This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Probably safe to assume every other smart TV brand is doing the same, but just no one has gone to the effort to check...
I wonder if I can disable it if I rooted webOS on my parents' TV
... Well great, now I have to check whether my television has a goddamn microphone for some reason. I didn't think to check because it's a television.
Never connected it to the Wifi though.
Doesn't anything with a speaker have an inherent shitty microphone?
Does it have voice command capability?
Is there a way to direct all the iffy traffic from the tv to a pi hole?
Could connect the tv to the guest wifi network which would prevent it from accessing your local network. Plug in an android tv box of some variety and connect that to the network and you can cut the tv off f4om internet entirely.
If you set the pihole as your primary DNS on your router then all network traffic goes that way anyway. Set up google as a secondary in case your pihole goes down. Or configure a second pi hole for resilience and set that as the backup.
FYI guest network doesn't separate traffic from normal network. You need different vlan for that.
my guest network is in a different vlan by default.
Afaik thats standard for guest networks. They have internet access but not local network access. Otherwise whats the point in them?
The GN investigation discovered that LG makes the TVs mesh with each other as well. So even if you don't connect your LG to the internet, it can connect with other LG devices in the neighbourhood and exfiltrate data that way.
Oh! Thats sneaky.
Fuck that, become ungovernable. If the pihole is down, the tv is down.
Build your own router and
Redirect all port 53 to your pihole
Block port 853 on that vlan
Block these ips on that vlan
https://github.com/dibdot/DoH-IP-blocklists
I had a raspberry pi working as a router but when my provider gave me a zyxel router i didnt need it anymore as its super customisable.
Will i need to go back to my openwrt router to get this working? Since its saying github actions update the list?
It's hard to find a dumb TV.
Monitors and projectors are going the same way.
Not connecting them might not be enough.
Time to learn how to use a soldering iron.
It is like trying to find a new car that doesn't have one of those fucking screens instead of a real console.
I keep my tv dumb by not connecting it to a network.
modern ones are soldered directly to the board and integrate bluetooth into the same chip and removing that chip form the board could remove the ability to use bluetooth functions and the remote, however!!!!!!! most have usb ports!!!!!! lets make new operating systems and fucking delete their file system, load a new os that lacks the abilities these manufactures have.
The hardware is whatever but if we remove the file systems that its preloaded with it won't be able to load any of its preinstalled shit. If we mod the operating system we can mod some of the shit the hardware is capable of doing through the software and coding. Kinda like how windows 11 is known for lowering ram speed.
I don’t care that companies thought they’d get away with this, the problem is have are the people buying this shit! This should’ve been enough to get people to just refuse to buy it but no.
And the bigger problem isn’t what we know they can do, you have to think about what it ‘could’ do.
Even if you never connect this stuff to the internet, they could still track all this stuff locally. Once that happens, which no doubt it will if not already, what happens if suddenly you get arrested for something, they confiscate the TV, download all the stuff tracked, and oops, something even more incriminating… maybe you watched an illiegal movie on jellyfin! 😲
Look at all the “People will never let it happen” that has happened pretty much unchallenged… you’ll have no privacy, and you’ll all be paying for it!
The majority of people do not realize how much information is being recorded and what it’s used for. If there was an easy way to track down how a telemarketer got your information, a lot more people would freak out and demand change.
The majority of people do not ~~realize~~ care how much information is being recorded and what it’s used for.
What exactly is the alternative? Every tv manufacturer is doing this. Buying a commercial display isn’t the answer.
Scepter.
(I dunno if they're doing it yet or not but I bought a dumb TV and a dumb monitor from them and I really hope they stay dumb)
The problem is not that people are buying this willingly, it's because they don't know. If you present them two rougly similar options, but one of them is a spying machine, people will choose the other one. This stuff should not be legal in the first place.
The problem's that what's presented is a cheap machine vs an expensive machine. Guess which one spies on you?
That's not true at all. The LG OLED (C5, G5) are very expensive. I paid over 1300$ for my C4 last year and just learned that LG is pulling this shit.
That's true, but the law should be the first line of defence against practices like this - you can't expect every person to do thorough research on every appliance they buy.
"We own the glass, we own the TV, we own the living room. We know who is in an LG home." --LG President of Ads
These are the Gamers Nexus videos these articles are referencing btw. Support them and their work. Get some cool shirts and physical media while you're at it.
Fuck LG, this is creepy AF
There's no "might" here. It's why high-end TVs are cheap.
Really makes one wonder...How many fucking data points do these assholes need telling them we're too fucking broke for their game and want their heads on pikes?
