If only our fucking government would do something about this and actually regulate these evil bastards.
but then the market would be ever so slightly less free. the horror!
Wait until they hear about cell phones.
And cars, and smart thermostats and smart cameras and smart fridges and routers and literally every fucking thing in your house that is connected to the fucking internet. Every single thing in our homes is a data miner.
God damn! You know things are god damn grim when even Oswald Cobblepot has gone woke!
pi-hole ftw. the vast majority of my pi-hole’s DNS drops are from various Roku and Roku-like devices. Also, put all your IoT stuff onto a guest network, or if your gear supports it, on its own VLAN.
See, I just don’t connect it to the network. It complained when I set it up but now it just works as a screen.
I’ve got a raspberry pi steaming my desktop to it with gamestream/sunshine/moonlight, and it’s now as smart as my computer. It can even stream from different computers no matter where they are in the house, watch anything with stremio, and play games from them too. It’s way better than using the youtube or netflix button on the TV, most of the services it offers I don’t use anyway.
But actually pihole does sound like a good idea and maybe I should get that set up one of these days.
So with all the recent drama I learned that some TVs look for other open networks or other same brand TVs in range, and if found will join those networks and still share data.
So not connecting it isn’t enough in all cases.
A pihole wouldn’t solve this either if it was smart enough to know it’s blocked and look elsewhere.
Gotcha, find its card and rip it out.
In the not so distant future, people will begin turning their houses into faraday cages to ensure nothing can access the outside unless given proper permission.
This is the way.
I’d be interested to see more information on that. I don’t doubt companies would do that, but some good information on when it happens and how to prevent it would be useful.
So I did some looking, and as far as I can tell, there’s no definitive proof of someone testing this and reporting on it. It might just be all rumors and speculation.
Thanks, I hope they don’t do it. I would expect the security community to be able to find something like this, since it’s not hard to hook up some devices and do packet sniffing to detect if they’re talking to each other.
This would be an excellent use case for LTT’s faraday cage room for instance.
You could set up a dummy LAN with no internet access for the tv. Unless it actually has more than one network card, it would need to be able to have the ability to virtualize network interfaces to connect elsewhere, and I really doubt these TVs are that smart.
Ah, gotcha. That would seem like overkill if that’s what would be needed.
can’t you set a password so it can’t join willy nilly?
That would only work until your neighbor leaves their guest WiFi open.
I need to replace my router as it’s coming to end of life. I want one with vlan so I can put all my iot on a separate lan. Any recommendations?
I have the Ubiquiti Edgerouter X. I got it mostly because at the time it was on sale 😂 but it seems to have decent support. Note that you will have to get a wireless AP as the Edgerouter is a pure router without WiFi function. Lots of people also like Mikrotik products.
I’ll check out mikrotik - thanks!
I don’t really understand the rest of what you said haha
Mikrotik are really aimed at advanced users, ubiquiti brand themselves as prosumer products. I found the Ubiquiti interface a complete mess - but it could just be me.
If it can run OpenWRT I’d suggest taking that path (if you like to tinker / the device supports it). My Google WiFi hubs are still humming away after all these years - now with way more features and a usable interface!
For consumer grade gear, Ubiquiti is probably the best bet. Unless you want to get into the commercial side of things, but that’s prohibitively expensive for the average person.
Personally I run a GL.iNet system. I like it being completely open source, and the Flint 2 is a workhorse of a router. But as far as ease of use and config, Ubiquiti is certainly more straightforward.
This might be my ignorance, but the Ubiquiti stuff I’m finding seems to be all commercial. I ended up getting a good price on the Flint 2 and it should be here next Friday. I’m hoping to chunk out some time setting it up on the 20th
So lucky my smart thermostat and door/window sensor are connected via DECT-ULE to my router/modem combo (for those interested AVM Fritzbox) and I can poll those via home assistant.
And I don’t think they could phone home (and I hope AVM doesnt do bs).
One way to get Congress to act on this would be to remind them of how Robert Bork’s video rental history got released. They very quickly realized that they all had the same sleazy movies on their rental list and passed a law making it illegal to share them.
Call your Congressmen and tell them that their smart TV is sending screenshots of whatever they’re watching back to home base, including stuff that’s not streamed, and there might be swift action.
Better yet, hack Samsung and leak it to the press. That’ll definitely light a fire under them.
I blocked my two TVs from phoning home via my pihole. They are the two noisiest devices on my network, by leaps and bounds.
On a day of heavy usage, my phone and desktop may get ~2000 blocked requests combined. That’s high, but not unheard of. It just means I did a lot of browsing, with a lot of blocked ad requests. My TVs average somewhere around 7500 blocked requests per day, on days that I haven’t even turned them on. That’s an attempt to phone home every ~12 seconds. And it is much worse on days that I actually use them.
I got a 42" 4k computer monitor instead
How many times the cost of a comparably-sized Trojan TV did that run you?
1.2x
I also use it as a computer monitor though.
Jesus dude, what brand TV do you have?
My LG issues a few hundred blocked requests throughout the day with heavy usage. I’ve never seen it wake up and phone home (my Nintendo Switch does it every hour for some stupid reason)
One is a Samsung, and the other is a Roku. The Roku is a little bit noisier, but not by much.
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can we just ban online features from tvs, cars, printers, light bulbs etc.
That ship, my friend, has already sailed.
Civilians used to own canons. For blowing up ships. And the occasional home invader. Doesn’t matter if it has sailed if we sink it. We should sink that ship.
They called me crazy.
Why do we continue to be ok with this? Where is the outrage and call for change?
the overwhelming bulk of humanity cant be fucked to care about shit like this… until it personally affects them.
Then they will wail like banshees about the great injustice of it all, and how could anyone let it happen to them.
It’s there, but people forget about it when they can get a 4" bigger TV for 100 bucks less.
Because it works and provides a use case. Most “simpletons” do not want to invest any more time in than putting some Account Data and start watching netflix or whatever. “We” (e.g. the people that care about data privacy and stuff) never have been okay with that shit…
Simpletons LOL get a grip
I’m more than happy to buy a TV that uses post-purchase monetization, because I am never going to connect that fucker to the internet. It’s a display. I shall use it as a display. I do not care that it can replace my streaming box. I fully control my streaming box, and I will use that.
If I catch it doing any sketchy shit like trying to use unsecured/Comcast/etc WiFi to phone home, it’ll be time to pull out the screwdriver, though.
What happens when it no longer needs your WiFi and uses something like LoRa to phone home with your data and location? It may not know who you are exactly but it’ll have a good guess.
Screwdriver.
What happens when it no longer needs your WiFi and uses something like LoRa to phone home with your data and location? It may not know who you are exactly but it’ll have a good guess.
I mean…what happens when it becomes sentient, sprouts legs and you catch it sleeping with your spouse?
Let’s deal with the here and now.
You know LoRa hardware is getting cheaper and the reliability of these TVs are just terrible. This is likely to happen sooner rather than later. For now just don’t plug it in to WiFi unless you’re willing to go further and desolder its module? I don’t think we can do much via legislation other than write to our congressional reps.
What’s Lora?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LoRa (Long Range)
It’s a low power, large range connection technology, working a bit like a mesh network. It can achieve data rates between 0.3 kbit/s and 27 kbit/s and enables geolocation services. According to the LoRa Development Portal, the range provided by LoRa can be up to 3 miles (4.8 km) in urban areas, and up to 10 miles (16 km) or more in rural areas (line of sight).
As soon as your LoRa-Device is in range of another LoRa-Device, it will probably be able to phone home.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LoRa
Long-range radio protocol
Of course they are without any data privacy laws companies are going to collect and then sell as much of your personal data that they can get away with.
“CTV” is a new term that I wasn’t familiar with.
The situation is really bad for consumers. Even with a Pi-Hole and a dumb TV and something like a Fire TV stick (they tend to send lots of telemetry too and apps like Toggo will nag you to oblivion to consent to data mining - if an app asks at all that is).
I’m slowly building up a Jellyfin library and yeah I jumped the hoops to find a non-smart TV. Wrote about it at https://beko.famkos.net/2022/11/27/on-non-smart-tvs/ and settled with a https://www.homex.eu/u55nt1000.html that ticked all my boxes:
☑
cheapaffordable ☑ 4k (UHD) ☑dumbnon-Smart ☑ HDMI ☑ 55″No idea about it’s tuner though[1] alas it’s not really any longer available in any market space today and I hope it will not die on us any time soon or the quest to find a new one starts again 🤓
[1] We’ve a decent external receiver that does all the work and HDMI juggling but even that thing is on the WiFi for software updates and in-house streaming but from what I can tell it behaves at least, which is probably just because it’s old by now.
Just disconnect your TV from the Internet and get an Apple TV.
My current tv is a 42” I got in 2012. I would love to upgrade to a bigger one, but I don’t wanna get a lame smart tv.
I’m on the same boat 44" tv, from ages ago. Connected to my linux reinstalled asus chromebox. Freedom baby yeah!
Fuckingcapitalists
Ahh yes, unlike all those non-capitalist modern nations with their complete lack of widespread insidious surveillance.
