The approach I’ve taken is to just keep my TV off the internet (never join a WiFi network) and make it smart via an Apple TV, which I personally believe to have the strongest privacy protection of any smart TV device.
Another bonus is my TV UI hasn’t changed despite changing and upgrading TV brands.
I repurpose the old laptops that I seem to accumulate for this. Just about anything made in the last 10 years can handle at least 1080p video, and will have an HDMI output. I add a small wireless keyboard and use my regular desktop environment. But you can add a remote and use one of the open source media centre suites.
I do wish more TVs had a monitor-like sleep mode and accepted the command for it over HDMI. And were actually low power when they sleep. That seems to be pretty spotty.
We do the same and it works well. We prefer a handheld keyboard/mouse to control it. We've tried several and the Lenovo N5902 [1] is our favorite by far.
It's also useful to have the Unified Remote server [2] running on the media computer so you can control it from your phone when you need to.
Thumbs up for the Lenovo keyboard/mouse combo. I preferred the trackball one, but the "trackpad"-y one works well too. It feels good in hand, it's nicely sized, fits easily in the drawer of nightstand table, and works well :).
(not sure if it's discontinued btw; I struggled to find it in Canada last few years; but there are seemingly-identical unbranded alternatives usually available on amazon, e.g. https://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/B08H8LH7GP/ )
Of course it's not a real keyboard and mouse but it works fine.
I do use an universal remote most of the time though (Harmony 700), but I use the Rii when I exit Kodi and I'm back to my HTPC's Linux environment. The Rii is then enough to open a browser and YouTube, for example.
I've been using these for close to a decade now. We have two. They're so good, but very hard to find now. When the time comes, I'll scavenge parts from both to keep one going.
Same here. I try to find 3-4 year old laptops with decent graphics cards. It has served well as family gaming pc (casual and retro games) and with attached external drive we can watch family videos, photos etc. Not to mention ad-blocking. Every time I'm at someone's house and have to use a phone to stream things on the TV or to use those point-n-click remotes to type things I lose patience now :)
Good idea for the laptop. You could use a smart plug (one that runs esphome, for instance, athom.tech sells pre-flashed ones) to wake the TV as well. And maybe the computer too.
Yes, this. I bought an LG OLED C2 recently, plugged in an Apple TV, have not connected the TV itself to the internet. Works absolutely fine; bonus is that the apparently annoying voice control option is disabled. You don't need firmware updates unless there's a specific bug that you need fixed, and you can update by USB stick if you do need a fix.
Bought one recently as well. I connected mine because it's easier for everyone in the house, but I used a trick to hide most of the crapware: change the country to "Other" [1]
Yep. Extra bonus for LG since it uses webOS ( and that thing is great ). If you are concerned about TV connecting to something it shouldn't, you can setup a honeypot ( I think Unify still supports that ) and see what it tries to do. I never connected mine and didn't notice any attempts ( but it is an older OLED model ).
I also got a C2 and briefly connected it via WiFi before I had the Apple TV. After hooking up the Apple TV I turned WiFi and thought I was all set, but it keeps turning WiFi on by itself and checking for updates which is really annoying. Might do a factory reset to clear out the WiFi password.
Change your wifi password, give the new password to your TV and make sure it connects, then change the wifi password (either to another new password or to the old one) and don't give the new new password to the TV. They generally don't remember and try previous passwords.
Go into your router and block the MAC address. Even most ISP routers have an option for this, sometimes in the Parental Controls section. Much easier than changing the password or resetting the TV.
I see a lot of people buying the C2. Is this the undisputed winner for a new 4K television? I am vaguely in the TV market but am mildly intimidated by the variety.
I have one (coming from a 32 inch cheap Samsung 1080p from 8 years ago) and it's pretty insane how good it looks. I have to leave it in Filmmaker mode for movies as it's too good at interpolating frames on shows and colour correcting things to make it look like raw acting footage. But have perfect blacks in games is incredible, the amount of times I stopped to just look at the surroundings in shadow of the tomb raider was too many to count. The refresh rate also supports 120fps for shooters so it's buttery smooth in comparison to what I used to have. Putting nextdns as my DNS resolver blocks the ads on it and having the built in Chromecast support for Netflix and YouTube is pretty handy as well.
Ask 4 people and you’ll get at least 5 answers, I recommend reading rtings reviews and buying whatever they recommend for whatever kind of viewer you are. If you’re asking this kind of question here then that’ll be good enough.
I'd avoid anything using a QD-OLED panel for now until they've proven they've massively decreased their burn in issues.
Rtings is currently running a huge 2 year burn in test with 100 TVs [1], and have had major burn in issues on both their Sony and Samsung QD-OLEDs (while the LG WOLEDs don't have burn in issues, though their G2 had a column of pixels fail).
The LG G3 seems to compete with the QD-OLED panels in terms of colour and brightness this year with its MLA panel [2], but I'm not sure if it's worth the increased cost for most people compared to buying last year's C2.
No, this appears to be a HN urban legend. It's always asked in these threads and the closest thing that anyone has been able to provide is one person asking one time on the samsung forums why there tv was connected to the neighbour's wifi (openly in the TV's own menu). So either there's a giant conspiracy which literally nobody else in the world has noticed or attempted to reproduce, or her kids/neighbour/whoever just connected it to the first network that'd work.
If “possible” is all that matters then you have to include stuff like “I’m on a special list where if I order a monitor from Amazon, they’ll send me a version with a secret chip on the inside of the case that broadcasts my secret TV viewing habits to the NSA.”
I have a 3 month old Samsung TV with recent firmware. I am trying to use it as a dumb offline TV connected to an Apple TV (which is, of course, online). Short version is it does not automatically connect to networks without user input, but it prompts people all the time and inevitably ended up back on the network.
It won't forget network passwords without a full reset. So if you connect to download firmware then disable the connection, it is one click away from someone re-enabling it. If there's an unsecured network available, you're only 2-3 clicks away from joining that.
With other people in the house using it, the only way to reliably keep it off the internet is to connect it to a network, allow it to verify the connection works, then block it from making any more outgoing connections at the router level. It seems to be ok with this situation and doesn't complain too much.
My original plan was to setup HDMI CEC and lock away the Samsung Remote to prevent people from getting into trouble. But when the TV is turned on vi HDMI CEC, half the time it wants to immediately run the OLED refresh cycle, and will automatically shut off and start doing that unless you actively prevent it from doing so with the remote. This is annoying because they have a setting to run the OLED refresh at night when not in use. It's almost like they sabotaged this use case on purpose to force people to interact with the Samsung UI.
I should have bought a projector, assuming one can still get projectors that aren't similarly infected.
My Samsung tries to be smart too and ends up wrecking everything. I have a Steam Deck and a Linux laptop that I want to connect via HDMI, but the TV tries to do some sort of detection thing but doesn't wait long enough and does some sort of power cycle on it. The net result is that the laptop will switch from HDMI on to HDMI off and back every few seconds, and the TV will never connect. It's aggravating because it's such a stupid simple bug, but I have zero control over the TV.
Yeah, it is terrible. They have settings to modify resolution/refresh/latency mode, but those settings are always overridden if the TV's auto detection thinks it knows better.
About a third of the time it will insist my Xbox is a 1440p/60Hz input, and I can do nothing about it except reboot all the things.
Ugh, it's so utterly terrible. I really wonder, what kind of engineers are building/designing these things? Do they not even use their own products, or if they do they never plug external devices in?
My Sony smart tv was great for 3 years because I never connected it to the internet, but ever since I did, it hangs, takes 2 minutes to allow switching inputs, and in general just sucks.
I will not make the mistake of ever connecting one of these to the internet again, and if I have to buy a Giant monitor for 2k, so be it.
I'm 90% sure that the flash drive on the TV wore out and they want me to replace what is otherwise great working hardware for features I don't even want anymore.
This already happens with Nespresso coffee machines (they have an SIM that connects to the Internet, whether you want it or not). That day is already yesterday.
Wow, they sure do. Page 29 of the user guide for the Nespresso Zenius says -
This coffee machine is equipped with M2M (Machine to Machine) techology which may be activated in due time with your agreement.
Thanks to a SIM card already integrated in the machine, such network connections will offer new services (subject to further terms and conditions) to its customers and improve the after sales process by automatically communicating machine troubleshooting / diagnostics to our Customer Relationship Centre (depending on country requirements and specificities).
What a time to be alive. This should be disclosed on the front page of the manual and not hidden in the smallprint. And it should come with instructions on how to disable it with a physical switch.
If that's the case then it cannot be used in any place/location where there is no signal.
If so, then there would be hell to pay the first time if happened. If it works sans connection, then do what I've said elsewwhere and that's to cut or short out the antenna lead.
Removing the SIM may be deemed provocative by the manufacturer, if there's no signal reception then that's a different matter (the user can't be blamed).
doubtful. I'm sure it will refuse to work if it can't talk to home base, and that home base will have some sort of certificate pinning so only their servers can authorize it do make the coffee.
I think the most likely next steps is integrating with Amazon Sidewalk instead of 5G. I don't know what the relative availability of 5G signal vs Sidewalk signal is, but I'm pretty sure Amazon has a dashboard tracking the latter.
I've seen rumblings that day may be very soon, too. Once devices in the home have embedded prepaid 5G out with your control, all sorts of home networking/firewall challenges are going to arise. We are entering a world in which it will cost very, very little to embed 5G into almost anything with say 1GB of prepaid eSim data for analytics collection, regardless of whether device resides on your LAN or not.
There’s only a fractional amount of people using smart TVs without WiFi. I’m very dubious it’s worth the cost to imbed GSM cards in each TV to reach the fraction that doesn’t allow the TV on WiFi.
I've long wondered about what wifi/cellular looks like on an infinite timescale... it does strike me as unlikely too we will maintain two separate wireless standards forever for IP data. I think embedded cellular or equivelent global wireless access will one day just be as taken for granted as embedded wifi in a lot of devices. Technologies like eSims are all steps in this direction.
I've seen others in this thread argue embedded cellular isnt worth the cost, but this misses the critical point - if it costs almost nothing (we are close to this point already) and is already built into every off the shelf SoC, of course manufacturers will use it. We are talking pennies per unit at scale here in future.
The auto industry has already done this - Ford for example have embedded cellular analytics you can't turn off (or at least its non-obvious to me as an owner) on every single new Ford and has done so for several years now, and you don't pay a penny as the end user, even on their most basic entry level cars.
It wouldn't last five minutes on my car without being disabled. Easy to do, use a portable spectrum analyzer, find the source of the RF and then nuke the antenna.
Same goes for any other appliance that radiates RF signals (IoT, etc.).
You don't stop internet access or do anything to alter the electronics. By blocking the car from transmitting and receiving cell signals it's effectively the same as the car being out of cell range.
If cell access is essential, what happens in a place without cell access, much of Alaska perhaps?
I hate to think of all the lawsuits resulting from drivers who drive into locations where cells are out of range and get stranded.
Similarly, what happens when the cell phone system breaks down? And does that mean I can't buy a car if I live in an area with intermittent, weak or no cell or internet service? Hate to think what the manufacturer's sales department would think of that.
On the matter of reverse engineering, it seems to me we're just on the cusp of that. Hackers as still getting organized and aftermarket manufacturers have still to tool up for complete computer replacement kits. Reckon we're only at the very beginning of whole new industry.
Oh, I nearly forgot, the Right to Repair movement has only just begun to get organized. If manufacturers try to stop us altering something we've paid goid money for then they'll be in for a long political fight.
As I said above, just nuke the antennas (a box cutter through the antenna leads is usually enough. If you're really paranoid, short the lead out at or near the equipment end (as near as to the feed IC as is possible).
I do this on old smartphones that I have no intention of ever using as a phone again (say for testing APS etc.). It's dead easy, a razor blade through the circuit board tracks that connect to the antenna(s) and it's all over—no phone, with or without SIM (i.e.: no emergency service) and no WiFi or Bluetooth.
"…they'll embed 5G chips and do it over cell without involving your consent,"
There'd be hell to pay if they ever did that. Moreover, it'd be impossible to keep the fact quiet if deployed at any reasonable scale.
A much bigger looming threat is the possible closure of terrestrial Free-to-Air TV broadcasting (it was an early agenda item to be discussed at the 2028 WARC/WRC (World Administrative Radio Conference) but was dropped early on.
That it ever got there in the first instance is a very big worry, it shows that people in high places have been or are considering such a move).
It’s not that simple. The Faraday cage I got from Costco seems to phone home to a server in China. Obviously I returned it and used the money to buy a whole lot of tinfoil.
Anyone who says that "blocking" wifi is easy is someone who hasn't tried. Even very expensive professionally built cages don't "block", they attenuate. And modern wifi equipment is surprisingly good at working just fine with weak signals.
Google is telling me that the mesh for a Faraday cage that would block WiFi could have hole sizes up to about 5 mm. Suppose you made your faraday cage (or at least the part that goes in front of the screen) out of 40 gauge wire (0.07874 mm diameter) with the wires spaced 2.25 mm apart.
On a 70" 4K TV a pixel is about 0.4 mm x 0.4 mm. If the mesh were close to the screen I think about 30% of the pixels would have wire in front of them. Of those 30%, 1/6 would both a horizontal and a vertical wire in front (let's not go crazy and talk about orienting the mesh diagonally or anything like that), and 5/6 would only have one wire in front of them. So that's 70% of pixels not interfered with, 25% having one wire in front of them, and 5% having two wires.
The 25% with one wire crossing would have about 20% of the pixel occluded by the wire. The 5% with two wires crossing them would have about 36% occluded.
My guess is that the screen could be seen pretty well through that.
Underfloor foil insulation works pretty well as a cage. It also adds a nice electrocution risk when installing and is banned in my area for this reason.
The existence of Sidewalk is what prompted me to remove all Amazon devices from my home. I hope the range on that network is less than the distance to my neighbors house (but they're old folks, definitely don't have an Echo).
Yes. I was looking for this comment before saying the same. This is the biggest selling point of Sidewalk to appliance/product companies. All the usage data, ad data, analytics, even remote control of devices can now happen even if your devices are completely disconnected from your home WiFi. If your neighbor has an Amazon Echo... now its basically connected to the internet. Even if you don't have neighbors, there could be a LoRa gateway a mile away on a cell tower, and its now connected.
I looked into this last year and couldn’t find much. I found a few forum posts of people claiming their TV connected to a public WiFi but none of them seemed particularly reputable.
Sure but if everyone has WPA2 encryption enabled on their network, such as is the case in my neighbourhood, then there is no network for the TV to connect to anyways.
If you use nextdns or pihole you can block those. I do so the home screen has no top 2/3 of TV suggestions, just my installed apps at the bottom and the hi Def paintings from the gallery app showing above them.
> Another bonus is my TV UI hasn’t changed despite changing and upgrading TV brands.
One of the recent updates to my TV's software introduced bugs to a feature I use a lot. It is very infuriating, and it's one of the reasons I refuse to buy an expensive TV. Even if the hardware is good, I'm one software update away from a piece of garbage.
An "update" to my TV made it so if it's on an input channel with no detected input for 10 seconds it will automatically switch back to the "smart" TV channel. Now if for some reason an input source isn't working correctly and I'm trying to figure out why I have to keep switching back to the correct input channel. Which of course lags for like ten seconds whenever it switches.
My TCL TV bootloops if it goes more than 3 months without downloading fresh ads. If you contact support, they walk you through connecting to the network.
This reminds me of my friend in the 2000's that would say "I don't have email" when stores asked for his email address. Even at the time, quite unusual unless you were over 70 years old.
huh, my TCL is fine disconnected... The only irritating this as a flashing light around the power-button/ir-reciever that comes on when it can't connect to a network, but I've stopped noticing it.
Unfortunately it follows that with "occasionally connect the TV to the internet for a minute to see if it needs any firmware updates" which is pointless if the TV is already working properly.
I did the same with a projector and an old Mac Mini. Upgraded the internal hard drive to a small SSD and hung an 8TB spinning HD off the back with an attached Blu-Ray drive. Has the benefit that you can do things like rip / play Blu-Ray discs, choose to use Netflix / Amazon Prime / Apple TV / Eurosport / whatever you want. Only downside is that the Mac Mini is so old now (> 10 years) that it doesn't get OS updates. But I'm not sure I care about that too much as long as it works, because I have no personal data on it.
I did this with my A80J last year. During initial setup there is the option to disable all of the smart TV features. It's quite nice. Firmware updates can also be applied via USB stick, so it never needs to connect.
I’d argue libreelec/Kodi with servarr is the strongest privacy friendly solution as it leaks nothing at all to anyone at all and there is no algorithm to influence what you watch or don’t watch. It even can do YouTube in 1080p with sponsorblock (and no ads of course)
this 100%. When I had my TV installed I explicitly told the geeksquad guys who mounted it on the wall to not connect it to the internet because I'm driving it with an apple TV
I use NextDNS/Adguard to cut out all the telemetry/tracking and have mine on a separate VLAN. I don't use the TV ui often, but this worked for the rare occasion
I attempted to do this with a new TCL TV. And continue using Chromecast dongle. But the damn thing freezes. So I'm using the inbuilt Chromecast for now!
Why do you want a not-smart tv? I thought the point was to not have tracking, but you were using a Chromecast dongle and I would expect Google of all companies to keep track of what you watch at least? Is it the security risks that probably show up after the tv software stops updating?
Here's another thing that shits me about the TCL. It asks me to sign in when setting up for the first time. You can't skip it. I thought this was related to Google TV, but apparently not. I later found a way to log out of the TCL, and my Google stuff still worked fine. False and intrusive behaviour from TCL.
Also! your average joe would think this is for the Google account and would probably put in their Google password. I found an option to use a link number instead. How many Google passwords have been exposed to TCL?
I would guess Google's privacy stuff is still an order of magnitude better than the TV manufacturers. Google actually gives you a decent amount of control over your data. There are definitely better privacy options than a Chromecast, but I don't think it's fair to put Google in the same category as Vizio/Samsung/et al.
1. The old Chromecast dongle is much faster than this new TCL TV.
2. Google already knows everything I do and I trust them more than TCL.
Playing a stream from the dongle just freezes after 30s. I'm pretty sure it's the TCL hdmi implementation, because the dongle has been utterly flawless previously.
I just plugged a desktop into my big ole TV and then get a wireless mouse and keyboard. Run Linux on that thing and I control all of it, bonus points is that everyone knows how to use it when they come over to my house.
> Sad state of affairs really when you get punished for being rational, respectful, and adult.
Do you honestly think your comment was "respectful"?
Hacker News is all about rationality and respect, and a big part of that is backing up your opinions/assertions with evidence. Challenging people for unsubstantiated claims is a staple here. If you want to be able to say something like "You'd also be wrong about Apple's privacy protection," expect to be challenged.
You are correct about Apple's privacy, but it is far from a well-known self-evident fact (in fact to most people it's widely considered that Apple is the darling of privacy), so being challenged on it is (IMHO) reasonable and even expected. Obviously you don't have to back it up, but the result of that is going to be downvotes. Also, any criticism of Apple on HN is risking downvotes too. It's not rational, but it is reality.
> Do you honestly think your comment was "respectful".
Yes, it very much was.
I didn't waste their time, I didn't preach, I didn't lecture on something they did not ask or want to hear. I simply said they were mistaken. It was civil conversation, not disparaging in any way.
If they were receptive to learn more, they would have followed up, and could have asked, and they did not. That was the choice they made.
Any other structure would allow a trap, similar to what's shown in Serenity's The Operative, and I have no time for games.
You really can't be more respectful of their time, attention, or choice.
You are right about challenging with argumentation and building support for persuasion, but that challenge was never accepted. There is an order to these things.
You can't communicate by talking 'at' people, both parties need to engage.
> Apple on HN is risking downvotes too...
Honestly just breathing on HN with an unpopular, but right opinion, risks down-votes. I've already spoken to Daang about the structural issues, not that anything will come of it.
You're being a dick. If you didn't realize that, that's what is going on here.
To follow up on GGP(?), if I was going to look into the Apple privacy protection stuff, where would I start? Are there search terms, or specific sites or individuals you can point me to?
I'm being mature, and there is an important distinction though not mutually exclusive.
If OP wanted to know more they could ask, and they didn't so I was right in my initial assessment regardless of how others feel.
I would start with google keywords: "apple telemetry -site:apple.com" are a good place to start.
From memory some of the important highlights were in 2016, there was an issue with the fast-fail network code in macOS and other devices where applications would not launch locally. Apple was forced to briefly disclose the cause of the outage, which amounted to a telemetry server update, a check-in at each application launch and other actions was required and could allow apple to decide what you can and can't run in realtime without your knowledge; there were several news articles about it at the time.
There is the more recent articles about client-side scanning, which they rolled back but they largely by default upload everything to their cloud and do it there. This is good for catching predators, bad if one of those hashes they match against (which are not unique, one hash matches many potential files, an inherent property of modular arithmetic) cause a false positive, or if those hashes match material that is not illegal, but seek to censor. They don't disclose what they match specifically so you'll never know, nor will you be able to dispute or correct any mistakes.
There have been several blog posts by System Administrators about the AppleTV and other Apple devices probing/mapping their internal networks over the years, and sending data up to the cloud. Its largely been encrypted so we don't know what it is they are sending but its a lot according to netflow and wireshark. If one were to find out, and publish what they found, it would serve as proof of violating the DMCA. So it is unlikely this will ever come to light from anyone domestically in the US or its allied countries.
SDR opens a whole new avenue to approach auditing Apple devices that broadcast that data over the em spectrum, its also important since anyone with an antenna can pick that information up.
Additionally, they don't disclose how long or what specific information they do collect about you, who they share it with, and even when you tell them to not collect info, they still do it.
The higher the amount, and time, that you store information, the more likely it is going to be stolen.
make it smart via an Apple TV, which I personally believe to have the strongest privacy protection of any smart TV device.
Except that as we saw with the CSAM debacle from a couple years ago, Apple will absolutely be scanning any device they have for anything they deem unsavory. I still can't believe people think Apple is a benign player in all of this
Or perhaps you see what you want to see in that story.
Apple and Google both scan images uploaded to their cloud for CSAM. Apple decided that they had the horsepower to do it on the device instead for only those images that would be uploaded to the cloud with the apparent intention of enabling end-to-end encryption for photos.
Another bonus is my TV UI hasn’t changed despite changing and upgrading TV brands.