For a hacker news article, it misses the crucial option - hacking a smart TV! I have LG OLED jailbroken using rootmy.tv, it was pretty trivial. It's basically a linux computer with a huge screen, you can customize it, SSH into it, map any commands to the remote, etc.
Before I only used monitor, simple DP/HDMI input is all I wanted. But being able to take full control of the tv and connect it with other devices in the house I would normally get Rpi for is pretty convenient!
You shouldn't have to hack it, you should have the right to repair the software on your device. Hopefully the Vizio lawsuit will help with that for Linux based devices, signs are looking good though.
You're right, but until the laws change we should be telling everyone how and make these tools better. If we can't change the laws we can make the cat and mouse game too expensive for them to continue.
Plus, I'm pretty confident they are already doing illegal things. On my Samsung TV it wants to force update. There is no decline option, there is no option to turn off updates, only to take it completely offline. There's no way in hell these kinds of contracts would be legal in any other setting. There's no meaningful choice and contracts that strongarm one party are almost always illegal. You can't sign a contract where the bank can arbitrary change the loan on you (they can change interest but they can't arbitrarily charge how that interest is determined. Such as going from 1% to 1000% without some crazy impossible economic situation).
Someone needs to start a class action. Someone needs to push that as far as the courts will go
Agreed. Its not that useful, but I have been collecting exploits here when I see any that could potentially be useful for replacing firmware on devices.
This is just about GPL compliance though (afaik LG TVs are already GPL compliant, or at least, I haven't noticed any noncompliance).
The bigger problem here is tivoization. You can build a fresh kernel from source but you have no way to install it because the bootloader is locked down.
We should really be happy that Torvalds decided to license Linux as GPL software. If it was BSD these discussions would simply not exist, and corporate power over software would be even greater. I would dare to say we would probably not even have an open source scene at all...
The lawsuit is indeed about the GPL, but the right to repair (or at least replace) software really it needs to be expanded to all software. The right to repair movement is often about software-based lockdowns. Hopefully it will eventually result in those being banned.
Why wouldn't you want it to be a computer? Then it can be connected to your devices AND also do the job itself in a situation where it's awkward to connect to a device.
If already needs a computer in it to drive menus / modern display protocols. Having that computer be powerful enough to also decode content is barely an extra cost.
A rooted piece of trashy IOT is trashy IOT. It's an acquired taste, the excitement of putting a black box insecure linux device on the home network to add to your home infra admin duties.
I feel you, that's exactly why I was using only monitors before! I got convinced to go for this as an acceptable compromise with much more control than some proprietary backend.
> RootMyTV (v1/v2) has been patched for years, and your TV is almost certainly not vulnerable.
We recommend checking whether your TV is rootable with another method.
Religiously updating my TV? It has been patched since spring, someone clicking by accident "yes" for the update notice that appears randomly on the middle of the screen in the past 9 months would ruin it. I was religously *not* updating my TV and it still got too new software for the exploit :')
I have 2 LG OLED TVs, different sizes. Rootmytv failed to root both of them. I forgot which step and which error it was giving, but I tried everything including factory reset etc. I'm glad it's working for some people.
The first line of the homepage says "RootMyTV (v1/v2) has been patched for years, and your TV is almost certainly not vulnerable.", so that's hardly surprising
What I didn't mention is that I specifically looked for older TV on the second hand market to find a hackable model.
I mean, I didn't wanted to buy a brand new one anyway, it's very expensive and I don't need latest AI features. I found a year old model with firmware that was listed as supported by the jailbreak at the time
Seems like there is a big opportunity here for something a router distro to combine with a tv jailbreak. How good is the hardware? It would be nice to have my tv serve a couple purposes if it has the hardware to do it.
It's a modest ARM CPU, I wouldn't rely on it for a router but it can run Rpi Hole! Also Home Assistant integration, I use the TV remote to control LEDs/lights around the apartment
I think the parent commenter is perhaps a little over-selling the LG rooting. It is definitely root, you can write whatever you want on the filesystem (at your peril), and theoretically do whatever you want, but the homebrew exploit launches a bit later in the boot chain than you'd want (so blocking update nags isn't quite reliable), and a lot of the inner system things are proprietary and require reverse engineering to extend.
It's the same system software, just with root capacity.
That being said, there's still a bunch of nice homebrew:
- Video screensavers ala Apple TV
- DVD logo screensaver
- Adfree (and sponsorblock-integrated and optional shorts-disabling) Youtube
- Remote button remapping (Netflix button now opens Plex for me)
- Hyperion (ambilight service that controls an LED strip behind the TV)
- A nice nvidia shield emulator for game streaming from my PC with low latency
- VNC server (rarely useful, but invaluable when it is)
Sponsorblock and remote remapping are killer features for me, and the rest is just really pleasant to have.
A while ago I had a discussion with my friends that it is possible that in the future if 5G is sufficiently cheap, smart tvs come with a 5G SIM so they can force ads and updates even if you refuse to connect it to WiFi. I wonder if this will ever be a real thing. Either 5G, 6G or whatever comes next.
You might be interested to read about the findings by Ruter, the publicly owned transport company for Oslo. They discovered their Chinese Yutong electric buses contained SIM cards, likely to allow the buses to receive OTA updates, but consequentially means they could be modified at any moment remotely. Thankfully they use physical SIMs, so some security hardening is possible.
Of course, with eSIMs becoming more widespread, it’s not inconceivable you could have a SoC containing a 5G modem with no real way to disable or remove it without destroying the device itself.
What I'd really like is a TV with DisplayPort. How is this not a thing? IIRC you cannot buy a display with DP that's larger than 45 inches, give or take - they just don't exist. I think this is really weird. Like, I'd pay an extra $100 for that port, but I'm just not allowed to have it.
I absolutely love my Aorus 48" OLED-type display (w/ DisplayPort).
I tried a 48" TFT-type television (attempting use as a computer display) and the refresh rate just wasn't there, along with typical backlight splotching (but it cost a fifth as much, so...).
My only caution is OLED can experience burn-in (unlike the smaller Aorus 45" using a VA-type panel), but it is otherwise a much better experience
The other limitation is lower brightness than miniLED monitors, around 30-60% of the nits in SDR. Whether that matters obviously depends on the ambient light or reflective surfaces near you.
For me, because I'm next to a big window and already squinting at my 400 nits IPS monitor, a < 300 nits OLED is a non-starter, but a 600 nits in SDR, IPS miniLED, is ideal.
This limitation should be temporary however because there are some high nit OLED TVs coming on the market in 2025 so bright OLED 27-43" monitors will likely follow.
330 nits in SDR is good relative to other OLED monitors and good enough for most indoor environments but not good enough for my indoor environment. Windows are too big and not tinted, just too much ambient light for anything below 500 nits.
New Hisense TVs have USB-C DisplayPort support. Pretty cool, but realistically I don't see how it's different from HDMI from a usefulness standpoint.
Edit: It is cool I can plug my phone or laptop into the TV with one cable, no adapters, and get some power as well. For some reason it didn't work with my Steam Deck which was strange.
This. I was reading about some of the ugly hacks Valve has had to get around to use 2.1 on the steam machine. They (HDMI consortium, whatever its called) won't let you use 2.1 if your video drivers are FOSS. Since SM has open drivers for the AMD card it's leading to subobtimal video output at certain resolution/framerate combos (4K@120fps? Something like that), and they can't legally advertise support for HDMI2.1.
There absolutely are ways to do this, some motherboards have a DP-In connector that is routed to the USB4 ports. One example would be the ProArt X670E.
As far as I am aware, after having done exhaustive research on this, its licensing costs and popularity. Display port simply isn't popular enough. The vast majority of TV manufacturers (not brands mind you, many white label their manufacturing to different brands) also make monitors, and adoption of HDMI across both tvs and monitors not only was much higher, it was overall cheaper in cost since you could share the same components across lines. This being driven by cheaper licensing costs for accessory manufacturers (like blu ray players).
Its also easier to implement, if I recall correctly
This is the essential core of it, as I have come to understand it anyway.
I tried to buy a good 32 inch tv. This is also hard. I need up going a little matter and even then, the utterly trash built in speakers frustrate the hell out of me.
A 32" 4k 240hz OLED computer monitor + smart TV HDMI dongle + external speakers should work fine. Only point I would check is if the remote that comes with the dongle can turn on the monitor.
Why would you want such a thing? HDMI 2.1 does HDR 4k @ 120hz without compression. The entire TV ecosystem uses HDMI. If you want to connect a PC to a TV they always have at least 1 HDMI out, and some have a couple.
Because HDMI 2.1 uses a proprietary protocol that's not implemented in any free OS[0]. If you want to use HDMI 2.1 features right now, your only option is to use a non-free OS like Windows or MacOS.
from a purely technical point of view i do wish HDMI 2.1 was able to gain traction. On a couple of things I own that do actually use it, its an actual noticeable improvement and I feel does a better job than DisplayPort.
Granted, I suspect quite strongly the next wave of consolidation is going to continue the trend of being around USB-C, since the spec should have the bandwidth to handle any video / audio protocols for quite some time. Matter of time until that happens IMO.
It also lets you have a single cord that could theoretically be your power cord and your A/V cord.
From a purely technical standpoint display port is a better standard. HDMI couldn't get their shit together to do anything with USBC and thus all USBC to HDMI converter cables run display port internally.
Display port already allows multiple video streams, ausiostreams ... Why do we need a closed standard to also do this?!?!
Not really. That same link talks about how Intel and nvidia drivers can provide HDMI 2.1 on Linux but it is via their non-free firmware blob.
AMD doesn't (can't? won't?) do the same but there is a workaround: a DisplayPort to HDMI adapter using a particular chip running hacked firmware. That'll get you 4K 120 Hz with working FreeSync VRR.
I don't remember where,but somebody explained that the adapters also have some kind of limitation. I can't remember what but they went into deep details and the whole thing is revolting. Governments should protect open source.
Am I missing something? I have a LG nano something TV that has many “smart” features, but I never let it connect to my WiFi ever. Since day 1 it has been hooked up to an AppleTV. Can I not buy any fancy smart TV in 2025 and use it as a dumb HDMI display for AppleTV?
the issue is that eventually SIM cards will be baked in to deliver ads and spyware; there will be no alternatives because everyone was fine with buying smart TVs and not connecting them to wifi.
see: Android's recent transformation into a closed platform which no longer allows users to control devices they purchase. it's important to fight against trends like this loudly and vehemently while we still can.
Same. I have not seen the interface of my TV for years (Only the input switching UI when switching between my Apple TV and Xbox). This really isp pretty much a "dumb tv" with a setup like this.
Second that.
There were articles a year or two ago about TVs trying to connect to any open Wi-Fi they can find, without you asking them. But hopefully LG wouldn’t go that far.
While reading the article, I was pretty suspicious about Emerson and Westinghouse, because they sound just like Polaroid - once a solid American manufacturer, but run into the ground and then the name is licensed to bottom-of-the-barrel cheap electronics marketers. It seems strange that the article went out of its way to mention they are headquartered in Pittsburg and founded in the 1940s, like it's some respected brand with a long tradition.
That said my Dynex TV from like 2008 won't die so my agreement with my wife to replace it can't kick in for a 75" OLED TV...someday. Thing has a decent panel FHD and 120hz and you can turn the smoothing crap off and it's definitely a dumb TV
Absurdly although I’m, currently paying for a BBC TV licence, I use an Apple TV but they have not, and will not provide UHD content for it on their streaming app.
Either I can do the stupid thing and connect my LG TV to the network, or through various means download the UHD content, and therefore have to manage it, especially the last watched position, or forego it.
Having ADHD, I never really watch to the end, and so rely so much on the saved position to resume.
As a Plex user I'd recommend a used last-gen game console as a TV source. In my AV room upstairs I've had an XBOX ONE S for a long time and more recently I got a PS4 Pro for the spare room downstairs -- both at Gamestop. I have some games for both of them but I am more likely to game on Steam, Steam Deck or mobile.
Every Android-based media player I've had tried just plain sucks, the NVIDIA Shield wasn't too bad but at some point the controller quit charging. You can still get a game console with a built-in Blu-Ray player too and it's nice to have one box that does that as well as being an overpowered for streaming.
I have a HDHomeRun hooked up to a small antenna pointed at Syracuse which does pretty well except for ABC, sometimes I think about going up on the roof and pointing the small one at Binghamton and pointing a large one at Syracuse but I am not watching as much OTA as I used to. It's nice though being able to watch OTA TV on either TV, any computer, tablets, phones, as well as the Plex Pass paying for the metadata for a really good DVR side-by-side with all my other media.
As for TVs I go to the local reuse center and get what catches my eye, my "monitor" I am using right now is a curved Samsung 55 inch, I just brought home a plasma that was $45 because I always wanted a plasma. I went through a long phase where people just kept dropping off cheap TVs at my home, some of which I really appreciated (a Vizio that was beautifully value engineered) and some of which sucked. [1]
[1] ... like back in the 1980s everybody was afraid someone would break into your home and take your TV but for me it is the other way around
I think it costs less too, whereas a new or used PS5 costs more but doesn't add a lot of value -- there are roughly 15 exclusive games for the PS5 so it's not compelling if you have a gaming PC, but it is a nice package to sit next to your TV that does a lot and can stream games from the gaming PC. Personally I like a PS4 controller better than the Apple TV thing.
The launch edition doesn’t? I’m surprised vendors even sell a bluray drive that doesn’t have that capability. I guess sony wanted to cut every cent off they could…
> A spokesperson from Panasonic Connect North America told me that digital signage displays are made to be on for 16 to 24 hours per day and with high brightness levels to accommodate “retail and public environments.”
Some TV's err on the side of being too dim for daytime viewing in a bright room; that could only be a plus.
If it's too bright in a way that can't be turned down, you could always DIY a tinted shield to put over it for evening viewing. We used to use things like that over CRT monitors once upon a time.
> Their rugged construction and heat management systems make them ideal for demanding commercial use, but these same features can result in higher energy consumption, louder operation, and limited compatibility with home entertainment systems.
I've never heard a commercial flat screen display make a sound.
> Panasonic’s representative also pointed out that real TVs offer consumer-friendly features for watching TV, like “home-optimized picture tuning, simplified audio integration, and user-friendly menu interfaces.”
That person doesn't understand how this would be used at all. The user hooking up their streaming box to the display panel only needs the panel to do video (e.g. via HDMI cable). The display is not involved in audio at all.
I use a 1/8" plug stereo cable going straight from the Android box to a pair of RCA jacks in the speaker system. Bluetooth could be used but the wire has lower latency, 100% reliability, and not using BT means that the speakers are available for pairing if someone wants to use them from a phone. They have a remote control that can switch between two copper line inputs, and BT. The TV's volume is kept at 1%; it would make no difference if it had no speakers.
Spoiler: this is Ars Technica. Obviously they suggest you to instead get an Apple TV so that you send your data to Apple and watch Apple ads instead (with the only argument being that "so far they do less ads").
Yup, from the Apple TV article linked in the article[1]:
> According to its privacy policy, the company gathers usage data, such as “data about your activity on and use of” Apple offerings, including “app launches within our services…; browsing history; search history; [and] product interaction.” [...] transaction information, account information (“including email address, devices registered, account status, and age”), device information (including serial number and browser type), contact information (including physical address and phone number), and payment information (including bank details).
Also 'product interaction' is an euphemism to say "if you're sick, we'll sell this information for around 80€" (I think it's close to 200$ for Americans but I don't have any contact in this industry overseas). If you have a cancer and suddenly you see an increase in ads for pseudo-medicine and other scams whose only goal is to extract all the money you have left, and if lucky, your famil's money too, that's from 'product interaction'.
So exactly how do you suppose they sync your browsing history and bookmarks between devices if they don’t store the information? And your browsing history is e2e encrypted by keys on your device. Apple doesn’t have access to your browsing history.
You can give Apple any age you want to. It’s not like it checks.
And I have no idea about the other topics you are going off on and what they have to do with Apple..
I am so curious to learn more about this. Are there any extensive write ups of the mechanics of identification, price points, whatever? Or is it all insider baseball because it is distasteful?
Many tens to hundreds of dollars for that single datapoint is incredible. I have naively assumed we were just packaged up in aggregate and never thought more deeply than that.
What are the most valuable data? Pregnant? Wedding? Divorce? Illness? Home purchase?
It would be a horrible user experience if it didn’t keep track of the series I’ve watched and where I was in shows so I could pick up and watch where I left off on a different device.
This isn’t the iPod days where you would sync your watch history with iTunes.
The entire point of the remark is that you can throw these pseudo-justifications for any and all forms of tracking, since "tracking all the shows you watch" is precisely the issue that motivates TFA.
At the end of the day, they could be taking screenshots of everything you do with your TV and argue it's because of some AI system that will allow you to more easily launch whatever it is you normally do at that time of the day. If you do not see any issue with that, why would you be on this thread?
No the justification for the article is TVs that track your watching no matter what you watching and selling it to advertisers.
Apple tracks what you are watching on AppleTV only.
I’m on this thread because I understand technology.
Are you saying that if you are watching something like “South Park” you wouldn’t want the service that you are watching it on to keep track of where you are in its 25 season run?
> Apple tracks what you are watching on AppleTV only.
So the solution they propose to TVs that track what you're watching is to switch to AppleTV where Apple will track what you're watching? And you still justify this somehow?
Man, how I wish there was a Netflix setting "omit things I've already watched", since I know they already know this.
I can't help wonder if they are just afraid of the offering looking more bare, or is this really such an uncommon desire to want to see "new to me" stuff and not repeat things?
There are no ads in the AppleTV operating system itself.
The only Apple “ads” I ever see are inside the Apple TV+ app (yeah, their naming is confusing…) and it’s only for TV shows they’re promoting in their streaming service.
The Apple TV box does not have a microphone and a camera, but beyond that there is absolutely no reason to think it's any more private than a "smart" TV.
The more I think about it I wonder why Chinese TVs using Android based TV don’t have Some GrapheneTV or basic trimmed down Android aimed to be “dumb”.
Unlike phones,
- if it should be air gapped then all you’d want is your HDMIs input and remote control to work.
- nice to have: ADCs/DACs for analog AV input and audio out and any antenna input if available.
- super nice to have: Bluetooth for passing audio out and maybe network (Ethernet, WiFi) stack if same.
But assuming the goal is airgapped. There are less security concerns in general,
You just want the Android TV to be lightweight and fast and don’t care it’s “stuck” in specific version or use closed blobs.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned that KDE revived the Plasma Bigscreen project. No idea on the ETA but assuming all goes well I can see it becoming my daily driver very quickly.
SteamOS/Bazzite also makes it pretty easy to integrate flatpaks into its gamepad-oriented UI. I hope that leads to the development of more apps that work with a remote control or gamepad, which would then also work on Plasma Bigscreen.
Yeah I have a couple of recent Samsung OLEDs and they're fine without an internet connection despite reports that they wouldn't be. If I press one of the annoying streaming service buttons on the remote it'll give me a setup popup which needs to be dismissed, otherwise they work fine, albeit without any built in streaming support.
I'd read reports that Q-Symphony (audio from the TV speakers and soundbar simultaneously) wouldn't work, but it does.
I stuck an OSMC (https://osmc.tv/) box to the back of both of them so they can play stuff from my NAS. They're not the cheapest solution and I realise Kodi/XBMC on which they're based isn't everyone's jam (I grew up with XBMC on an Xbox so it is very much mine) - but they play everything, have wifi, HDMI-CEC, integrated RF remote, and work out of the box.
Model numbers if anyone cares: Samsung QE65S95C, Samsung QE77S95F. I believe S95, S90 and S85 (at least up to F) are all very similar so they should all work but ofc ymmv.
This OSMC box looks interesting, but does it allow to run arbitrary programs like a plain Linux box? What I have in mind here are things such as VacuumTube (YoutubeTV front end), a Web browser to stream from various online sources, etc. I found KODI (as running on Linux) far too restrictive when it comes to streaming from the Internet, and the add ons to be terrible. (In particular the YouTube add-on requires an API key registered with Google, which makes it a far worse proposition than using VacuumTube anonymously.)
Thanks for mentioning VacuumTube, it sounds useful.
I’m using a Minix Z100 running Gnome and Kodi. I use a simple Bluetooth keyboard, the interface is clunky but it does the job. I use Samba to also share files to VNC running on iOS and Android on the same network.
I tried using fancier solutions but anything that browses content without involving directories always break for some specific content in unpredictable ways.
That has been my experience as well. So far nothing has come close to the flexibility of Gnome (upscaled) with an airmouse. I am keeping an eye on the Plasma Bigscreen project however (10-foot UI for Plasma).
An alternative could be some x86 Android TV build like Lineage, but I have not seen very convincing demonstrations that this is truly viable.
My recent TCL TV forces you agree to Google's terms and conditions, and you aren't even provided the text of what you're agreeing to unless you connect the TV to the internet.
A guest logged into Wi-Fi on a Vizio of mine and there was conveniently no way to disconnect/forget it without a factory reset back to motion smoothing hell.
I have a Mac Mini hooked up to my TV. We never use anything mode of the TV. (Then again, I have zero streaming services, so perhaps I am not who this article is for.)
Neither do I, but what about YouTube? Not letting your TV manufacturer sell your watching habits is already a big win, and on macOS you can further block telemetry. A big chunk of my YouTube consumption happens through yt-dlp using a VPN provider that presumably does not cooperate with Google.
We're running a solution that isn't perfect and isn't for everyone. We have a nice Sony Android TV along with a pihole. But on the TV itself I installed f-droid and netguard. Netguard's UI sucks on a TV, but it's workable. I use it to block Internet access to everything including Google. Only a few streaming apps have internet access. There was some trial and error with a handful of dependencies too.
If I need to update an app, I temporarily allow Google services access. All the streaming apps work well, except for HBO Max which takes a few minutes to load. I suspect it has a long timeout/retry count for something I'm blocking. But once it loads, it's fine.
I also use a different and basic home launcher so we can open the apps we want immediately, without having to deal with shifting algorithm-based icons. But even if we use the Google launcher, it's mostly empty and free of ads because it can't connect. It does still capture what I recently watch though.
Overall it's a decent experience, mainly because we're not being bombarded by more ad algorithms.
How I break free from Smart TVs ("smart" for the manufacturer but very dumb for the user).
Buy a cheap smart TV and run it in "store mode".
Brightness and saturation will probably be maxed out but with a cheap TV, it looks more like "normal" on a more expensive model. Hint: The main difference between cheap and expensive in some cases --- the color adjustment range is limited by software on the cheaper models.
Currently using a Hisense 4k model from Costco connected to a small mini PC --- Windows or Linux, your preference. The TV functions as nothing but a dumb display.
Use a small "air mouse" for control. On screen keyboard as needed.
Use a Hauppauge USB tuner for local digital broadcasts.
I use software called DVB Viewer to view local channels and IPTV. A browser with VPN for streaming in some cases.
In every case, I maintain full control of my data and the ability to block ads as I see fit.
> Brightness and saturation will probably be maxed out but with a cheap TV, it looks more like "normal" on a more expensive model.
That probably mimics Samsung TVs, which are popular for that reason but look like crap.
The actual best TVs, picture wise, are among the LG C series, which are surprisingly dim and unsaturated. That said, mine has held up terribly so I won't buy another. My $200 Onn looks good enough to my eyes and lasted longer.
Why does it have to be cheap? What if I want a killer panel without all the bs?
> Use a small "air mouse" for control
An alternative is something like 'unified remote' on it, then you can even type from your phone without any pain.
> A browser with VPN for streaming in some cases.
There is a missing piece for me here. A magic 'send my PC browser tab to this other PC connected to the TV' button. Not sure if something like this exists. It would be ideal to send all the browser context with cookies etc so that you are logged in too and can just start playing whatever you found on PC.
Any for of cast is not an option, rendering has to happen on the TV PC box.
It doesn't have to be --- but you may be wasting your money if you run in "store mode".
As noted above, "store mode" will usually max out the brightness, saturation and contrast while removing user control. This looks pretty "normal" with cheaper models. More expensive ones can become overbearing.
It appears to me that in some cases, the difference between cheap and more expensive is mainly the color adjustments.
In order to take advantage of economies of scale, they may use the exact same screen panel on multiple different models but limit the cheaper ones in software so it doesn't look as "bright" and "eye catching" in the store as their more expensive "killer" model.
> There is a missing piece for me here. A magic 'send my PC browser tab to this other PC connected to the TV' button. Not sure if something like this exists.
Chromecast does exactly this and has existed since ~2010.
>There is a missing piece for me here. A magic 'send my PC browser tab to this other PC connected to the TV' button.
I use an NVIDIA shield on a dumb TV with firefox sideloaded (ad blockers, ect) for 95% of my streaming. You can import your cookies or other preferences or simply browse for content directly.
I'm less bothered by the ever present smart tv and more bothered that there is no way to just turn on the tv and go straight to input from a certain port. Would love to know TV's that just do that. My old Samsung constantly forces me to click through sources and out of smart features to get to the hdmi from my computer everytime I turn it on.
I just bought a LG 50" UA7000 [1] that goes straight to HDMI on turning on. I am using it as a additional screen for my laptop. I am hoping using one screen two feet away and one screen 6 feet away will preserve my eyesight a bit longer.
A minor problem is that it displays "Turning on AI voice features" every time I turn it on, but those features are not actually turned on. It probably tries to, but since I never connected the TV to the internet, this fails. Still have to figure out how to get rid of the message.
We have two Hisense TVs that both allow this. One is Roku based and the other Google TV. Neither is connected to wifi. I’d recommend the Google flavor, it has a lot more control over the settings and will auto suspend in a reasonable period if no input is being sent. The Roku’s minimum auto suspend is 4 HOURS.
They were cheap and the picture quality is great. Not OLED level, but jeeze I had to share a 27” CRT for my SNES as a kid—
Getting an hospitality variant tv might be an option too. I have a Samsung one which does have some smart features but they are mostly backend related. I think there's only YouTube on the user facing side. I got it because they are support to be better TVs for the money but it was such a huge pain to set up that I wouldn't do it again.
My Samsung QN90B does that just fine, it's only a few years old. IIRC there's a setting somewhere in the menu to not boot to the home screen. It also doesn't nag me about anything, although I only enable wifi when I want to update.
I have had an old PC hooked up to the hdmi port of an old TV for years and it works exactly as I want. I have full control and don't have to deal with smart tv ads.
My wife and I have been wondering about exactly this question and are on the market for a new TV, and this list of options is really sad. 720p? 32"? Yeesh
I'm a huge fan of projectors. With large TVs, you have a huge black wall when you aren't watching. With a projector you can have a pull-down screen that disappears when you don't need it. Or leave it down - it's white, and a lot less visually intrusive.
The only problem with projectors is there's not much choice if you're sensitive to DLP rainbow effect. I haven't tried one of the newer ones with a faster colour wheel, though. It means I've had to go JVC DLA projectors, but these are now ridiculously expensive and I can't see myself ever spending that much on, well, anything.
If you already have a "smart TV" of some kind, one strategy is to block it from having Internet access at your router and then use an Android TV based streaming box/stick or other external source for all content (OTA tuner, 4K Blu-Ray player, game console, etc). It's pretty easy to side load apps like Kodi and SmartTube on Android TV (a YouTube client with ad blocking, other features and zillion UX improvements).
I'll never buy a car manufactured after about 2014 for this reason. I'm planning to just keep getting repairs & upgrades done on my model year 2006 for at least the next 10-20 years. By then perhaps I will want to switch to electric, but I'll do it by electrifying something older.
Cars from around 1998-2014 usually have side curtain airbags & adequate rollover durability. The only improvements since then that I'd even want at all are better EV batteries & marginal efficiency gains for IC engines, but those can be retrofitted &/or aren't worth the anti features they also added IMO.
If car companies want my business they'll have to remove the telemetry & automatic updates.
I don't care if I end up paying more to drive an old car eventually, but this approach has also been saving me money so far.
No thank you. I will take predictable handling and a steering wheel that responds to my inputs. Loss of traction situations are exactly where I don’t want any systems helping. I need to countersteer and feel the car. Speaking as someone who was raised in winter driving and encouraged to find the limits of handling in snow and ice covered parking lots.
Of course if you are one of those drivers who removes their hands from the wheel in a stressful situation (there are many), these systems will help somewhat.
It really depends on the situation and the car. I’ve had it really help and not take over too much (very modern Porsche in the mountains), and systems where it was actively making the situation much worse by alternately locking the brakes on individual wheels. That was down a long hill which turned icy a third of the way down in a borrowed 2013 BMW F30, and I still consider it luck that I kept it on the road and nothing was coming the other way.
I have a car from 2017 that is perfectly dumb. It had been a rehash of a car being produced since 2010 though.
All other models of the same year by the manufacturer had telemetry, mobile app start etc. All those models are now dumb though since for those earlier years they used 3G wireless which is now a dead spectrum.
You just need to pull the fuse or physically remove the telematics unit. In some cars you need to partially disassemble the dash to do this, but there are plenty of tutorials on YouTube. An independent shop should also be able to do this, although dealers will generally refuse since they are among the ones benefiting from the "telemetry," aka spyware.
It's not feasible for everyone, but between grocery delivery services, telehealth, etc - if you work remotely anyway, it may be surprisingly feasible to get rid of your car altogether and only Uber/Lyft as needed, at least until robotaxis expand into your area at a fraction of the price of traditional ride-hailing apps.
I work remotely, my gym is downstairs as well as a convenience store with some fresh (overpriced) items, a bar and an (overpriced) restaurant.
My barber and grocery store is a $9 Uber Ride each way. So I could get away with a car easily where I live now. My wife and I have been down to one car since Covid.
But when I was in the burbs if metro Atlanta where everything wasn’t so close, it would have been over $100 easy going from one side to the other or basically anywhere besides the grocery store.
My car insurance is only $176 a month for my wife and I. It doesn’t make sense not to have a car, even if you include the minor maintenance on a car that would be hardly ever driven. Even at a theoretical $400 car payment + $176 in insurance, it still easy to come out ahead.
> Yes because it’s completely safe to bike everywhere and how would I bring the groceries back?
Pannier bags. I did this for years. Before I got panniers I filled a big camping rucksack and cycled, but I wouldn't recommend that. Use a small backpack in addition to panniers if you have to, but having just the panniers feels the best.
However, in terms of safety you are unfortunately right. I didn't have a car so I went everywhere by bike but I was essentially a third class citizen in many places. Felt like I could just get wiped out and nobody would even care. There were no people around, only cars. I hate cars, so I had to get a car too :(
Your car is tracking much more than rideshare apps even can. Uber, Lyft, whoever gets point to point trip information, maybe audio recording in the car. Modern personally owned automobiles are getting everything, all the time. It knows when you're home, when you're not, many record all audio all the time, some are recording video, some are tracking your sexual activity in the car.
At this point, I treat rideshare like public transit: I assume I'm being watched, but I get to skip the permanent always-on tracking for the other 99% of the time that I'm not in the car.
Also, if you own a car, the state knows where you're going and when, per ALPR systems. With Uber or Lyft or a robotaxi, there's a layer between my personal information and the state. It's not an insurmountable layer, as rideshare / robotaxi services can always be subpoena'd, but adding a layer of extra work for the state is a net gain to my privacy.
Clearly you’re not actually interested in a modern vehicle regardless of capabilities, so I don’t think that there’s any real point in detailing which of those things can be disabled.
Also, for what it's worth, you don't have to use same service on each leg of your trip, you don't need to have it pick you up at your front door, and you don't need to have it drop you off at your exact destination. While for some people, these are admittedly imperfect improvements (you can't really effectively conceal your destination as easily if it's, say, an airport, there's also absolutely nothing stopping you from calculating the cost of your full trip with an equidistant destination, ordering a short trip (not to your final destination), and offering your driver a reasonable amount of cash to take you the rest of the way. Uber/lyft themselves are con artists charging riders WAY more than they pay drivers anyway. You can get away with paying a fraction of what the app would charge you, paying the driver way more than they would otherwise receive, and cutting the parasite (the multi-billion-dollar corporation providing zero value after connecting you with a driver) out of the middle.
I have the exact setup shown towards the end of the article - HTPC and K400 keyboard/touchpad. I have tried all "smart" platforms in the past, and this setup is an order of magnitude better in everything. I used to have issues where a specific content provider doesn't have an app for my type of smart TV[1], this is no longer an issue because I just use a browser to access anything. And I can browse the web when I'm not watching something[2] (in fact I'm using my HTPC right now as I write this comment).
The only change I had to make starting from a "standard" Linux UI is bumping the screen zoom level to 150%. This may vary depending on your TV size and how far your couch is from your TV.
Building the HTPC was very cheap, I just boughs a horizontal form-factor case, and used spare "donor" parts coming from our household PCs after upgrades.
[1][2]For comparison, the only streaming platform that had all apps I wanted was Apple TV, but that one doesn't have a browser.
the big issue with this setup is that most streaming platforms won’t give you multi-channel audio via the browser on Linux systems. Some might also limit the video quality.
On Windows, it used to be different, but lately I’ve observed the same—ex: Netflix seems to limit the streaming quality even with Edge.
If you really care about fidelity you’d skip the streaming and either have a collection of new and used blurays, rip blu rays from the library, or pirate bluray rips from other people.
No one offers actual fidelity on the streaming platforms. They consider cost to them to serve content and assume you don’t care enough to seek alternatives.
I'm expecting that later ones will contain methods to get out however they can, whether that's connecting to xfinity free wifi, connecting to a satellite, or having a cheap cell connection that is always on. They want your data and will do their damnedest to get it with/without your permission. Geolocation will be found. I'd expect they'll scan your local wifi SSIDs and send those too and ethernet MAC address to figure out who you are. There must be methods of using this info to wrangle your identity for marketing purposes.
There are still annoyances. Our TV finds every opportunity to send you to its home screen of apps, requiring me to reset the input to the PS5 that we use for Netflix etc. And regardless, I don't want to pay for a lousy customised Android with a bunch of crappy apps preinstalled.
Some brands are better than others. I bought a Sony Bravia TV less than a year ago. The nags are infrequent (maybe every fifth time I turn it on) and unobtrusive (a toast notification pops up in the upper right corner of the screen for a few seconds; it's gone by the time the Fire Stick UI comes up).
Getting rid of ads on the streaming stick and various streaming services is an interesting challenge though...
I’ve had plenty of RokuTVs and my previous home had wired gig e Internet in every room. I plugged the TV to the Ethernet to get software updates, unplugged it, set the TV to always switch to the HDMI port with my AppleTV connected and never thought about the Roku again.
The AppleTV supports CEC and controls the power and the volume.
However, if you do connect, then Samsung pushes so many updates (more ads) than anyone else. My ancient samsung tv in the garage was getting weekly updates for some reason.
This must be a very new or not universal feature. I have an Element E4AA70R 70" 4K UHD HDR10 Roku TV I picked up in mid-2023 for well below $1000. It has never once been connected to the internet, and it doesn't nag me.
Might still be possible to jailbreak LG TVs. Not sure what the quality of the homebrew TV firmware situation is like though. Maybe not stable enough for family use.
Are dumb TVs rare? I've never bought one, just getting TVs when other people are finished with theirs, but I'm pretty sure every one I've owned has been a dumb TV. We just connect it to the PS4 and they've all been the same.
Are there any hobby projects to hack/replace the controller board to make a new/fancy TV into a dumb tv?
Would be nice to be able to use a new OLED panel like that...
It's a nice starting point. There are other options such as used Flanders Scientific or Sony Studio Screens. But those are usually rather expensive. I would recommend to buy them on Ebay if anything.
It isn’t even the smart tv prospect that concerns me with new tvs. My current TV is technically a smart TV but you can’t tell. It has never been connected to the internet.
My concern is the framerate. Some of these TVs, even in the 1080p era, will turn a cinematic masterpiece into feeling like a cheap soap opera. I’m not even sure what to look for to avoid this issue. Limiting myself to maybe 48hz tvs?
I have a fire tv and run adguard, which does the same thing as pihole, and I can barely tell it's on. It may block some tracking, but I get an increasing amount of ads in the fire tv GUI, not to speak of YouTube ads.
Sometimes I wonder if the people recommending pihole actually tried it. You get much better value out of ublock, smarttube, and so on.
This is a great suggestion. I've run two on my local network for about five years:
pi#1) My personal DNS resolver, which I manually configure on each device.
pi#2) The much less restrictive DNS resolver which my DHCP server automatically issues to all other network clients, including all phones and IoT [0]
Individual hosts can then manually configure their DNS to resolve to the local network router (or third-party DNS), which effectively bypasses both PiHoles (for that device, only).
[0] There is a method to use a firewall to capture all outbound DNS and force routing through PiHole (ifsense? I don't know), which may be necessary for hard-coded DNS-IPs. I do not know how to do this but it's not necessary on my network.
Often devices will have the DNS server hard-coded and never connect to the pihole DNS server. This is not just to avoid ad-blocking but to make the DNS more reliable and avoiding having lots of potential support issues around faulty DNS.
I've never used pihole, but on any decent router you can intercept outgoing udp to port 53, and redirect it to a destination of your choosing. DNS-over-HTTP ruined that however.
> Any display or system you end up using needs HDCP 2.2 compliance to play 4K or HDR content via a streaming service or any other DRM-protected 4K or HDR media, like a Blu-ray disc.
This plus all the notes below about how various apps won't stream 4k in various circumstances depending on platform or web browser just lend further credence to the idea that it's best to say fuck it and deploy a jellyfin instance and sail the high seas. Or at least rip blu rays.
I mean why would I pay all these streaming services for such subpar service?
I looked into this. If I am remembering correctly the price was higher. It is just easier to connect a mini PC to an hdmi port and bypass all of the built in TV functionality.
The cheat code is Sceptre dumb TVs from Wal-Mart's web site. I want Hackernews to know about this so that Sceptre and Wal-Mart can get sales and know that there's a substantial market for these devices, not shrug their shoulders and go "we may as well take these off the market and sell enshittified crap instead; it's not like our customers know or care about the difference."
That can block some trackers, but does not block ads or “suggested” content. There are also some devices that have hardcoded DNS settings that bypass any local network DNS settings.
I gave up on televisions about 10 years ago, they were all slow as molasses in January, underpowered, with atrocious interfaces. Nothing fluid or positive about any of them. I've got a 30 inch iMac in the bedroom that we watch everything on, much better than a television. I would be interested in purchasing a 52 inch iMac, hang on the wall, has all the media sharing and everything that televisions fail so much at.
Buy a Roku TV, never connect it to the internet, set it to come on on the HDMI channel your AppleTV is connected to and you get a fast fluid user experience.
Right - I'm wondering why this article is so important and maybe I haven't seen enough intrusive "smart" TV's -- but is it not the case that for the vast majority of smart TVs, you can still just connect whatever to the HDMI (e.g. a computer) and keep it on that? Mine are Roku's, but I feel like the Samsungs et al are the same?
The point is what if you DON’T just connect something to bypass all the slowness. Maybe in a tech forum everybody has done it, but certainly not out in the “real world”.
My work health insurance recently offered a free scale and blood pressure monitor, I thought that's a nice perk, I'll use that, so I ordered with the intent of never using their app, just using it for my own tracking. The first time I used it, I got an email from my insurance company congratulating me and giving me suggestions. Both devices have a cellular modem in them, and arrived paired to my identity.
I destroyed them and threw them in a dumpster like that Ron Swanson gif.
All to say, little cellular modems and a small data plan are likely getting cheap enough it's worth being extra diligent about the devices we let into our homes. Probably not yet to the point of that being the case on a tv, but I could certainly see it getting to that point soon enough.
Similarly, I had a workplace dental provider ship me a ‘smart toothbrush’.
Turns out they track the aggregate of everyone’s brushing and if every employee brushes their teeth, the plan gets a discount.
”Lower rate based on group's participation in Beam Perks™ wellness program and a group aggregate Beam score of "A". Based on Beam® internal brushing and utilization data.”
Technology is starting to become genuinely terrifying. Computers used to sit on desks in full visibility, and we used to be in control. Now they're anywhere and everywhere, invisible, always connected, always sensing, doing god knows what, serving unknown masters, exploiting us in unfathomable ways. Absolutely horrifying.
I'd have tried to disassemble it, locate the SIM card or cellular modem, and see if it could be used for other traffic. A wireguard tunnel fixes the privacy problem, and I can always use more IP addresses and bandwidth.
Until people start abusing these "features", they will not go away.
The data plans on some embedded modems are quite different from consumer plans. They are specifically designed for customers who have a large number of devices but only need a small amount of bandwidth on each device.
These plans might have a very low fixed monthly cost but only include a small data allowance, say 100 KB/month. That's plenty for something like a blood pressure monitor that uploads your results to your doctor or insurance company.
If you are lucky that's a hard cap and the data plan cuts off for the rest of the month when you hit it.
If you are unlucky that plan includes additional data that is very expensive. I've heard numbers like $10 for each additional 100 KB.
I definitely recall reading news articles about people who have repurposed a SIM from some device and using it for their internet access, figuring that company would not notice, and using it to watch movies and download large files.
Then the company gets their bill from their wireless service provider, and it turns out that on the long list of line items showing the cost for each modem, a single say $35 000 item really stands out when all the others are $1.
If you are lucky the company merely asks you to pay that, and if you refuse they take you to civil court where you will lose. (That's what happened in the articles I remember reading, which is how they came to the public's attention).
If you unlucky what you did also falls under your jurisdiction's "theft of services" criminal law. Worse, the amount is likely above the maximum for misdemeanor theft of services so it would be felony theft of services.
Through what technical or legal mechanism is the company identifying or locating you - assuming you never logged in or associated the product with your identity?
What law is preventing Best Buy from telling TVManufacturer that a credit card with these last 4 digits bought the TV with this exact serial number?
And once the SIM connects near your house, what is preventing the phone company from telling TVManufacturer the rough location of the SIM, especially after that SIM is found to have used too much data?
Then use some commercially available ad database to figure out that the person typically near this location with these last four digits is 15155.
That's just a guess, but there is enough fingerprinting that they will know with pretty high certainty it is you. Whether all this is admissible in civil court, idk.
> What law is preventing Best Buy from telling TVManufacturer
No law: reality and PCI standards prevent this. And of course, the manufacturer could get a subpoena after enough process. This also assumes the TV was purchased with a credit card and not cash.
> And once the SIM connects near your house
> what is preventing the phone company from telling
Again: reality and the fact that corporations aren't cooperative. A rough location doesn't help identify someone in any urban environment. Corporations are not the FBI or FCC on a fox hunt.
Can you cite a single case where this has happened on behalf of a corporation? These are public record, of course.
Yup. Works great. All things equal I'd prefer just not buying a damn Smart TV to begin with, but absent that as a realistic option (every 4K TV I've ever seen is smart) I'll happily settle with them never seeing one byte of Internet.
I’m in the same camp. The next escalation is defending against a TV scanning for, and joining unprotected neighbor networks to “phone home.” It’s a thing.
I mean yeah or they include a 5G modem because the ads are so lucrative. But then we can start discussing how to cut the red wire to disarm your spy rectangle.
Imagine if we could put this kind of innovation to work to solve actual problems and not find ways to bypass people attempting to not have capitalism screaming at them 24/7 to buy things.
Bet this is easy to fool with a fake/honeypot open network with a high rssi that blocks all traffic except the initial captive portal / connectivity check.
> Dumb TVs sold today have serious image and sound quality tradeoffs, simply because companies don’t make dumb versions of their high-end models. On the image side, you can expect lower resolutions, sizes, and brightness levels and poorer viewing angles. You also won’t find premium panel technologies like OLED. If you want premium image quality or sound, you’re better off using a smart TV offline. Dumb TVs also usually have shorter (one-year) warranties.
For a hacker news article, it misses the crucial option - hacking a smart TV! I have LG OLED jailbroken using rootmy.tv, it was pretty trivial. It's basically a linux computer with a huge screen, you can customize it, SSH into it, map any commands to the remote, etc.
Before I only used monitor, simple DP/HDMI input is all I wanted. But being able to take full control of the tv and connect it with other devices in the house I would normally get Rpi for is pretty convenient!
You shouldn't have to hack it, you should have the right to repair the software on your device. Hopefully the Vizio lawsuit will help with that for Linux based devices, signs are looking good though.
https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/vizio.html
You're right, but until the laws change we should be telling everyone how and make these tools better. If we can't change the laws we can make the cat and mouse game too expensive for them to continue.
Plus, I'm pretty confident they are already doing illegal things. On my Samsung TV it wants to force update. There is no decline option, there is no option to turn off updates, only to take it completely offline. There's no way in hell these kinds of contracts would be legal in any other setting. There's no meaningful choice and contracts that strongarm one party are almost always illegal. You can't sign a contract where the bank can arbitrary change the loan on you (they can change interest but they can't arbitrarily charge how that interest is determined. Such as going from 1% to 1000% without some crazy impossible economic situation).
Someone needs to start a class action. Someone needs to push that as far as the courts will go
Agreed. Its not that useful, but I have been collecting exploits here when I see any that could potentially be useful for replacing firmware on devices.
https://wiki.debian.org/Exploits
This is just about GPL compliance though (afaik LG TVs are already GPL compliant, or at least, I haven't noticed any noncompliance).
The bigger problem here is tivoization. You can build a fresh kernel from source but you have no way to install it because the bootloader is locked down.
As Conservancy would say, a device with no way to modify isn't GPLv2 compliant either.
https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2021/mar/25/install-gplv2/ https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2021/jul/23/tivoization-and-t... https://events19.linuxfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2017...
We should really be happy that Torvalds decided to license Linux as GPL software. If it was BSD these discussions would simply not exist, and corporate power over software would be even greater. I would dare to say we would probably not even have an open source scene at all...
The lawsuit is indeed about the GPL, but the right to repair (or at least replace) software really it needs to be expanded to all software. The right to repair movement is often about software-based lockdowns. Hopefully it will eventually result in those being banned.
> It's basically a linux computer with a huge screen
Why would I want a Linux computer with a huge screen?
I just want a huge screen.
I’ll provide my own connected devices, independent of the screen.
Why wouldn't you want it to be a computer? Then it can be connected to your devices AND also do the job itself in a situation where it's awkward to connect to a device.
If already needs a computer in it to drive menus / modern display protocols. Having that computer be powerful enough to also decode content is barely an extra cost.
A rooted piece of trashy IOT is trashy IOT. It's an acquired taste, the excitement of putting a black box insecure linux device on the home network to add to your home infra admin duties.
For the same reason I don't want a self-heating mug.
Yeah, I'd absolutely agree here. The article didn't "miss" this option. It just isn't relevant here.
I feel you, that's exactly why I was using only monitors before! I got convinced to go for this as an acceptable compromise with much more control than some proprietary backend.
Begs the question, how long before smart monitors.
> RootMyTV (v1/v2) has been patched for years, and your TV is almost certainly not vulnerable. We recommend checking whether your TV is rootable with another method.
The one-click method has been patched, but there are other methods that will work if you haven't been religiously updating your TV:
[0] https://github.com/throwaway96/dejavuln-autoroot
[1] https://github.com/throwaway96/faultmanager-autoroot
Religiously updating my TV? It has been patched since spring, someone clicking by accident "yes" for the update notice that appears randomly on the middle of the screen in the past 9 months would ruin it. I was religously *not* updating my TV and it still got too new software for the exploit :')
One day I will buy a new TV and develop a new one-click method... but for now I'm still rocking my B9.
I have 2 LG OLED TVs, different sizes. Rootmytv failed to root both of them. I forgot which step and which error it was giving, but I tried everything including factory reset etc. I'm glad it's working for some people.
The first line of the homepage says "RootMyTV (v1/v2) has been patched for years, and your TV is almost certainly not vulnerable.", so that's hardly surprising
What I didn't mention is that I specifically looked for older TV on the second hand market to find a hackable model.
I mean, I didn't wanted to buy a brand new one anyway, it's very expensive and I don't need latest AI features. I found a year old model with firmware that was listed as supported by the jailbreak at the time
Seems like there is a big opportunity here for something a router distro to combine with a tv jailbreak. How good is the hardware? It would be nice to have my tv serve a couple purposes if it has the hardware to do it.
It's a modest ARM CPU, I wouldn't rely on it for a router but it can run Rpi Hole! Also Home Assistant integration, I use the TV remote to control LEDs/lights around the apartment
Most smart TVs only have 100mbit ethernet, even "high end" TVs like LG OLEDs. They'd be terrible routers.
Is there much you can do with it? Does it still work as before, does it still have a GUI? Sounds really cool.
I think the parent commenter is perhaps a little over-selling the LG rooting. It is definitely root, you can write whatever you want on the filesystem (at your peril), and theoretically do whatever you want, but the homebrew exploit launches a bit later in the boot chain than you'd want (so blocking update nags isn't quite reliable), and a lot of the inner system things are proprietary and require reverse engineering to extend.
It's the same system software, just with root capacity.
That being said, there's still a bunch of nice homebrew:
- Video screensavers ala Apple TV
- DVD logo screensaver
- Adfree (and sponsorblock-integrated and optional shorts-disabling) Youtube
- Remote button remapping (Netflix button now opens Plex for me)
- Hyperion (ambilight service that controls an LED strip behind the TV)
- A nice nvidia shield emulator for game streaming from my PC with low latency
- VNC server (rarely useful, but invaluable when it is)
Sponsorblock and remote remapping are killer features for me, and the rest is just really pleasant to have.
A while ago I had a discussion with my friends that it is possible that in the future if 5G is sufficiently cheap, smart tvs come with a 5G SIM so they can force ads and updates even if you refuse to connect it to WiFi. I wonder if this will ever be a real thing. Either 5G, 6G or whatever comes next.
What a horrid thought…
You might be interested to read about the findings by Ruter, the publicly owned transport company for Oslo. They discovered their Chinese Yutong electric buses contained SIM cards, likely to allow the buses to receive OTA updates, but consequentially means they could be modified at any moment remotely. Thankfully they use physical SIMs, so some security hardening is possible.
Of course, with eSIMs becoming more widespread, it’s not inconceivable you could have a SoC containing a 5G modem with no real way to disable or remove it without destroying the device itself.
[1] https://ruter.no/en/ruter-with-extensive-security-testing-of...
Chuck McGill was a visionary?
What I'd really like is a TV with DisplayPort. How is this not a thing? IIRC you cannot buy a display with DP that's larger than 45 inches, give or take - they just don't exist. I think this is really weird. Like, I'd pay an extra $100 for that port, but I'm just not allowed to have it.
I absolutely love my Aorus 48" OLED-type display (w/ DisplayPort).
I tried a 48" TFT-type television (attempting use as a computer display) and the refresh rate just wasn't there, along with typical backlight splotching (but it cost a fifth as much, so...).
My only caution is OLED can experience burn-in (unlike the smaller Aorus 45" using a VA-type panel), but it is otherwise a much better experience
> My only caution is OLED can experience burn-in
The other limitation is lower brightness than miniLED monitors, around 30-60% of the nits in SDR. Whether that matters obviously depends on the ambient light or reflective surfaces near you.
For me, because I'm next to a big window and already squinting at my 400 nits IPS monitor, a < 300 nits OLED is a non-starter, but a 600 nits in SDR, IPS miniLED, is ideal.
This limitation should be temporary however because there are some high nit OLED TVs coming on the market in 2025 so bright OLED 27-43" monitors will likely follow.
The new LG panels are bright enough. I think they’re called 4th generation WOLED.
330 nits in SDR is good relative to other OLED monitors and good enough for most indoor environments but not good enough for my indoor environment. Windows are too big and not tinted, just too much ambient light for anything below 500 nits.
You can buy projector and have 120 inches screen in 160 inches wide room. And it is also unbreakable screen, useful especially if you have kids.
New Hisense TVs have USB-C DisplayPort support. Pretty cool, but realistically I don't see how it's different from HDMI from a usefulness standpoint.
Edit: It is cool I can plug my phone or laptop into the TV with one cable, no adapters, and get some power as well. For some reason it didn't work with my Steam Deck which was strange.
I think it helps with the HDMI 2.1 licensing bullshit.
This. I was reading about some of the ugly hacks Valve has had to get around to use 2.1 on the steam machine. They (HDMI consortium, whatever its called) won't let you use 2.1 if your video drivers are FOSS. Since SM has open drivers for the AMD card it's leading to subobtimal video output at certain resolution/framerate combos (4K@120fps? Something like that), and they can't legally advertise support for HDMI2.1.
And annoyingly you can do USB-C to DP but not the other direction.
I can't be the only one that hooks up my computer, with a graphics card, to my TV
There absolutely are ways to do this, some motherboards have a DP-In connector that is routed to the USB4 ports. One example would be the ProArt X670E.
The cheapest one nowadays is probably the PSVR 2 adapter
As far as I am aware, after having done exhaustive research on this, its licensing costs and popularity. Display port simply isn't popular enough. The vast majority of TV manufacturers (not brands mind you, many white label their manufacturing to different brands) also make monitors, and adoption of HDMI across both tvs and monitors not only was much higher, it was overall cheaper in cost since you could share the same components across lines. This being driven by cheaper licensing costs for accessory manufacturers (like blu ray players).
Its also easier to implement, if I recall correctly
This is the essential core of it, as I have come to understand it anyway.
Wanting to know what I'm missing r/e: licensing costs.
Wikipedia [0] states:
> VESA, the creators of the DisplayPort standard, state that the standard is royalty-free to implement.
And VESA's website [1] lists Samsung, Sony and LG as being members already, so they've already paid. What am I missing here?
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DisplayPort#Cost
[1]: https://vesa.org/about-vesa/member-companies/
There was the 55" Alienware OLED monitor, but unfortunately it never received a follow-up after its 2019 release.
I saw some giant TV on LTT recently which has a DP port.
A DisplayPort Port you say?
> What I'd really like is a TV with DisplayPort.
Issues with HDCP support maybe?
DisplayPort supports all HDCP versions, so that shouldn't be a problem.
i would really like a tv with usb c. so, i can directly connect my phone/ tablet and cast directly
Different tariff rates for TVs and computer monitors.
I tried to buy a good 32 inch tv. This is also hard. I need up going a little matter and even then, the utterly trash built in speakers frustrate the hell out of me.
32" is squarely "PC monitor" territory and there are now many good options even w/ OLED. No built-in speakers.
A 32" 4k 240hz OLED computer monitor + smart TV HDMI dongle + external speakers should work fine. Only point I would check is if the remote that comes with the dongle can turn on the monitor.
Why would you want such a thing? HDMI 2.1 does HDR 4k @ 120hz without compression. The entire TV ecosystem uses HDMI. If you want to connect a PC to a TV they always have at least 1 HDMI out, and some have a couple.
Because HDMI 2.1 uses a proprietary protocol that's not implemented in any free OS[0]. If you want to use HDMI 2.1 features right now, your only option is to use a non-free OS like Windows or MacOS.
[0]: This came up recently with Valve: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46220488
It's also a piece of shit that will negotiate whatever it wants with your non free OS instead of giving you unmolested RGB...
from a purely technical point of view i do wish HDMI 2.1 was able to gain traction. On a couple of things I own that do actually use it, its an actual noticeable improvement and I feel does a better job than DisplayPort.
Granted, I suspect quite strongly the next wave of consolidation is going to continue the trend of being around USB-C, since the spec should have the bandwidth to handle any video / audio protocols for quite some time. Matter of time until that happens IMO.
It also lets you have a single cord that could theoretically be your power cord and your A/V cord.
From a purely technical standpoint display port is a better standard. HDMI couldn't get their shit together to do anything with USBC and thus all USBC to HDMI converter cables run display port internally.
Display port already allows multiple video streams, ausiostreams ... Why do we need a closed standard to also do this?!?!
Not really. That same link talks about how Intel and nvidia drivers can provide HDMI 2.1 on Linux but it is via their non-free firmware blob.
AMD doesn't (can't? won't?) do the same but there is a workaround: a DisplayPort to HDMI adapter using a particular chip running hacked firmware. That'll get you 4K 120 Hz with working FreeSync VRR.
https://forum.level1techs.com/t/it-is-possible-to-4k-120-hdr...
Some of us would like our expensive hardware to work without hacked third party dongles.
I don't remember where,but somebody explained that the adapters also have some kind of limitation. I can't remember what but they went into deep details and the whole thing is revolting. Governments should protect open source.
Oh, I know this one. It was recently on the HN front page. Open source software stacks are locked out of high end pixel clocks.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46220488
Am I missing something? I have a LG nano something TV that has many “smart” features, but I never let it connect to my WiFi ever. Since day 1 it has been hooked up to an AppleTV. Can I not buy any fancy smart TV in 2025 and use it as a dumb HDMI display for AppleTV?
the issue is that eventually SIM cards will be baked in to deliver ads and spyware; there will be no alternatives because everyone was fine with buying smart TVs and not connecting them to wifi.
see: Android's recent transformation into a closed platform which no longer allows users to control devices they purchase. it's important to fight against trends like this loudly and vehemently while we still can.
Same. I have not seen the interface of my TV for years (Only the input switching UI when switching between my Apple TV and Xbox). This really isp pretty much a "dumb tv" with a setup like this.
Second that. There were articles a year or two ago about TVs trying to connect to any open Wi-Fi they can find, without you asking them. But hopefully LG wouldn’t go that far.
At that point you just open up the back of the TV and drive a screwdriver into the WiFi chip.
Sceptre is not in fact "a Wal-Mart brand" but rather an independent company.
https://www.sceptre.com
Westinghouse TVs are made by a company licensing the brand, not a "Pittsburgh-headquartered company".
These seem like easy mistakes to avoid.
Westinghouse was acquired as a brand under Tsinghua TongFang.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westinghouse_Electronics
This is really poor research on their part.
> "Below are the brands I’ve identified as most likely to have dumb TVs available for purchase online as of this writing."
That just has to be an LLM at work.
And Emerson has for a LONG time been just an American brand on the cheapest Chinese electronics your money can buy.
The whole article is pretty terrible.
While reading the article, I was pretty suspicious about Emerson and Westinghouse, because they sound just like Polaroid - once a solid American manufacturer, but run into the ground and then the name is licensed to bottom-of-the-barrel cheap electronics marketers. It seems strange that the article went out of its way to mention they are headquartered in Pittsburg and founded in the 1940s, like it's some respected brand with a long tradition.
That said my Dynex TV from like 2008 won't die so my agreement with my wife to replace it can't kick in for a 75" OLED TV...someday. Thing has a decent panel FHD and 120hz and you can turn the smoothing crap off and it's definitely a dumb TV
To say nothing of the the ads..
Absurdly although I’m, currently paying for a BBC TV licence, I use an Apple TV but they have not, and will not provide UHD content for it on their streaming app.
Either I can do the stupid thing and connect my LG TV to the network, or through various means download the UHD content, and therefore have to manage it, especially the last watched position, or forego it.
Having ADHD, I never really watch to the end, and so rely so much on the saved position to resume.
As a Plex user I'd recommend a used last-gen game console as a TV source. In my AV room upstairs I've had an XBOX ONE S for a long time and more recently I got a PS4 Pro for the spare room downstairs -- both at Gamestop. I have some games for both of them but I am more likely to game on Steam, Steam Deck or mobile.
Every Android-based media player I've had tried just plain sucks, the NVIDIA Shield wasn't too bad but at some point the controller quit charging. You can still get a game console with a built-in Blu-Ray player too and it's nice to have one box that does that as well as being an overpowered for streaming.
I have a HDHomeRun hooked up to a small antenna pointed at Syracuse which does pretty well except for ABC, sometimes I think about going up on the roof and pointing the small one at Binghamton and pointing a large one at Syracuse but I am not watching as much OTA as I used to. It's nice though being able to watch OTA TV on either TV, any computer, tablets, phones, as well as the Plex Pass paying for the metadata for a really good DVR side-by-side with all my other media.
As for TVs I go to the local reuse center and get what catches my eye, my "monitor" I am using right now is a curved Samsung 55 inch, I just brought home a plasma that was $45 because I always wanted a plasma. I went through a long phase where people just kept dropping off cheap TVs at my home, some of which I really appreciated (a Vizio that was beautifully value engineered) and some of which sucked. [1]
[1] ... like back in the 1980s everybody was afraid someone would break into your home and take your TV but for me it is the other way around
What does a last-gen game console offer over an Apple TV if you don't care about games?
A DVD/Blu-ray/CD player and a digital TV tuner.
I think it costs less too, whereas a new or used PS5 costs more but doesn't add a lot of value -- there are roughly 15 exclusive games for the PS5 so it's not compelling if you have a gaming PC, but it is a nice package to sit next to your TV that does a lot and can stream games from the gaming PC. Personally I like a PS4 controller better than the Apple TV thing.
The PS5 unfortunately doesn't do DVDs or CDs though.
The launch edition doesn’t? I’m surprised vendors even sell a bluray drive that doesn’t have that capability. I guess sony wanted to cut every cent off they could…
About commercial displays:
> A spokesperson from Panasonic Connect North America told me that digital signage displays are made to be on for 16 to 24 hours per day and with high brightness levels to accommodate “retail and public environments.”
Some TV's err on the side of being too dim for daytime viewing in a bright room; that could only be a plus.
If it's too bright in a way that can't be turned down, you could always DIY a tinted shield to put over it for evening viewing. We used to use things like that over CRT monitors once upon a time.
> Their rugged construction and heat management systems make them ideal for demanding commercial use, but these same features can result in higher energy consumption, louder operation, and limited compatibility with home entertainment systems.
I've never heard a commercial flat screen display make a sound.
> Panasonic’s representative also pointed out that real TVs offer consumer-friendly features for watching TV, like “home-optimized picture tuning, simplified audio integration, and user-friendly menu interfaces.”
That person doesn't understand how this would be used at all. The user hooking up their streaming box to the display panel only needs the panel to do video (e.g. via HDMI cable). The display is not involved in audio at all.
I use a 1/8" plug stereo cable going straight from the Android box to a pair of RCA jacks in the speaker system. Bluetooth could be used but the wire has lower latency, 100% reliability, and not using BT means that the speakers are available for pairing if someone wants to use them from a phone. They have a remote control that can switch between two copper line inputs, and BT. The TV's volume is kept at 1%; it would make no difference if it had no speakers.
Spoiler: this is Ars Technica. Obviously they suggest you to instead get an Apple TV so that you send your data to Apple and watch Apple ads instead (with the only argument being that "so far they do less ads").
Yup, from the Apple TV article linked in the article[1]:
> According to its privacy policy, the company gathers usage data, such as “data about your activity on and use of” Apple offerings, including “app launches within our services…; browsing history; search history; [and] product interaction.” [...] transaction information, account information (“including email address, devices registered, account status, and age”), device information (including serial number and browser type), contact information (including physical address and phone number), and payment information (including bank details).
Yeah, sure, that's privacy, Ars.
[1]https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/06/all-the-ways-apple-t...
Let’s see where to start?
1. Email address - you have to use an email address to have an Apple account. How are they not going to have your email?
2. Devices registered - you mean when you log into your device, they keep track of your logged in devices!
3. Transaction history - they keep track of what you bought from them!
Must I continue? Every single piece of data that you named is required to do business with them.
Browsing history? Search history? Age?
Also 'product interaction' is an euphemism to say "if you're sick, we'll sell this information for around 80€" (I think it's close to 200$ for Americans but I don't have any contact in this industry overseas). If you have a cancer and suddenly you see an increase in ads for pseudo-medicine and other scams whose only goal is to extract all the money you have left, and if lucky, your famil's money too, that's from 'product interaction'.
So exactly how do you suppose they sync your browsing history and bookmarks between devices if they don’t store the information? And your browsing history is e2e encrypted by keys on your device. Apple doesn’t have access to your browsing history.
You can give Apple any age you want to. It’s not like it checks.
And I have no idea about the other topics you are going off on and what they have to do with Apple..
I am so curious to learn more about this. Are there any extensive write ups of the mechanics of identification, price points, whatever? Or is it all insider baseball because it is distasteful?
Many tens to hundreds of dollars for that single datapoint is incredible. I have naively assumed we were just packaged up in aggregate and never thought more deeply than that.
What are the most valuable data? Pregnant? Wedding? Divorce? Illness? Home purchase?
> Browsing history? Search history?
They want to show you things you have recently watched or looked at when you log in, rather than just random TV shows.
> Age?
You can give your kids an age-restricted account so what they watch is limited.
Every series you've ever watched with the Apple TV -- of course, they keep track of what you watched with them!
(/s).
It would be a horrible user experience if it didn’t keep track of the series I’ve watched and where I was in shows so I could pick up and watch where I left off on a different device.
This isn’t the iPod days where you would sync your watch history with iTunes.
The entire point of the remark is that you can throw these pseudo-justifications for any and all forms of tracking, since "tracking all the shows you watch" is precisely the issue that motivates TFA.
At the end of the day, they could be taking screenshots of everything you do with your TV and argue it's because of some AI system that will allow you to more easily launch whatever it is you normally do at that time of the day. If you do not see any issue with that, why would you be on this thread?
No the justification for the article is TVs that track your watching no matter what you watching and selling it to advertisers.
Apple tracks what you are watching on AppleTV only.
I’m on this thread because I understand technology.
Are you saying that if you are watching something like “South Park” you wouldn’t want the service that you are watching it on to keep track of where you are in its 25 season run?
> Apple tracks what you are watching on AppleTV only.
So the solution they propose to TVs that track what you're watching is to switch to AppleTV where Apple will track what you're watching? And you still justify this somehow?
Names are confusing no sarcasm intended. I meant Apple tracks what you watch when watching AppleTV+ (the streaming service) on the AppleTV box.
How else are there going to mark what you watched and whdfd you are in a TV series?
Man, how I wish there was a Netflix setting "omit things I've already watched", since I know they already know this.
I can't help wonder if they are just afraid of the offering looking more bare, or is this really such an uncommon desire to want to see "new to me" stuff and not repeat things?
There are no ads in the AppleTV operating system itself.
The only Apple “ads” I ever see are inside the Apple TV+ app (yeah, their naming is confusing…) and it’s only for TV shows they’re promoting in their streaming service.
> Obviously they suggest you to instead get an Apple TV
I did the same last year though when I couldn’t find a good non-smart tv. Even if you don’t like the advice it is a practical solution for normies.
The Apple TV box does not have a microphone and a camera, but beyond that there is absolutely no reason to think it's any more private than a "smart" TV.
There's a microphone in the remote control.
Funny how the article itself is an ad
AdsTechnica now.
At least we can gather and post an actual solution in the top comment.
Hopefully this lawsuit will mean people can modify the software on their smart TVs; replace it with a Linux distro running KDE Bigscreen or similar.
https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/vizio.html
The more I think about it I wonder why Chinese TVs using Android based TV don’t have Some GrapheneTV or basic trimmed down Android aimed to be “dumb”.
Unlike phones,
- if it should be air gapped then all you’d want is your HDMIs input and remote control to work.
- nice to have: ADCs/DACs for analog AV input and audio out and any antenna input if available.
- super nice to have: Bluetooth for passing audio out and maybe network (Ethernet, WiFi) stack if same.
But assuming the goal is airgapped. There are less security concerns in general, You just want the Android TV to be lightweight and fast and don’t care it’s “stuck” in specific version or use closed blobs.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned that KDE revived the Plasma Bigscreen project. No idea on the ETA but assuming all goes well I can see it becoming my daily driver very quickly.
https://plasma-bigscreen.org/get/
SteamOS/Bazzite also makes it pretty easy to integrate flatpaks into its gamepad-oriented UI. I hope that leads to the development of more apps that work with a remote control or gamepad, which would then also work on Plasma Bigscreen.
Presumably locked bootloaders on smart TVs are a problem that would block usage of that project?
I'm confused. Every TV is a dumb TV if you don't give it your Wifi password.
Yeah I have a couple of recent Samsung OLEDs and they're fine without an internet connection despite reports that they wouldn't be. If I press one of the annoying streaming service buttons on the remote it'll give me a setup popup which needs to be dismissed, otherwise they work fine, albeit without any built in streaming support.
I'd read reports that Q-Symphony (audio from the TV speakers and soundbar simultaneously) wouldn't work, but it does.
I stuck an OSMC (https://osmc.tv/) box to the back of both of them so they can play stuff from my NAS. They're not the cheapest solution and I realise Kodi/XBMC on which they're based isn't everyone's jam (I grew up with XBMC on an Xbox so it is very much mine) - but they play everything, have wifi, HDMI-CEC, integrated RF remote, and work out of the box.
Model numbers if anyone cares: Samsung QE65S95C, Samsung QE77S95F. I believe S95, S90 and S85 (at least up to F) are all very similar so they should all work but ofc ymmv.
This OSMC box looks interesting, but does it allow to run arbitrary programs like a plain Linux box? What I have in mind here are things such as VacuumTube (YoutubeTV front end), a Web browser to stream from various online sources, etc. I found KODI (as running on Linux) far too restrictive when it comes to streaming from the Internet, and the add ons to be terrible. (In particular the YouTube add-on requires an API key registered with Google, which makes it a far worse proposition than using VacuumTube anonymously.)
Thanks for mentioning VacuumTube, it sounds useful.
I’m using a Minix Z100 running Gnome and Kodi. I use a simple Bluetooth keyboard, the interface is clunky but it does the job. I use Samba to also share files to VNC running on iOS and Android on the same network.
I tried using fancier solutions but anything that browses content without involving directories always break for some specific content in unpredictable ways.
That has been my experience as well. So far nothing has come close to the flexibility of Gnome (upscaled) with an airmouse. I am keeping an eye on the Plasma Bigscreen project however (10-foot UI for Plasma).
An alternative could be some x86 Android TV build like Lineage, but I have not seen very convincing demonstrations that this is truly viable.
No, it doesn’t in the way you are intending. I run various utilities on them, but nothing that ever shows up in the interface/TV
I just think of them as the best solution to run Kodi for media that is on my network.
My recent TCL TV forces you agree to Google's terms and conditions, and you aren't even provided the text of what you're agreeing to unless you connect the TV to the internet.
It felt illegal.
I think they, or at least samsungs. will happily use open wifi if they can find it.
Source, my open test network and a neighbors tv that keeps trying to phone home with it.
The TV can happily connect to my neighbors printer WLAN. That is the only open wifi around. It isn’t 2008 anymore.
My 2 year old LG complained every time I turned it on that I hadn't hooked it to the internet. No way to disable it.
Now that it's connected, it shows an ad at that time, in the same way. Can't win.
My LG TV is pretty dumb since the only button it has is "connect to media server" in local network.
A guest logged into Wi-Fi on a Vizio of mine and there was conveniently no way to disconnect/forget it without a factory reset back to motion smoothing hell.
i have a vizio which I opened up and removed the WiFi module. it never complains about the internet now.
"In the land of telescreens, the man with the soldering iron is king"
I have a Mac Mini hooked up to my TV. We never use anything mode of the TV. (Then again, I have zero streaming services, so perhaps I am not who this article is for.)
Neither do I, but what about YouTube? Not letting your TV manufacturer sell your watching habits is already a big win, and on macOS you can further block telemetry. A big chunk of my YouTube consumption happens through yt-dlp using a VPN provider that presumably does not cooperate with Google.
What do you use for a remote for the Mac Mini?
some will yell at you with a notification until you give in and connect it.
Return it as unfit for service.
Yup - my LG (~6 months old) works fine without my ever having given it a WiFi password.
This is what the article recommends by the way.
We're running a solution that isn't perfect and isn't for everyone. We have a nice Sony Android TV along with a pihole. But on the TV itself I installed f-droid and netguard. Netguard's UI sucks on a TV, but it's workable. I use it to block Internet access to everything including Google. Only a few streaming apps have internet access. There was some trial and error with a handful of dependencies too.
If I need to update an app, I temporarily allow Google services access. All the streaming apps work well, except for HBO Max which takes a few minutes to load. I suspect it has a long timeout/retry count for something I'm blocking. But once it loads, it's fine.
I also use a different and basic home launcher so we can open the apps we want immediately, without having to deal with shifting algorithm-based icons. But even if we use the Google launcher, it's mostly empty and free of ads because it can't connect. It does still capture what I recently watch though.
Overall it's a decent experience, mainly because we're not being bombarded by more ad algorithms.
How I break free from Smart TVs ("smart" for the manufacturer but very dumb for the user).
Buy a cheap smart TV and run it in "store mode".
Brightness and saturation will probably be maxed out but with a cheap TV, it looks more like "normal" on a more expensive model. Hint: The main difference between cheap and expensive in some cases --- the color adjustment range is limited by software on the cheaper models.
Currently using a Hisense 4k model from Costco connected to a small mini PC --- Windows or Linux, your preference. The TV functions as nothing but a dumb display.
Use a small "air mouse" for control. On screen keyboard as needed.
Use a Hauppauge USB tuner for local digital broadcasts.
I use software called DVB Viewer to view local channels and IPTV. A browser with VPN for streaming in some cases.
In every case, I maintain full control of my data and the ability to block ads as I see fit.
> Brightness and saturation will probably be maxed out but with a cheap TV, it looks more like "normal" on a more expensive model.
That probably mimics Samsung TVs, which are popular for that reason but look like crap.
The actual best TVs, picture wise, are among the LG C series, which are surprisingly dim and unsaturated. That said, mine has held up terribly so I won't buy another. My $200 Onn looks good enough to my eyes and lasted longer.
> Buy a cheap smart TV and run it in "store mode".
They aren't "cheap," but just last week I unboxed and tested 5 different Samsung S95F televisions of 4 different sizes.
One of the functions that each of them promised to perform when set to "retail mode" was to reset the picture settings every 5 minutes.
That makes retail mode a non-starter for anyone who seeks any resemblance of accuracy in their video system, at least on these particular televisions.
I think costco sells a 100" hisense for $1899
seems on the cheaper side and it might work like he said
> Buy a cheap smart TV
Why does it have to be cheap? What if I want a killer panel without all the bs?
> Use a small "air mouse" for control
An alternative is something like 'unified remote' on it, then you can even type from your phone without any pain.
> A browser with VPN for streaming in some cases.
There is a missing piece for me here. A magic 'send my PC browser tab to this other PC connected to the TV' button. Not sure if something like this exists. It would be ideal to send all the browser context with cookies etc so that you are logged in too and can just start playing whatever you found on PC.
Any for of cast is not an option, rendering has to happen on the TV PC box.
> A magic 'send my PC browser tab to this other PC connected to the TV' button
You can send a tab to another device on Firefox. It doesn't come with all the browser context, but it's pretty handy.
Why does it have to be cheap?
It doesn't have to be --- but you may be wasting your money if you run in "store mode".
As noted above, "store mode" will usually max out the brightness, saturation and contrast while removing user control. This looks pretty "normal" with cheaper models. More expensive ones can become overbearing.
It appears to me that in some cases, the difference between cheap and more expensive is mainly the color adjustments.
In order to take advantage of economies of scale, they may use the exact same screen panel on multiple different models but limit the cheaper ones in software so it doesn't look as "bright" and "eye catching" in the store as their more expensive "killer" model.
> There is a missing piece for me here. A magic 'send my PC browser tab to this other PC connected to the TV' button. Not sure if something like this exists.
Chromecast does exactly this and has existed since ~2010.
>There is a missing piece for me here. A magic 'send my PC browser tab to this other PC connected to the TV' button.
I use an NVIDIA shield on a dumb TV with firefox sideloaded (ad blockers, ect) for 95% of my streaming. You can import your cookies or other preferences or simply browse for content directly.
I'm less bothered by the ever present smart tv and more bothered that there is no way to just turn on the tv and go straight to input from a certain port. Would love to know TV's that just do that. My old Samsung constantly forces me to click through sources and out of smart features to get to the hdmi from my computer everytime I turn it on.
I just bought a LG 50" UA7000 [1] that goes straight to HDMI on turning on. I am using it as a additional screen for my laptop. I am hoping using one screen two feet away and one screen 6 feet away will preserve my eyesight a bit longer.
A minor problem is that it displays "Turning on AI voice features" every time I turn it on, but those features are not actually turned on. It probably tries to, but since I never connected the TV to the internet, this fails. Still have to figure out how to get rid of the message.
[1] https://www.bestbuy.ca/en-ca/product/lg-50-ua7000-4k-uhd-hdr...
We have two Hisense TVs that both allow this. One is Roku based and the other Google TV. Neither is connected to wifi. I’d recommend the Google flavor, it has a lot more control over the settings and will auto suspend in a reasonable period if no input is being sent. The Roku’s minimum auto suspend is 4 HOURS.
They were cheap and the picture quality is great. Not OLED level, but jeeze I had to share a 27” CRT for my SNES as a kid—
Samsung had a hidden hospitality menu, or hotel mode, search for how to access it for your model. You can have it go right to an input on power on.
Getting an hospitality variant tv might be an option too. I have a Samsung one which does have some smart features but they are mostly backend related. I think there's only YouTube on the user facing side. I got it because they are support to be better TVs for the money but it was such a huge pain to set up that I wouldn't do it again.
HDMI CEC should be able to to turn on TVs direct to the input. Sadly few desktops seem to support it.
Apparently "almost no PC GPU has hardware support for CEC" according to Arch. Wonder if that is outdated and modern GPUs do?
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/HDMI-CEC
The Steam Machine will support CEC, hopefully other PC vendors will take note and adopt it.
My Samsung QN90B does that just fine, it's only a few years old. IIRC there's a setting somewhere in the menu to not boot to the home screen. It also doesn't nag me about anything, although I only enable wifi when I want to update.
Is the input device on prior to turning the tv on? Some of them will automatically switch if an input is on or gets switched on.
LG (UT8000 at least) TVs have an option to default to last used input, that works reliably.
Roku has this feature.
I have had an old PC hooked up to the hdmi port of an old TV for years and it works exactly as I want. I have full control and don't have to deal with smart tv ads.
My wife and I have been wondering about exactly this question and are on the market for a new TV, and this list of options is really sad. 720p? 32"? Yeesh
there was a 55" 4K option but your point stands. Yeesh.
I'm a huge fan of projectors. With large TVs, you have a huge black wall when you aren't watching. With a projector you can have a pull-down screen that disappears when you don't need it. Or leave it down - it's white, and a lot less visually intrusive.
The only problem with projectors is there's not much choice if you're sensitive to DLP rainbow effect. I haven't tried one of the newer ones with a faster colour wheel, though. It means I've had to go JVC DLA projectors, but these are now ridiculously expensive and I can't see myself ever spending that much on, well, anything.
If you already have a "smart TV" of some kind, one strategy is to block it from having Internet access at your router and then use an Android TV based streaming box/stick or other external source for all content (OTA tuner, 4K Blu-Ray player, game console, etc). It's pretty easy to side load apps like Kodi and SmartTube on Android TV (a YouTube client with ad blocking, other features and zillion UX improvements).
What’s wrong with never configuring the WiFi for it?
...Not a damn thing. Makes you wonder if people on here connect their smart tv to the net just to find a complicated solution to make it dumb again.
Someone is going to run in here talking about how smart TV's randomly connect themselves to wifi, which is absolutely nonsense.
HN things I guess.
Unfortunately cars are becoming like smart TVs in this respect.
I'll never buy a car manufactured after about 2014 for this reason. I'm planning to just keep getting repairs & upgrades done on my model year 2006 for at least the next 10-20 years. By then perhaps I will want to switch to electric, but I'll do it by electrifying something older.
Cars from around 1998-2014 usually have side curtain airbags & adequate rollover durability. The only improvements since then that I'd even want at all are better EV batteries & marginal efficiency gains for IC engines, but those can be retrofitted &/or aren't worth the anti features they also added IMO.
If car companies want my business they'll have to remove the telemetry & automatic updates.
I don't care if I end up paying more to drive an old car eventually, but this approach has also been saving me money so far.
ESC is pretty good for safety. I would not want a car without that. Cars from 2014 do have it of course but not those much older.
FWIW I have two 2018 models with zero “smart” features.
No thank you. I will take predictable handling and a steering wheel that responds to my inputs. Loss of traction situations are exactly where I don’t want any systems helping. I need to countersteer and feel the car. Speaking as someone who was raised in winter driving and encouraged to find the limits of handling in snow and ice covered parking lots.
Of course if you are one of those drivers who removes their hands from the wheel in a stressful situation (there are many), these systems will help somewhat.
It really depends on the situation and the car. I’ve had it really help and not take over too much (very modern Porsche in the mountains), and systems where it was actively making the situation much worse by alternately locking the brakes on individual wheels. That was down a long hill which turned icy a third of the way down in a borrowed 2013 BMW F30, and I still consider it luck that I kept it on the road and nothing was coming the other way.
This is the same reason why we haven't bought a new vehicle. Our 2013 Toyota is fantastic.
I've got a 2013 Honda Fit that I love. It's just worked nearly perfectly with only routine maintenance since we bought it used in 2016.
I have a car from 2017 that is perfectly dumb. It had been a rehash of a car being produced since 2010 though. All other models of the same year by the manufacturer had telemetry, mobile app start etc. All those models are now dumb though since for those earlier years they used 3G wireless which is now a dead spectrum.
You just need to pull the fuse or physically remove the telematics unit. In some cars you need to partially disassemble the dash to do this, but there are plenty of tutorials on YouTube. An independent shop should also be able to do this, although dealers will generally refuse since they are among the ones benefiting from the "telemetry," aka spyware.
Is there a device category that isn't becoming like this?
Vote with your wallet while there's still a chance
US government already decided for you, sorry.
It's not feasible for everyone, but between grocery delivery services, telehealth, etc - if you work remotely anyway, it may be surprisingly feasible to get rid of your car altogether and only Uber/Lyft as needed, at least until robotaxis expand into your area at a fraction of the price of traditional ride-hailing apps.
I work remotely, my gym is downstairs as well as a convenience store with some fresh (overpriced) items, a bar and an (overpriced) restaurant.
My barber and grocery store is a $9 Uber Ride each way. So I could get away with a car easily where I live now. My wife and I have been down to one car since Covid.
But when I was in the burbs if metro Atlanta where everything wasn’t so close, it would have been over $100 easy going from one side to the other or basically anywhere besides the grocery store.
My car insurance is only $176 a month for my wife and I. It doesn’t make sense not to have a car, even if you include the minor maintenance on a car that would be hardly ever driven. Even at a theoretical $400 car payment + $176 in insurance, it still easy to come out ahead.
Only a $9 ride in 2025? What is that 1-2 miles? Just bike.
Yes because it’s completely safe to bike everywhere and how would I bring the groceries back?
I live in a tourist area where there are a lot of drivers causing the prices to be low. I noticed it in Las Vegas too.
The only reason I know is I use Uber to run errands close by when my wife has the car on the weekends.
> Yes because it’s completely safe to bike everywhere and how would I bring the groceries back?
Pannier bags. I did this for years. Before I got panniers I filled a big camping rucksack and cycled, but I wouldn't recommend that. Use a small backpack in addition to panniers if you have to, but having just the panniers feels the best.
However, in terms of safety you are unfortunately right. I didn't have a car so I went everywhere by bike but I was essentially a third class citizen in many places. Felt like I could just get wiped out and nobody would even care. There were no people around, only cars. I hate cars, so I had to get a car too :(
That's worse? I don't want my car to track me, I'm def not going to volunteer that information to Uber.
That’s a lost cause between tag readers and if you carry a cell phone.
Your car is tracking much more than rideshare apps even can. Uber, Lyft, whoever gets point to point trip information, maybe audio recording in the car. Modern personally owned automobiles are getting everything, all the time. It knows when you're home, when you're not, many record all audio all the time, some are recording video, some are tracking your sexual activity in the car.
At this point, I treat rideshare like public transit: I assume I'm being watched, but I get to skip the permanent always-on tracking for the other 99% of the time that I'm not in the car.
Also, if you own a car, the state knows where you're going and when, per ALPR systems. With Uber or Lyft or a robotaxi, there's a layer between my personal information and the state. It's not an insurmountable layer, as rideshare / robotaxi services can always be subpoena'd, but adding a layer of extra work for the state is a net gain to my privacy.
There are still 2025 model cars where you can just pull the fuse for the modem and telematics module with no real ill effects.
Can you pull the fuse for the stability control? For the radar brake that gives false positives? For the damn steer by wire and throttle by wire?
Clearly you’re not actually interested in a modern vehicle regardless of capabilities, so I don’t think that there’s any real point in detailing which of those things can be disabled.
Also, for what it's worth, you don't have to use same service on each leg of your trip, you don't need to have it pick you up at your front door, and you don't need to have it drop you off at your exact destination. While for some people, these are admittedly imperfect improvements (you can't really effectively conceal your destination as easily if it's, say, an airport, there's also absolutely nothing stopping you from calculating the cost of your full trip with an equidistant destination, ordering a short trip (not to your final destination), and offering your driver a reasonable amount of cash to take you the rest of the way. Uber/lyft themselves are con artists charging riders WAY more than they pay drivers anyway. You can get away with paying a fraction of what the app would charge you, paying the driver way more than they would otherwise receive, and cutting the parasite (the multi-billion-dollar corporation providing zero value after connecting you with a driver) out of the middle.
Then you have to carry a phone, which is even worse.
> Westinghouse’s dumb TVs max out at 32 inches and 720p resolution
Then why mention the pitiful shit? That describes a LCD TV I had in 2004, one of the first.
> but some of them also have a built-in DVD player.
Well, that changes everything; I want one now, LOL ...
I have the exact setup shown towards the end of the article - HTPC and K400 keyboard/touchpad. I have tried all "smart" platforms in the past, and this setup is an order of magnitude better in everything. I used to have issues where a specific content provider doesn't have an app for my type of smart TV[1], this is no longer an issue because I just use a browser to access anything. And I can browse the web when I'm not watching something[2] (in fact I'm using my HTPC right now as I write this comment).
The only change I had to make starting from a "standard" Linux UI is bumping the screen zoom level to 150%. This may vary depending on your TV size and how far your couch is from your TV.
Building the HTPC was very cheap, I just boughs a horizontal form-factor case, and used spare "donor" parts coming from our household PCs after upgrades.
[1][2]For comparison, the only streaming platform that had all apps I wanted was Apple TV, but that one doesn't have a browser.
the big issue with this setup is that most streaming platforms won’t give you multi-channel audio via the browser on Linux systems. Some might also limit the video quality.
On Windows, it used to be different, but lately I’ve observed the same—ex: Netflix seems to limit the streaming quality even with Edge.
If you really care about fidelity you’d skip the streaming and either have a collection of new and used blurays, rip blu rays from the library, or pirate bluray rips from other people.
No one offers actual fidelity on the streaming platforms. They consider cost to them to serve content and assume you don’t care enough to seek alternatives.
The is the modern version of "ditch your cable company's horrible DVR for a TiVO". What's old is new again, sadly.
Don't bring one into your house?
TV Manufacturers: “oh no!” *proceeds to remove all dumb TVs from the market*
There's a second hand market.
For now. Try getting a good CRT today. Most all the good ones were sent to the dump.
The article goes into that option.
Don’t ever connect your TV to the internet?
I'm expecting that later ones will contain methods to get out however they can, whether that's connecting to xfinity free wifi, connecting to a satellite, or having a cheap cell connection that is always on. They want your data and will do their damnedest to get it with/without your permission. Geolocation will be found. I'd expect they'll scan your local wifi SSIDs and send those too and ethernet MAC address to figure out who you are. There must be methods of using this info to wrangle your identity for marketing purposes.
Better be far enough from the neighbor's password less wifi.
There are still annoyances. Our TV finds every opportunity to send you to its home screen of apps, requiring me to reset the input to the PS5 that we use for Netflix etc. And regardless, I don't want to pay for a lousy customised Android with a bunch of crappy apps preinstalled.
Don't ever let anyone else connect your TV to the internet either.
They nag.
Some brands are better than others. I bought a Sony Bravia TV less than a year ago. The nags are infrequent (maybe every fifth time I turn it on) and unobtrusive (a toast notification pops up in the upper right corner of the screen for a few seconds; it's gone by the time the Fire Stick UI comes up).
Getting rid of ads on the streaming stick and various streaming services is an interesting challenge though...
I’ve had plenty of RokuTVs and my previous home had wired gig e Internet in every room. I plugged the TV to the Ethernet to get software updates, unplugged it, set the TV to always switch to the HDMI port with my AppleTV connected and never thought about the Roku again.
The AppleTV supports CEC and controls the power and the volume.
No nagging
Maybe some brands do (feel free to name them). My Samsung does not.
However, if you do connect, then Samsung pushes so many updates (more ads) than anyone else. My ancient samsung tv in the garage was getting weekly updates for some reason.
I've not experience that on my TCL.
My Phillips 65" doesn't. I just have it connected to my old PC via HDMI. Don't need any smart features.
This must be a very new or not universal feature. I have an Element E4AA70R 70" 4K UHD HDR10 Roku TV I picked up in mid-2023 for well below $1000. It has never once been connected to the internet, and it doesn't nag me.
I rented an apartment that had an LG. It showed a FOMO-inducing popup every week.
Might still be possible to jailbreak LG TVs. Not sure what the quality of the homebrew TV firmware situation is like though. Maybe not stable enough for family use.
I have an LG C3. The old jailbreak no longer works.
I keep avoiding the upgrade to keep the possibility open. At some point they force upgrade your firmware.
Any information on model number so people can compare, learn from your experience, etc?
Other options than the suggested Apple TV route, include pihole (adblock), kodi, openelec (opensource media players).
Are dumb TVs rare? I've never bought one, just getting TVs when other people are finished with theirs, but I'm pretty sure every one I've owned has been a dumb TV. We just connect it to the PS4 and they've all been the same.
I’m fairly certain that Sony TV’s ask you where you want to use it as a Smart TV or a Dumb TV when setting it up.
Are there any hobby projects to hack/replace the controller board to make a new/fancy TV into a dumb tv? Would be nice to be able to use a new OLED panel like that...
It's a nice starting point. There are other options such as used Flanders Scientific or Sony Studio Screens. But those are usually rather expensive. I would recommend to buy them on Ebay if anything.
It isn’t even the smart tv prospect that concerns me with new tvs. My current TV is technically a smart TV but you can’t tell. It has never been connected to the internet.
My concern is the framerate. Some of these TVs, even in the 1080p era, will turn a cinematic masterpiece into feeling like a cheap soap opera. I’m not even sure what to look for to avoid this issue. Limiting myself to maybe 48hz tvs?
You just need to turn it off in the settings.
Pi-hole
I have a fire tv and run adguard, which does the same thing as pihole, and I can barely tell it's on. It may block some tracking, but I get an increasing amount of ads in the fire tv GUI, not to speak of YouTube ads.
Sometimes I wonder if the people recommending pihole actually tried it. You get much better value out of ublock, smarttube, and so on.
This is a great suggestion. I've run two on my local network for about five years:
pi#1) My personal DNS resolver, which I manually configure on each device.
pi#2) The much less restrictive DNS resolver which my DHCP server automatically issues to all other network clients, including all phones and IoT [0]
Individual hosts can then manually configure their DNS to resolve to the local network router (or third-party DNS), which effectively bypasses both PiHoles (for that device, only).
[0] There is a method to use a firewall to capture all outbound DNS and force routing through PiHole (ifsense? I don't know), which may be necessary for hard-coded DNS-IPs. I do not know how to do this but it's not necessary on my network.
Often devices will have the DNS server hard-coded and never connect to the pihole DNS server. This is not just to avoid ad-blocking but to make the DNS more reliable and avoiding having lots of potential support issues around faulty DNS.
I've never used pihole, but on any decent router you can intercept outgoing udp to port 53, and redirect it to a destination of your choosing. DNS-over-HTTP ruined that however.
> Any display or system you end up using needs HDCP 2.2 compliance to play 4K or HDR content via a streaming service or any other DRM-protected 4K or HDR media, like a Blu-ray disc.
This plus all the notes below about how various apps won't stream 4k in various circumstances depending on platform or web browser just lend further credence to the idea that it's best to say fuck it and deploy a jellyfin instance and sail the high seas. Or at least rip blu rays.
I mean why would I pay all these streaming services for such subpar service?
Terrible article, but a good topic. You can get rid of homescreen ads on Google(/Android/Chromecast?) TV with a custom launcher like Projectivity: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.spocky.pro...
"We, and our 226 partners use cookies and similar methods to recognize visitors"
How can you as a publisher not look at that an not go: "Seems a bit much".
Fine that you need to run ads and maybe partner with someone to sell those ads, but 226 of them?
It’s just a modern-day MLM scam.
This
Will it be smart if you don’t connect it to the internet? Am I missing something?
Just use a commercial signage display
I looked into this. If I am remembering correctly the price was higher. It is just easier to connect a mini PC to an hdmi port and bypass all of the built in TV functionality.
It's always best long term to attach your own smarts to a tv.
That can be as simple as an Apple / Android TV, or more.
says the blog with tens of ads and hundreds of trackers
Dont buy a TV?
https://theonion.com/area-man-constantly-mentioning-he-doesn...
Haha yeah that’s a good one, fair
Obligatory David Foster wallce just to add some gen x post structuralist nihilism
https://youtu.be/A_ujr9gi3wk
The cheat code is Sceptre dumb TVs from Wal-Mart's web site. I want Hackernews to know about this so that Sceptre and Wal-Mart can get sales and know that there's a substantial market for these devices, not shrug their shoulders and go "we may as well take these off the market and sell enshittified crap instead; it's not like our customers know or care about the difference."
I’d be in the market but walmart.ca doesn’t list any Sceptre TVs. (Nor does any other Canadian retailer.)
Aren't private DNS or PiHoles a good enough compromise ?
That can block some trackers, but does not block ads or “suggested” content. There are also some devices that have hardcoded DNS settings that bypass any local network DNS settings.
> There are also some devices that have hardcoded DNS settings that bypass any local network DNS settings.
You can intercept those as long as they're not using DoH/DoT.
I gave up on televisions about 10 years ago, they were all slow as molasses in January, underpowered, with atrocious interfaces. Nothing fluid or positive about any of them. I've got a 30 inch iMac in the bedroom that we watch everything on, much better than a television. I would be interested in purchasing a 52 inch iMac, hang on the wall, has all the media sharing and everything that televisions fail so much at.
Buy a Roku TV, never connect it to the internet, set it to come on on the HDMI channel your AppleTV is connected to and you get a fast fluid user experience.
Right - I'm wondering why this article is so important and maybe I haven't seen enough intrusive "smart" TV's -- but is it not the case that for the vast majority of smart TVs, you can still just connect whatever to the HDMI (e.g. a computer) and keep it on that? Mine are Roku's, but I feel like the Samsungs et al are the same?
The point is what if you DON’T just connect something to bypass all the slowness. Maybe in a tech forum everybody has done it, but certainly not out in the “real world”.
Your choices are
1. Spend money. AppleTV and the Nvidia Shield have the best hardware followed by high end Roku devices.
2. Use a computer. That’s a horrible experience.
tl;dr: don’t connect it to a network, and/or use a computer monitor.
My work health insurance recently offered a free scale and blood pressure monitor, I thought that's a nice perk, I'll use that, so I ordered with the intent of never using their app, just using it for my own tracking. The first time I used it, I got an email from my insurance company congratulating me and giving me suggestions. Both devices have a cellular modem in them, and arrived paired to my identity.
I destroyed them and threw them in a dumpster like that Ron Swanson gif.
All to say, little cellular modems and a small data plan are likely getting cheap enough it's worth being extra diligent about the devices we let into our homes. Probably not yet to the point of that being the case on a tv, but I could certainly see it getting to that point soon enough.
Similarly, I had a workplace dental provider ship me a ‘smart toothbrush’.
Turns out they track the aggregate of everyone’s brushing and if every employee brushes their teeth, the plan gets a discount.
”Lower rate based on group's participation in Beam Perks™ wellness program and a group aggregate Beam score of "A". Based on Beam® internal brushing and utilization data.”
Technology is starting to become genuinely terrifying. Computers used to sit on desks in full visibility, and we used to be in control. Now they're anywhere and everywhere, invisible, always connected, always sensing, doing god knows what, serving unknown masters, exploiting us in unfathomable ways. Absolutely horrifying.
Time to turn your house into a giant Faraday cage
Why not just remove the cell modem?
I'd have tried to disassemble it, locate the SIM card or cellular modem, and see if it could be used for other traffic. A wireguard tunnel fixes the privacy problem, and I can always use more IP addresses and bandwidth.
Until people start abusing these "features", they will not go away.
Be very very careful if you do that.
The data plans on some embedded modems are quite different from consumer plans. They are specifically designed for customers who have a large number of devices but only need a small amount of bandwidth on each device.
These plans might have a very low fixed monthly cost but only include a small data allowance, say 100 KB/month. That's plenty for something like a blood pressure monitor that uploads your results to your doctor or insurance company.
If you are lucky that's a hard cap and the data plan cuts off for the rest of the month when you hit it.
If you are unlucky that plan includes additional data that is very expensive. I've heard numbers like $10 for each additional 100 KB.
I definitely recall reading news articles about people who have repurposed a SIM from some device and using it for their internet access, figuring that company would not notice, and using it to watch movies and download large files.
Then the company gets their bill from their wireless service provider, and it turns out that on the long list of line items showing the cost for each modem, a single say $35 000 item really stands out when all the others are $1.
If you are lucky the company merely asks you to pay that, and if you refuse they take you to civil court where you will lose. (That's what happened in the articles I remember reading, which is how they came to the public's attention).
If you unlucky what you did also falls under your jurisdiction's "theft of services" criminal law. Worse, the amount is likely above the maximum for misdemeanor theft of services so it would be felony theft of services.
Example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2509967 (the original source is gone and not in the Wayback Machine)
Through what technical or legal mechanism is the company identifying or locating you - assuming you never logged in or associated the product with your identity?
They shipped it to you. They associated a machine UUID with you at that time, as well as the SIM card.
Now maybe you mean the TV? That’s not what this particular thread is about.
> That’s not what this particular thread is about
This thread is about removing the SIM from a TV.
If I bought that TV in cash (or even credit card, sans subpoena) at a Best Buy and removed the SIM, how is any corporation identifying me?
What law is preventing Best Buy from telling TVManufacturer that a credit card with these last 4 digits bought the TV with this exact serial number?
And once the SIM connects near your house, what is preventing the phone company from telling TVManufacturer the rough location of the SIM, especially after that SIM is found to have used too much data?
Then use some commercially available ad database to figure out that the person typically near this location with these last four digits is 15155.
That's just a guess, but there is enough fingerprinting that they will know with pretty high certainty it is you. Whether all this is admissible in civil court, idk.
> What law is preventing Best Buy from telling TVManufacturer
No law: reality and PCI standards prevent this. And of course, the manufacturer could get a subpoena after enough process. This also assumes the TV was purchased with a credit card and not cash.
> And once the SIM connects near your house
> what is preventing the phone company from telling
Again: reality and the fact that corporations aren't cooperative. A rough location doesn't help identify someone in any urban environment. Corporations are not the FBI or FCC on a fox hunt.
Can you cite a single case where this has happened on behalf of a corporation? These are public record, of course.
Holy shit! I would’ve done the same! This is pure evil! I guess the box never had this info on it
Someone should start a blog where it's all clickbait titles and the articles are all once sentence with the obvious resolution to the bait.
Yup. Works great. All things equal I'd prefer just not buying a damn Smart TV to begin with, but absent that as a realistic option (every 4K TV I've ever seen is smart) I'll happily settle with them never seeing one byte of Internet.
I’m in the same camp. The next escalation is defending against a TV scanning for, and joining unprotected neighbor networks to “phone home.” It’s a thing.
I mean yeah or they include a 5G modem because the ads are so lucrative. But then we can start discussing how to cut the red wire to disarm your spy rectangle.
That one I’m starting to lean on getting closer to happening because we now have 5G RedCap out there for the ‘cheaper’ moderate-speed IoT data market.
https://about.att.com/blogs/2025/5g-redcap.html https://www.t-mobile.com/news/network/5g-redcap-powering-sma...
Wouldn’t surprise me to see modems and eSIMs and embedded PCB antennas some day down the line.
Imagine if we could put this kind of innovation to work to solve actual problems and not find ways to bypass people attempting to not have capitalism screaming at them 24/7 to buy things.
Bet this is easy to fool with a fake/honeypot open network with a high rssi that blocks all traffic except the initial captive portal / connectivity check.
The article lists several manufacturers of 4k dumb tv’s
Some of the advice is a bit weird though. Get a 4k HDR TV and then connect it to an antenna? I mean, why do you even need a 4k HDR TV in that case?
Not to mention disabling the smart/ad features is an option on some smart tvs (ie. Sony).
The article also says why they suck:
> Dumb TVs sold today have serious image and sound quality tradeoffs, simply because companies don’t make dumb versions of their high-end models. On the image side, you can expect lower resolutions, sizes, and brightness levels and poorer viewing angles. You also won’t find premium panel technologies like OLED. If you want premium image quality or sound, you’re better off using a smart TV offline. Dumb TVs also usually have shorter (one-year) warranties.
Yeah, Sceptre's site shows a bunch of dumb TVs that max out at HDMI 2.0, 4K/60Hz. Basically, they are ten years out of date.
I've been on projectors for 10 years. Never even had to own a smart TV.