serve ads. If they do, then the antenna will be replaced with a dummy load.
this sounds terrible
a quick reminder that the 5G standard defined a peer to pear operating mode for smart devices
Pear to pear communication.
Coming soon: a screwdriver and a soldering iron
This is the way to do it
I blocked my lg from the Wi-Fi after i got a “Kobe Bryant memorial” ad, while playing on my switch… TF?!
Do you think he thought avoiding all that traffic was worth it as he plummeted?
Hopefully no IBS either.
If they ever make this a standard feature in all TVs and make it where I can’t just disconnect it from the internet, I will be using old TVs for the rest of my life.
My TV is there to display a visual output. It does not and should not do anything else.
Luckily digital signboards will always be an option to replace TVs with if the situation becomes truly dire. The sorts of no-frills displays corporations buy to display whatever media they want in store.
Might not come with sound, but you can pick up a cheap sound bar and it will still be better than whatever cheap speakers commercial TVs try to cram in there.
The future is great!
As long as my 1080p plasma tv works, there’s no need to upgrade. Going 4K would also mean I would have to upgrade my HTPC hardware, because that old APU probably can’t handle resolutions like that.
In the meantime though, I’ll just keep on watching online videos in my living room without ads or interruptions. It’s been great even though all of this hardware is cheap and ancient.
But that’s the thing: televisions are complex and can be very difficult to repair, so what do you do when you can’t buy a dumb replacement anymore? I have the same issue with cars. I would like to replace ours with an EV, but they are a privacy nightmare whereas my car’s peak technology is FM radio.
I was thinking earlier today about how much technology waste there is because old stuff is superseded so quickly. Maybe in future we will treasure the tech we had before it all went to shit.
Kit cars have been around for ages, and Framework offers DIY laptops. I think we should have kit displays as well. Surely, someone has already made something like that with a raspberry or something.
Yeah, hopefully we can just buy cheap panels and put it together how we want. If that also opened up options for hackers to build entirely new display applications, or in new ways, that would be the dream.
I’m about to live in a camper full of paper books. I hate everything tech has done in the last twenty years.
I would make an inappropriate Ted Kaczynski joke if I didn’t know everything we do is being constantly monitored at all times by a bunch of turds with zero sense of humor.
Enshittification in progress. Sadly their OLED TVs are amazing, if not for the intrusive ads. It is really crap what all those companies are doing shoving ads our throats.
I am trying to block everything using ad blockers, DNS filtering, Pi hole, etc.
I just… don’t connect the TV to the internet. Never had an issue with anything like that.
This is the best way, really. Generally, you have much more control over what you plug into it.
A display shouldn’t have anything even approaching what can be called an ‘OS’ on it. Yet here we are.
I got an LG OLED a few weeks ago. Hands down the best TV screen I’ve ever owned.
Fuck knows what the stock OS does because I’ve only watched Apple TV through it.
Sometimes even that’s not enough. I’ve had some questionable kit before that would just ignore the DNS settings fed to it if it thought they were no good, and fall back to something else preconfigured.
pfSense is a wonderful tool for situations like that. Anything intended for local use only here just doesn’t get outside at all. Handy for stuff like a fire stick that only needs to be calling up a local media library.
It can also mangle any DNS requests going out to a different server and redirect them to itself instead. You could do this without it with iptables/nftables on a generic Linux box, but pfSense makes it much friendlier.
There are other packages that can do the same, but physically all you need is one piece of hardware as a bouncer that manages connections between inside/outside.
what can it do if the TV uses DoH, DoT, or something else similar? I expect that it can do nothing. unless the TV is on a separate vlan with very strictly only access to internal services
Don’t connect it at all and just use an Android TV box or dongle.
well that’s what I’m saying to the parent commenter
At that point I would expect control of it, or at least for it to respect the configuration it is given. If neither are true, then it just doesn’t go online at all. If that’s part of the main function, then I find an alternative or live without it.
Nothing on the inside should be sending anything to the outside that can’t be inspected before it leaves, with the exception of stuff that is directly driven by a human (guests browsing, etc).
Holy shit there were so many ads in that article that I just stopped reading. It sucks LG is going down this route. They make really nice displays but now I dont ever want to buy an LG tv if its spying on me to serve me these ‘better’ ads. Fuck advertising. Its turned into a complete monster
You can’t hardly even buy computer monitors without them anymore either. Every one of the higher end Samsung or LG monitors is starting to include “smart” bullshit.
You can probably just cover the camera with tape or smth.
it’s not talking about tracking emotions from looking at the viewer, it’s tracking the emotions in the script of the thing they’re watching, so it knows what they like.
Don’t connect a computer monitor to the internet?..
It’s just the addition of “AI”. We’ve been doing the same thing for a long time. I used to work for an advertising data company over a decade ago, and they filtered all the ads for one of the big channels’ streaming services in exactly the same way just with regular algorithms rather than AI. It’s what would make ads for men’s razors appear in the middle of a soap opera at 11PM because it knew the user was a man getting home from the pub.
Sounds like you need an ad blocker. I didn’t see any ads on the article except text links that were relevant to the story, which arguably aren’t ads.
So we pay them to do this to us? I stopped putting tv’s on the internet once I realized it offered me nothing useful. Firmware is about it and if that’s the case I’ll either usb it or put it on the internet for 5 min to do the update. Even then Samsung sucks so much with firmware the release notes for every single update are “bug fixes and improvements”… thanks Samsung.
If I am forced to put it online or it comes up with a way to phone home on its own, I am done buying those kinds of tv’s, and I’m sure some other brand will offer one that doesn’t, even if it isn’t the best one to buy.
most firmware releases will be to fix something with the online service anyway. If it displays stuff coming down a wire from your PC when you buy it, it probably never needs an update.
I will say I had 1 time i needed it. It was my Samsung Odessey monitor. It supports freesync but I noticed when it was on there would be a slight flicker. Dealt with it for probably 2 years before looking into it. Low and behold online comments all said firmware fixed it. It worked, fixed it and now it’s been fantastic ever since. One of the only times an update on a screen did something amazing. It’s not the norm but the excception.
Can we please ban electronic advertising already? And billboards? Society would be better off without them.
If we ban people from “earning” over a certain amount, they’ll get round it through “gifts” or exchange in-kind or something, right? Same with ads. If we ban them, then product placement with plausible deniability will be rife, paid through essentially money-laundering methods, worse than it is now.
Buying a TV should be a one time cost. These companies trying to create a continuing income where none exists is just rampant greed. Don’t want to pay the cost of updating and distributing your software? The open source it and get back to making better TVs.
Let’s be honest: I, as a customer, want to make informed buying decisions. I want to buy food that is tasty and maybe is healthy, but not based on some image that some marketing guys want to push. I want to choose the car which is best (and cheapest) for my purposes, and don’t want to be hearded into buying something else. I want to choose the best insurance for me and not be mislead by some emotional ad showing me a happy family.
And I really do not want to be manipulated in an emotional vulnerable moment so that I buy something. That’s shady as fuck
I’d rather just not have a tv
Just don’t connect it to the internet.
Don’t some try to locate public access points nearby? Or is it just an internet myth?
Aren’t some companies thinking of releasing TVs that won’t work unless connected to the internet?
I’m sure they’re thinking about it. Anyone who buys one of those deserves no better.
that was always my beef with ads, they just didnt speak to me on an emotional level
Yes, it’s always nice to feel like my ads get me, you know? Its important to have a meaningful relationship with your ads.
So glad I’m not in the market for a new TV
Literally TV from 1984
if it’s anything like the other ai features they offer, it will be garbage and never work and slow everything down
And use 10x the electricity to get this slop.
I wonder if they have a “depressed loser” profile and what kind of ads I will get.
Rope
“Gorilla Ladder step stools. Now at your local Home Depot!”
They’ve got aluminum frames and aren’t strong enough to hold me. The TV should’ve known!
Guns and Republicans
I get the feeling these will be dominated by manosphere podcasts and testosterone supplements.
