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...
Because anti-tivoization doesn’t make sense in a software license.
Imagine you make a smart toaster, and you make it entirely out of open source software. You release all the changes you made too, complying fully with the spirit of open source. People could take your software, buy some parts and make their own OSS toasters, everything’s great.
But for safety reasons, since the software controls when the toaster pops, you decide to check at boot time that the software hasn’t been modified. You could take the engineering effort to split the software into parts so that only the “pop on this heat level” part is locked down, but maybe you’re lazy, so you just check the signature of the whole thing.
This would be a gpl3 tivoization violation even though the whole thing is open source. You did everything right on the software end, it just so happens that the hardware you made doesn’t support modifying the software. Why is that a violation of a software license?
This is what makes no sense to Linus, and TBH it makes no sense to me either. Would the toaster be a better product if you could change the software? Of course. But it seems to be an extreme overreach for the FSF to use their license (and that “or any later version” backdoor clause) to start pushing their views on the hardware world.
It makes sense in the context of GPL specifically when you remember that the GPL itself and the entire GNU stack and movement started from frustration with a printer, not a program.
In the email you have linked to, he does not support tivoization. He simply says that he finds the term offensive (which is really funny coming from him).
Torvalds has also publicly stated that he doesn't think that tivoization benefits users, but it's not his battle to fight. More info on that topic can be found in the linked YT (linked at the precise time he is answering the question about tivoization, but the whole video is about GPL v2 vs GPL v3).
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.
> 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’ve been pretty happy with the smart apps on my LG OLED; it’s got the streaming things I want including jellyfin. Really the only one missing is steam link.
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.
How about the abdysmal security Smart TVs either have right of the shelf or for certain after they are no longer kept up-to-date? I don't want to worry having my TV act either as botnet or spying device (many come with microphones and cameras nowadays). I rather purchase additional device that has decent security that I can attach to the TV if I need to.
Modularity and separation of concerns can extend into other domains than software.
For me, it seems so much simpler to keep the two separate. You won't be forced to wash the heating element every time you wash the cup. Can't heat a different cup while the other is in the dishwasher, unless all your cups are self-heating. Normally, the only way for a cup to break is if it shatters, but with an inbuilt heater there's electronics that can break too. And should the cup shatter, now the heater is unusable too, or vice versa.
I have to have a kettle for other purpose (including heating water for other mugs than mine), and no self-heating mug is going to be as efficient as a kettle to heat water.
Furthermore, I also put cold or room temperature liquids in my mug. With a self-heating one, I would be carrying the heating parts for absolutely no reason.
Same goes for a TV.
By keeping things separated, I can decide what I do which each device and manage their lifecycle separately.
If the device reading video files is included in the TV, I can't plug it to another TV or a projector or even take it with me to use it elsewhere.
While I've upgraded three times my video playing device to follow tech evolution, I've kept the same TV to plug them in.
I have a multi-purpose kettle that I can use to boil water, heat the room, cook a small amount of food, or use as a sand battery for when its cold in the desert, where the kettle is designed to operate as long as there is a handful of material to burn.
It is fair to observe a separation methodology, but I also have to say, in some cases multi-purpose devices have their place.
If, say, the self-heating mug involved solar harvesting, I'd put a couple in my kettle bag, for sure.
You can make coffee with a kettle, but if you are making enough coffee often enough, it does make sense to bundle a second kettle into a dedicated coffeemaker, even if you are reducing the functionality of it by doing so.
It's a thing and it's convenient as a smart TV is convenient for people who don't care much.
But as a "power user" of a TV, I want to compose my own setup.
In the same way, "power users" of coffee don't use a coffeemaker. They use things like French press.
(I use instant coffee myself in my non-heating mug so in this comparison I would be the person not owning a TV and watching everything on their phone?)
Arguably the outcome you’d want there is to be able to add your own kettle to the coffee maker, so you can have the best value/option for you if you want it. Want a cheap thing or none? Fine. Want one with remote start and modded temp controls or whatever? Fill your boots. Got a new coffee part but like the existing kettle? Reuse it.
This applies less for some physical items, I know some people are already preparing to explain why it’d be harder to make or dangerous or something but that would miss the point. Computers are incredibly easy to swap out, we already have so many ways of doing that.
Maybe I want a fast computer. None. Maybe I want to upgrade later. Maybe in a year there’s a faster cheaper one. Maybe mine is just fine right now but I need a new screen. Why do I need to bundle the two things together? There’s a simplicity for users unboxing something but there’s not (I think) an enormous blocker to having something interchangeable here.
This provides absolutely zero advantages to the oven or to the microwave. It does cause a lot of stupid, easily foreseeable problems:
- There's only one control panel, and if the oven is currently active, some of the microwave controls get disabled.
- The microwave is awful in various ways -- regardless of whether the oven is active -- which wouldn't ordinarily be a problem, because microwaves are very cheap. But...
- It's impossible to replace the microwave, a $50 device, without simultaneously replacing the oven, a $2000 device.
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.
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
I’d do exactly as you did. It’s pity it didn’t work for you. I’m on the market to buy a TV (not hurrying though), so I’m not sure what to do here. I’d like to have Dolby Vision (otherwise why would I want a TV if my computer display is good enough for everything else), so perhaps that worsens things. As otherwise I’d just pick any TV, even FullHD (not 4K), and even not smart (attaching some SBC with Kodi to the back). But ideally I’d prefer to jailbreak it and have Kodi installed without any extra device. Now I’m puzzled whether these lists of ‘compatible’ TVs are trustworthy.
Can you actually replace the firmware with an open-source, privacy-respecting one? If you're still left running all the same proprietary background "services" and telemetry, I don't see how this kind of hack relates to any of the reasons for preferring a dumb TV.
This “proprietary telemetry” is basically malware, just, it was put on the thing at the factory. Once a system is fully rooted by malware, the least-bad option is to nuke it entirely and install from scratch.
In this context where the locked-down device probably also doesn’t have a fully open source kernel and drivers, this becomes a bit tricky. Better just to use a device that doesn’t have malware on it in the first place.
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.
How would you block ads on such a TV? The problem is you still cannot connect it to the internet without unknown privacy intrusion... Maybe to the LAN only? But then it's usefulness is still limited.
If we continue giving money to people who build malware into the products, the malware will eventually be baked in deeply enough that the rest of the device will refuse to operate if it can't phone home to the ministry of truth or wherever.
I feel like there's a bit of a jump from "tech-savvy" to de-soldering things on an expensive piece of home electronics. As it stands now, though, I agree that turning off the smart TV features seems to be the way to go for most people.
Offline smart TVs are great. As long as they support wake over CEC, they are close enough to a dumb display connected to an Apple TV.
I let my latest LG TV on the network, but block internet access at the router. HomeKit integration (Siri turn off tv), Chromecast, Airplay, and other local services all work, without the ability for it to phone home.
I just want a panel. I’m already doing what the article suggests (running a Hisense offline with a media box), but my TV still crashes a few times a month and needs to be power-cycled/takes about a minute to reboot.
There’s just no reason for this. You have one job: Take my signal and display it. Anything else is just another place for things to go wrong.
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.
I fear this won't even required SIM cards. I'm worried that Apple's Find My and Amazon's Sidewalk networks are the precursors of this: They're effectively company controlled p2p networks that lets the company use their customers' internet access points like a commodity. If one customer refuses to give a device access to the internet, they could use that network to route it through the access point of another customer.
Also, personal experience: My own ISP (in Germany) experimented with some similar stuff a few years ago: They mandated use of their own home routers where only they had root access. At some point, they pushed an OTA update that made the router announce a second Wifi network in addition to the customer's. This was meant as a public hotspot that people walking down the street could connect to after installing an app from the ISP and buying a ticket.
The customer that "owned" the router wasn't charged for that traffic and the hotspot was isolated from the LAN (or at least the ISP promised that), but it still felt intrusive to just repurpose a device sitting in my living room as "public" infrastructure.
(The ISP initially wanted to do this on an "opt-out" basis, which caused a public uproar thankfully. I think eventually they switched to opt-in and then scrapped the idea entirely.)
> Also, personal experience: My own ISP (in Germany) experimented with some similar stuff a few years ago: They mandated use of their own home routers where only they had root access. At some point, they pushed an OTA update that made the router announce a second Wifi network in addition to the customer's. This was meant as a public hotspot that people walking down the street could connect to after installing an app from the ISP and buying a ticket.
Not sure if you're referring to Vodafone, but Vodafone Germany definitely does this. You can opt out of allowing public access via your personal router, but this opts you out of being able to use other people's routers in the same manner.
If it had Ethernet ports I'd be tempted to just use my own wifi router and put the ISP's Trojan horse in a Faraday cage. All ISP-controlled hardware should be treated as just another untrusted WAN hop.
When I signed up with them, they were actually trying to withold access to the config web UI from customers and then charge extra just to enable Wifi. My response was exactly that - "fuck that" and put my own router in front of theirs.
(That was years before the other incident - since then they had dropped that idea and "generously" given customers access to the config UI)
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.
I keep being surprised if why that is not a thing yet. Amazon launched whispernet with ads on the discounted Kindle years ago and I was totally predicting more companies jump on that.
And it will require an uncovered camera and microphone, or it won't display an image. Sony TVs already come with "optional image optimization" cameras.
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.
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.
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.
It’s nice but OLED contrast is very hard to beat, and if you’re one of those folks who insist that ‘a white wall is good enough’ then it’s not even the same ballpark of image quality.
As opposed to the DisplayPort cable, DisplayPort standard, or DisplayPort encoding that's sent over the wire, yes. This isn't a PIN number situation despite the stutter.
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.
It's a failed article IMHO. It's to the point that the article should be pulled and corrected. None, as in zero TVs are made in the USA. They haven't been made in the USA for many decades. I HATE to say it, but an LLM would have given a better researched article.
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
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…
I am not a HIFI/TV aficionado, but the ACR [1] thing was new to me.
I hope it is not yet important for me as I never allowed a TV access to my LAN/WLAN. But with smart devices using accessible open WLANs to transmit who knows.
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?
What are you going to do with an iPhone without Apple? Yes you can use an Android without Google. But the percentage of people who do so outside of China is meaningless.
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?
So you are justifying it. For the record it's not just what you watch with the streaming service, it is everything you watch through their TV program.
You still do not get it: you can find a pseudo-justification for _every_ type of tracking they do to you. But none of these are really true justifications. You can do _everything_ without any type of tracking -- even the very basic premise: it shouldn't even be true that you need an account _at all_ to use an Apple TV.
AppleTV doesn’t record everything you watch on your TV like the smart TVs. A smart TV can track what you watch no matter which input source you are using.
How could an AppleTV or any device connected to an HDMI port know what you are watching on other input sources?
The AppleTV device doesn’t track what you watch at all. The AppleTV+ service knows what you watch on their service.
Their is no justification for the TV to know anything. There is obviously a reason for each service to know what you watch on their service. What exactly are you arguing? That you should be able to use the AppleTV+ service anonymously?
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?
The only way to have privacy from the matrix is to not participate in the matrix. That’s in fact your best option. Does one have to consume the drug of movies/tv? I realize that just suggesting something coming in between the addict and their drug causes consternation, but that also makes the point more salient.
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.
I installed an AppleTV recently, so I don't have much experience. But the first thing I saw after the initial setup was one/third of the display advertising a TV-show on a subscription service I had to purchase. Would that count as an ad?
On the Apple TV you get ‘ads’ for the apps you have in your top row, with different levels of interactivity. Some are just logos of that streaming service, some show recently watched. The Apple TV app has full-blown ads for Apple TV+ originals.
They won’t actually let you delete the Apple TV app, but if you move it out of the top row you will never see the ads.
My parents have an Amazon Fire TV and when I go to their house and have to use it it drives me insane. Carousels of adds large at the top, banner ads as you scroll, full rows of sponsored apps. Full screen ads for random Amazon products when you pause any show you are watching. Everything you watch on Amazon’s streaming service has minute long unskippable ads. Sometimes when you turn it on Alexa will just verbally read you ads.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
But also I pretty much never use the TV button to turn it on, I click a button on one of the connected devices to wake it and the TV turns itself on with that input selected. Even if it’s already on, if I want to switch from one device to another I can just wake the other device and it will switch inputs for me. It works really well, I almost never have to use the input selector and it just does the right thing reliably.
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.
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.
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—
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.
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 is technically illegal if that is how it is configured. Go get ‘em.
But kidding aside, who are we even really kidding anymore, even if you were provided the TOS would you simply not use the device of there were something in the TOS you disagreed with? How about when you’ve been using the device and all the sudden they change the TOS and force agreement as you are about to start a tv evening with the family?
The people simply accepted their enslavement, the taking of your agency, because we all allowed or were overwhelmed with it.
They take our agency through process just like they’ve taken our freedom and rights in so many different ways, just like through YC funded Flock, where treasonous mass surveillance cameras just show up over night and most here seem unaware it’s a YC company that now provides a mass surveillance network to the government and global government tightening its noose around humanity’s neck.
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.)
Yeah that OSMC box is just running Debian with their stuff coming from its own package repo. You can get a root shell. I realise I could have built something myself (and have in the past) but it's absolutely worth the money to me to get everything in a tiny package and working perfectly from day one.
I wouldn't recommend Kodi for streaming, it kinda works but the experience isn't great. I use it exclusively for playing stuff from my server full of legally acquired public domain videos (ahem).
I do watch YouTube videos on it, but I use TubeArchivist (basically a fancy wrapper for yt-dlp) to pull them onto the server first, and a script to organise them into nicely-named directories.
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.
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.
You gave me flashbacks to my Samsung washing machine that needed a factory reset after changing my SSID. Which also reset the service life of filters and liquids and such which was somewhat of a hassle. Such a dumb design not being able to change the wireless network.
Change your network name. When the TV prompts you to connect, join the renamed network. Then, rename it back so everything else can connect again and the TV can't. I can think of a few potential problems with this, but, it might work?
Or blacklist the TV's MAC address in your router settings. Didn't think of that first for some reason.
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.
Sadly, there's just a keyboard + trackpad sitting on my TV-audio console (a kind of home made speaker credenza I built years ago).
So no remote. I get up, hit the spacebar to pause/play. The audio is into a multi-channel receiver though so audio has mute/volume controls on a remote.
I have a Lenovo used minipc connected to mine and I just use a Logitech K400+, it runs Linux with KDE. I will never need a smart tv, or want one, for that matter.
I get that people would rather have a remote but I personally actually don't like remotes at all. My TV is basically a screen only.
I have a projector, a BenQ X3000i, in my living room, with a retractable screen. It has the plus side of not needing a dedicated wall, but does perform poorly (vs a TV) if the room isn't darkened. Maybe eventually I'll tie it into my home automation with some smart curtains.
It has low latency, will do 1080p 240Hz, 4k (pixel shift) 60Hz and HDR. Can even do 3D content if you really want...
BenQ did include an Android TV stick in the box, but you can just not hook it up to the projector - problem solved.
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?
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.
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.
Want to know the best option? GO USED. You can find a 50-60 inch dumb TV for a hundred dollars. No, it won't be UHD 4K, but it might be 3D, and it won't pester you to connect to Wi-Fi every time you use it.
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.
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.
TV devices are a hot mess to support from a streaming perspective, they each come with their own quirks that mean some perfectly-in-spec encoding and packaging techniques will result in a failed playback on some models of TV. Once a TV device _is_ supported, that support has to be maintained typically for more than a decade until usage of that model falls so low that dropping it from support can be justified.
It would be prohibitively costly to produce per-device renditions so instead there is one generic rendition produced for "all smart TVs" and another one for "UHD capable smart TVs".
Traditional TV manufacturers all work with the BBC to get their devices certified, which is a requirement for carrying the iPlayer app and comes with legal agreements that asset that a device _will_ be able to playback BBC content for as long as it's supported.
Because Apple like to Think Differently, they opted not to align with the entire rest of the TV industry in standardising on MPEG-DASH spec. They instead require all developers to stream video using the HLS protocol. As UHD content on iPlayer is geared exclusively for smart TVs, and all the other smart TVs support MPEG-DASH, the UHD workflow simply never evolved the ability to target Apple's TV devices.
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.
Yes, projectors with 3LCD tech is what you are looking for. They produce all 3 colors at once via 3 distinct lcds inside the chassis and mix them ahead of time. There are a few to choose from, but they all cost above 3000.
The reason why projectors don't use a single rgb lcd (like monitors) to produce the color is the same why all sub 5000$ projectors use pixel shift to fake 4k resolution: Too much light is blocked by the lcd itself if the individual pixels become too small.
I am somewhat sensitive to the effect and have been okay with an X3000i. If I scan my eyes across a black screen with white text, I can still perceive the effect - but it's nowhere near as bad as some older DLP projectors.
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.
The Vizio litigation is encouraging, but hardware-level hacking is still the most reliable way forward. Been running Linux on an old TV with HDMI-in for years - basically a dumb display with full control.
For budget-conscious setup: even older plasma/LCD displays that predate the "smart" era are increasingly available secondhand. Pair with a Raspberry Pi or similar and you get a system you actually own.
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.
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.
There's a lineageos template for Android TV. I don't think grapheneos will ever run on something like that (it doesn't even run on phones with ten times the security capabilities of TV SoCs) but alternative ROMs are available. There's also KDE Plasma if you want to go the non-Android route, though you'll struggle to find good support for that.
One problem with that approach is that you'll lose access to DRM'd contents, so while the official Netflix/HBO/Prime apps will install on lineageos, their video quality will be terrible or they will refuse to work.
There are a bunch of Google TV variants (brands like TCL and Philips) that will let you turn on "basic TV mode" (https://support.google.com/googletv/answer/10408998?hl=en), disabling pretty much everything other than displaying content.
As for why the Chinese TVs don't have a dumb mode, I think it's because the Chinese market is full of devices crammed to the brim with smart features, so smart TVs are sort of expected these days.
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
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).
The fact they give you a half decent media PC whilst discounting the monitor in the hope you give them tracking and allow them to be a market gatekeeper; only needs to be mildly anoying in today's world. Just plug in whatever you want and ignore it.
For now. I can see a not-so-distant future where internet access is needed for "cloud AI" to enable full 8K resolution, or where Dolby Atmos/Eclipsa Audio/Amphi Hi-D has to be unlocked through an online account, or where "advanced" menu settings like color calibration are tied to a monthly subscription…
Sure, there will probably be some alternatives from independent/smaller manufacturers but they will inevitably be based on older tech and/or standards, come with serious tradeoffs and so on.
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.
Keeping it practical and not purist, how do new smart TVs (mainly LG, it's the brand I like the most for the hardware) act with ads in a PiHole'd network? Does that block ads? Do they notice?
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.
I was just extrapolating. Why wouldn't a "smart" device connect to any wifi it has credentials for, and why wouldn't the implementation consider "has credentials" to include "it doesn't need any"?
But now I wonder why your aggressivity sounds so defensive.
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.
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.
Manufacturers know people do this. The TV will attempt to connect to any open network (neighbors) and I'd be shocked if they haven't at least considered packaging them with 4G/5G antennas. You're gonna need a Faraday Cage.
I don't really watch TV now. Not scheduled TV anyway. Sometimes some sport in a bar or whatever. I do watch YouTube and some streaming services but old school TV never.
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 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?
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 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.
There's historical speculation that a smart TV could connect to an open wireless access point, or more realistically, that it refuses to operate without internet access, perhaps after a certain number of power on hours.
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.
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 think they are selling off old stock and exiting the TV business. Searching various sites in the US shows only a basic 50” 4K TV. A few years ago, they had a very wide variety of offerings - I bought a 65” 4K dumb TV from them. Amazon (US) shows a wide variety of available-to-buy computer monitors, so that is probably their focus at the moment. It’s probably a lot more lucrative.
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.
Anecdotally, you may want to avoid Best Buy either way. There's a chance the TV box contains just rocks, no TV, and that they refuse to refund your purchase.
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
https://fossforce.com/2025/12/judge-signals-win-for-software...
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...
Unfortunately, Torvalds supported tivoization: https://lkml.org/lkml/2007/6/13/289
Because anti-tivoization doesn’t make sense in a software license.
Imagine you make a smart toaster, and you make it entirely out of open source software. You release all the changes you made too, complying fully with the spirit of open source. People could take your software, buy some parts and make their own OSS toasters, everything’s great.
But for safety reasons, since the software controls when the toaster pops, you decide to check at boot time that the software hasn’t been modified. You could take the engineering effort to split the software into parts so that only the “pop on this heat level” part is locked down, but maybe you’re lazy, so you just check the signature of the whole thing.
This would be a gpl3 tivoization violation even though the whole thing is open source. You did everything right on the software end, it just so happens that the hardware you made doesn’t support modifying the software. Why is that a violation of a software license?
This is what makes no sense to Linus, and TBH it makes no sense to me either. Would the toaster be a better product if you could change the software? Of course. But it seems to be an extreme overreach for the FSF to use their license (and that “or any later version” backdoor clause) to start pushing their views on the hardware world.
It makes sense in the context of GPL specifically when you remember that the GPL itself and the entire GNU stack and movement started from frustration with a printer, not a program.
It's not that simple.
In the email you have linked to, he does not support tivoization. He simply says that he finds the term offensive (which is really funny coming from him).
Torvalds has also publicly stated that he doesn't think that tivoization benefits users, but it's not his battle to fight. More info on that topic can be found in the linked YT (linked at the precise time he is answering the question about tivoization, but the whole video is about GPL v2 vs GPL v3).
YT video: https://youtu.be/PaKIZ7gJlRU?si=RK5ZHizoidgVA1xO&t=288
Which confirms the point actually. The hoops companies have to jump through are pretty good hoops.
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.
I got excited and then found that the exploit has been patched and hasn't worked on LG WebOS devices since early 2022.
I want the ability to add my own picture-in-picture display or overlay of text and other dynamic content.
Example: watching a movie but want the live score of a sports match scraped from a public website to be displayed in a corner.
OR while watching a sports match -- i want a overlay feed of text from a chat stream for a select web source
Looking forward for some public experiments / open projects in this space i could leverage. Dont have the skills to attempt it myself from scratch.
> 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’ve been pretty happy with the smart apps on my LG OLED; it’s got the streaming things I want including jellyfin. Really the only one missing is steam link.
Have you tried moonlight? An alternative to steam link. You can use install it on the lg tv by sideloading the app.
Alternatively, you can plug in a Raspberry Pi that runs steam link :)
> 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.
Well, you can make it a PC and then turn it off, I guess. Then let the rest of us have all the fun.
It sounds like you still want a smart TV, just with control. Which is fine.
But for many people, we just want a monitor, maybe with speakers (I personally am fine also separating this).
I prefer separation of concerns — if I want to attach a computer to my TV, I’ll do that as a search device.
Why have a dependency on the TV hardware, when I can attach upgradable parts?
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.
> Why wouldn't you want it to be a computer?
Because I can then easily upgrade my computer without upgrading my TV.
How about the abdysmal security Smart TVs either have right of the shelf or for certain after they are no longer kept up-to-date? I don't want to worry having my TV act either as botnet or spying device (many come with microphones and cameras nowadays). I rather purchase additional device that has decent security that I can attach to the TV if I need to.
For the same reason I don't want a self-heating mug.
Why wouldn't you want that? Genuinely curious
Modularity and separation of concerns can extend into other domains than software.
For me, it seems so much simpler to keep the two separate. You won't be forced to wash the heating element every time you wash the cup. Can't heat a different cup while the other is in the dishwasher, unless all your cups are self-heating. Normally, the only way for a cup to break is if it shatters, but with an inbuilt heater there's electronics that can break too. And should the cup shatter, now the heater is unusable too, or vice versa.
Exactly!
I have to have a kettle for other purpose (including heating water for other mugs than mine), and no self-heating mug is going to be as efficient as a kettle to heat water.
Furthermore, I also put cold or room temperature liquids in my mug. With a self-heating one, I would be carrying the heating parts for absolutely no reason.
Same goes for a TV. By keeping things separated, I can decide what I do which each device and manage their lifecycle separately. If the device reading video files is included in the TV, I can't plug it to another TV or a projector or even take it with me to use it elsewhere. While I've upgraded three times my video playing device to follow tech evolution, I've kept the same TV to plug them in.
I have a multi-purpose kettle that I can use to boil water, heat the room, cook a small amount of food, or use as a sand battery for when its cold in the desert, where the kettle is designed to operate as long as there is a handful of material to burn.
It is fair to observe a separation methodology, but I also have to say, in some cases multi-purpose devices have their place.
If, say, the self-heating mug involved solar harvesting, I'd put a couple in my kettle bag, for sure.
But like, a coffeemaker is a thing.
You can make coffee with a kettle, but if you are making enough coffee often enough, it does make sense to bundle a second kettle into a dedicated coffeemaker, even if you are reducing the functionality of it by doing so.
It's a thing and it's convenient as a smart TV is convenient for people who don't care much.
But as a "power user" of a TV, I want to compose my own setup.
In the same way, "power users" of coffee don't use a coffeemaker. They use things like French press.
(I use instant coffee myself in my non-heating mug so in this comparison I would be the person not owning a TV and watching everything on their phone?)
Arguably the outcome you’d want there is to be able to add your own kettle to the coffee maker, so you can have the best value/option for you if you want it. Want a cheap thing or none? Fine. Want one with remote start and modded temp controls or whatever? Fill your boots. Got a new coffee part but like the existing kettle? Reuse it.
This applies less for some physical items, I know some people are already preparing to explain why it’d be harder to make or dangerous or something but that would miss the point. Computers are incredibly easy to swap out, we already have so many ways of doing that.
Maybe I want a fast computer. None. Maybe I want to upgrade later. Maybe in a year there’s a faster cheaper one. Maybe mine is just fine right now but I need a new screen. Why do I need to bundle the two things together? There’s a simplicity for users unboxing something but there’s not (I think) an enormous blocker to having something interchangeable here.
The microwave in my house is built into the oven.
This provides absolutely zero advantages to the oven or to the microwave. It does cause a lot of stupid, easily foreseeable problems:
- There's only one control panel, and if the oven is currently active, some of the microwave controls get disabled.
- The microwave is awful in various ways -- regardless of whether the oven is active -- which wouldn't ordinarily be a problem, because microwaves are very cheap. But...
- It's impossible to replace the microwave, a $50 device, without simultaneously replacing the oven, a $2000 device.
Most likely it will not be dishwasher safe.
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.
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
I’d do exactly as you did. It’s pity it didn’t work for you. I’m on the market to buy a TV (not hurrying though), so I’m not sure what to do here. I’d like to have Dolby Vision (otherwise why would I want a TV if my computer display is good enough for everything else), so perhaps that worsens things. As otherwise I’d just pick any TV, even FullHD (not 4K), and even not smart (attaching some SBC with Kodi to the back). But ideally I’d prefer to jailbreak it and have Kodi installed without any extra device. Now I’m puzzled whether these lists of ‘compatible’ TVs are trustworthy.
Can you actually replace the firmware with an open-source, privacy-respecting one? If you're still left running all the same proprietary background "services" and telemetry, I don't see how this kind of hack relates to any of the reasons for preferring a dumb TV.
Agreed.
This “proprietary telemetry” is basically malware, just, it was put on the thing at the factory. Once a system is fully rooted by malware, the least-bad option is to nuke it entirely and install from scratch.
In this context where the locked-down device probably also doesn’t have a fully open source kernel and drivers, this becomes a bit tricky. Better just to use a device that doesn’t have malware on it in the first place.
For the real hackers:
https://www.panelook.com/
Global Panel Exchange Center
I was thinking the same. While it is not for everyone, hacking the TV to make the dumb is possible.
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
Nice!
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 used my rooted TV to root my PS4. I'm not even joking.
https://youtu.be/NzBBfGnAWM0
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.
How would you block ads on such a TV? The problem is you still cannot connect it to the internet without unknown privacy intrusion... Maybe to the LAN only? But then it's usefulness is still limited.
hosts file block?
For the tech-savvy, I'm not too worried about smart TVs. I just do this:
> If you want premium image quality or sound, you’re better off using a smart TV offline.
In the future, if they add e-sims, we'll just remove them or de-solder or whatever.
The real risk is cars: if they start not working without cell network connections.
> we'll just remove them or de-solder or whatever
If we continue giving money to people who build malware into the products, the malware will eventually be baked in deeply enough that the rest of the device will refuse to operate if it can't phone home to the ministry of truth or wherever.
That is inevitable. Too many people ship only on price and we’ll never reach sufficient mass
I feel like there's a bit of a jump from "tech-savvy" to de-soldering things on an expensive piece of home electronics. As it stands now, though, I agree that turning off the smart TV features seems to be the way to go for most people.
Offline smart TVs are great. As long as they support wake over CEC, they are close enough to a dumb display connected to an Apple TV.
I let my latest LG TV on the network, but block internet access at the router. HomeKit integration (Siri turn off tv), Chromecast, Airplay, and other local services all work, without the ability for it to phone home.
I do this too, works great. Sometimes I cry remembering all the money I wasted on TV’s “smart” features but I’ll take the small win.
I just want a panel. I’m already doing what the article suggests (running a Hisense offline with a media box), but my TV still crashes a few times a month and needs to be power-cycled/takes about a minute to reboot.
There’s just no reason for this. You have one job: Take my signal and display it. Anything else is just another place for things to go wrong.
ha good luck. they already aggressively scan and use public wi-fi networks and have everything shipped on a chonky SoC
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.
I fear this won't even required SIM cards. I'm worried that Apple's Find My and Amazon's Sidewalk networks are the precursors of this: They're effectively company controlled p2p networks that lets the company use their customers' internet access points like a commodity. If one customer refuses to give a device access to the internet, they could use that network to route it through the access point of another customer.
Also, personal experience: My own ISP (in Germany) experimented with some similar stuff a few years ago: They mandated use of their own home routers where only they had root access. At some point, they pushed an OTA update that made the router announce a second Wifi network in addition to the customer's. This was meant as a public hotspot that people walking down the street could connect to after installing an app from the ISP and buying a ticket.
The customer that "owned" the router wasn't charged for that traffic and the hotspot was isolated from the LAN (or at least the ISP promised that), but it still felt intrusive to just repurpose a device sitting in my living room as "public" infrastructure.
(The ISP initially wanted to do this on an "opt-out" basis, which caused a public uproar thankfully. I think eventually they switched to opt-in and then scrapped the idea entirely.)
> Also, personal experience: My own ISP (in Germany) experimented with some similar stuff a few years ago: They mandated use of their own home routers where only they had root access. At some point, they pushed an OTA update that made the router announce a second Wifi network in addition to the customer's. This was meant as a public hotspot that people walking down the street could connect to after installing an app from the ISP and buying a ticket.
Not sure if you're referring to Vodafone, but Vodafone Germany definitely does this. You can opt out of allowing public access via your personal router, but this opts you out of being able to use other people's routers in the same manner.
If it had Ethernet ports I'd be tempted to just use my own wifi router and put the ISP's Trojan horse in a Faraday cage. All ISP-controlled hardware should be treated as just another untrusted WAN hop.
These devices usually have detachable antennas, so just unscrew them
When I signed up with them, they were actually trying to withold access to the config web UI from customers and then charge extra just to enable Wifi. My response was exactly that - "fuck that" and put my own router in front of theirs.
(That was years before the other incident - since then they had dropped that idea and "generously" given customers access to the config UI)
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...
I keep being surprised if why that is not a thing yet. Amazon launched whispernet with ads on the discounted Kindle years ago and I was totally predicting more companies jump on that.
Add a camera and microphone, and you have yourself a utopia that can control masses.
You mean dystopia, right?
No, you mean utopia, friend.
Depends on your point of view, whether you are the one watching, or the one being watched, I guess :)
Chuck McGill was a visionary?
And it will require an uncovered camera and microphone, or it won't display an image. Sony TVs already come with "optional image optimization" cameras.
Source about Sony?
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
Dell offers a 43" display with speakers and DP, HDMI, and USB. It costs three times as much as a TV, but it is highly-rated kit if you can afford it.
I would rather have a quality large display with speakers and DP than a TV. The only argument in favour of buying a large TV for coding is cost.
Aorus/Gigabyte is also making their monitors into smart TVs. The next size up is a Google TV.
https://www.aorus.com/en-us/monitors/s55u
> 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.
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/
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
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BNX7MS6N
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
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BNX7MS6N
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.
It’s nice but OLED contrast is very hard to beat, and if you’re one of those folks who insist that ‘a white wall is good enough’ then it’s not even the same ballpark of image quality.
How far away from the screen do you need to sit though? Isn’t that too wide? I have kids but I’ve never seen them almost break a TV lol
I saw some giant TV on LTT recently which has a DP port.
A DisplayPort Port you say?
No, they said "DP port", not "DP Port".
DisplayPort is a standard. A DisplayPort port is a port that follows the DisplayPort standard.
As opposed to the DisplayPort cable, DisplayPort standard, or DisplayPort encoding that's sent over the wire, yes. This isn't a PIN number situation despite the stutter.
There was the 55" Alienware OLED monitor, but unfortunately it never received a follow-up after its 2019 release.
> 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
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.
It's a failed article IMHO. It's to the point that the article should be pulled and corrected. None, as in zero TVs are made in the USA. They haven't been made in the USA for many decades. I HATE to say it, but an LLM would have given a better researched article.
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..
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…
Do you mind elaborating on plasmas? I have entirely missed this technology, and wonder what’s about it.
Deep blacks, smooth motion, wide viewing angle. Most people would say OLEDs are better, but some still say the motion is smoother on plasmas.
What about their energy consumption? Aren’t they much hungrier?
Honestly my Xbox one S might be my favorite console I’ve ever owned. Certainly my most versatile.
I am not a HIFI/TV aficionado, but the ACR [1] thing was new to me.
I hope it is not yet important for me as I never allowed a TV access to my LAN/WLAN. But with smart devices using accessible open WLANs to transmit who knows.
[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.06203 / https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.06203
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..
why would i want to sync everything
Why would someone want to sync bookmarks, browsing history etc between their phone, their iPad and their computer?
Chrome and Firefox do the same.
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.
It should not be necessary to be tied to the vendor after you have bought the product.
What are you going to do with an iPhone without Apple? Yes you can use an Android without Google. But the percentage of people who do so outside of China is meaningless.
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?
So you are justifying it. For the record it's not just what you watch with the streaming service, it is everything you watch through their TV program.
You still do not get it: you can find a pseudo-justification for _every_ type of tracking they do to you. But none of these are really true justifications. You can do _everything_ without any type of tracking -- even the very basic premise: it shouldn't even be true that you need an account _at all_ to use an Apple TV.
AppleTV doesn’t record everything you watch on your TV like the smart TVs. A smart TV can track what you watch no matter which input source you are using.
How could an AppleTV or any device connected to an HDMI port know what you are watching on other input sources?
The AppleTV device doesn’t track what you watch at all. The AppleTV+ service knows what you watch on their service.
Their is no justification for the TV to know anything. There is obviously a reason for each service to know what you watch on their service. What exactly are you arguing? That you should be able to use the AppleTV+ service anonymously?
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?
The only way to have privacy from the matrix is to not participate in the matrix. That’s in fact your best option. Does one have to consume the drug of movies/tv? I realize that just suggesting something coming in between the addict and their drug causes consternation, but that also makes the point more salient.
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.
Apple TV is a huge Apple TV+ ad in itself. I shelved my device when my 2yo had "subscribed" to Apple TV+ by just randomly clicking around
An alternative is to just turn off the ability to purchase anything without entering your password each time in settings.
I installed an AppleTV recently, so I don't have much experience. But the first thing I saw after the initial setup was one/third of the display advertising a TV-show on a subscription service I had to purchase. Would that count as an ad?
On the Apple TV you get ‘ads’ for the apps you have in your top row, with different levels of interactivity. Some are just logos of that streaming service, some show recently watched. The Apple TV app has full-blown ads for Apple TV+ originals.
They won’t actually let you delete the Apple TV app, but if you move it out of the top row you will never see the ads.
My parents have an Amazon Fire TV and when I go to their house and have to use it it drives me insane. Carousels of adds large at the top, banner ads as you scroll, full rows of sponsored apps. Full screen ads for random Amazon products when you pause any show you are watching. Everything you watch on Amazon’s streaming service has minute long unskippable ads. Sometimes when you turn it on Alexa will just verbally read you ads.
It’s truly a dystopian piece of tech.
> 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.
you can see no privacy differences between an appletv and a roku or fire stick?
There's a microphone in the remote control.
Funny how the article itself is an ad
AdsTechnica now.
A box that can't run Kodi would never be my choice.
At least we can gather and post an actual solution in the top comment.
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.
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.
The problem with open source TV solutions like that is that they never support legal streaming platforms like Netflix, Disney+ and so on.
Presumably locked bootloaders on smart TVs are a problem that would block usage of that project?
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.
> 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
> 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
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
My recent Sony TV does this.
But also I pretty much never use the TV button to turn it on, I click a button on one of the connected devices to wake it and the TV turns itself on with that input selected. Even if it’s already on, if I want to switch from one device to another I can just wake the other device and it will switch inputs for me. It works really well, I almost never have to use the input selector and it just does the right thing reliably.
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...
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.
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—
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.
Just checked now: the setting is General & Privacy -> Start Screen Options -> Start with Smart Hub Home.
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'm confused. Every TV is a dumb TV if you don't give it your Wifi password.
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.
It is technically illegal if that is how it is configured. Go get ‘em.
But kidding aside, who are we even really kidding anymore, even if you were provided the TOS would you simply not use the device of there were something in the TOS you disagreed with? How about when you’ve been using the device and all the sudden they change the TOS and force agreement as you are about to start a tv evening with the family?
The people simply accepted their enslavement, the taking of your agency, because we all allowed or were overwhelmed with it.
They take our agency through process just like they’ve taken our freedom and rights in so many different ways, just like through YC funded Flock, where treasonous mass surveillance cameras just show up over night and most here seem unaware it’s a YC company that now provides a mass surveillance network to the government and global government tightening its noose around humanity’s neck.
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.)
Yeah that OSMC box is just running Debian with their stuff coming from its own package repo. You can get a root shell. I realise I could have built something myself (and have in the past) but it's absolutely worth the money to me to get everything in a tiny package and working perfectly from day one.
I wouldn't recommend Kodi for streaming, it kinda works but the experience isn't great. I use it exclusively for playing stuff from my server full of legally acquired public domain videos (ahem).
I do watch YouTube videos on it, but I use TubeArchivist (basically a fancy wrapper for yt-dlp) to pull them onto the server first, and a script to organise them into nicely-named directories.
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.
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.
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"
Did't even require that. It was a standard mini pci-e wifi card, just unclipped it and removed it from its slot.
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.
You gave me flashbacks to my Samsung washing machine that needed a factory reset after changing my SSID. Which also reset the service life of filters and liquids and such which was somewhat of a hassle. Such a dumb design not being able to change the wireless network.
Change your network name. When the TV prompts you to connect, join the renamed network. Then, rename it back so everything else can connect again and the TV can't. I can think of a few potential problems with this, but, it might work?
Or blacklist the TV's MAC address in your router settings. Didn't think of that first for some reason.
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?
Sadly, there's just a keyboard + trackpad sitting on my TV-audio console (a kind of home made speaker credenza I built years ago).
So no remote. I get up, hit the spacebar to pause/play. The audio is into a multi-channel receiver though so audio has mute/volume controls on a remote.
I have a Lenovo used minipc connected to mine and I just use a Logitech K400+, it runs Linux with KDE. I will never need a smart tv, or want one, for that matter.
I get that people would rather have a remote but I personally actually don't like remotes at all. My TV is basically a screen only.
Not the parent but my family also has a mac mini to offline TV setup - just a small bluetooth keyboard/mouse and the tv remote for volume. Works well.
As far as I know there are no remotes that work with MacOS.
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.
some will yell at you with a notification until you give in and connect it.
Return it as unfit for service.
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
I have a projector, a BenQ X3000i, in my living room, with a retractable screen. It has the plus side of not needing a dedicated wall, but does perform poorly (vs a TV) if the room isn't darkened. Maybe eventually I'll tie it into my home automation with some smart curtains.
It has low latency, will do 1080p 240Hz, 4k (pixel shift) 60Hz and HDR. Can even do 3D content if you really want...
BenQ did include an Android TV stick in the box, but you can just not hook it up to the projector - problem solved.
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?
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.
Goodbye warranty
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.
Want to know the best option? GO USED. You can find a 50-60 inch dumb TV for a hundred dollars. No, it won't be UHD 4K, but it might be 3D, and it won't pester you to connect to Wi-Fi every time you use it.
Basically locks you out of HDR, high frame rates, VRR, or (more importantly) new panel technology like OLED.
Nope. https://www.rtings.com/tv/reviews/sony/x850d
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.
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.
TV devices are a hot mess to support from a streaming perspective, they each come with their own quirks that mean some perfectly-in-spec encoding and packaging techniques will result in a failed playback on some models of TV. Once a TV device _is_ supported, that support has to be maintained typically for more than a decade until usage of that model falls so low that dropping it from support can be justified.
It would be prohibitively costly to produce per-device renditions so instead there is one generic rendition produced for "all smart TVs" and another one for "UHD capable smart TVs".
Traditional TV manufacturers all work with the BBC to get their devices certified, which is a requirement for carrying the iPlayer app and comes with legal agreements that asset that a device _will_ be able to playback BBC content for as long as it's supported.
Because Apple like to Think Differently, they opted not to align with the entire rest of the TV industry in standardising on MPEG-DASH spec. They instead require all developers to stream video using the HLS protocol. As UHD content on iPlayer is geared exclusively for smart TVs, and all the other smart TVs support MPEG-DASH, the UHD workflow simply never evolved the ability to target Apple's TV devices.
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.
Yes, projectors with 3LCD tech is what you are looking for. They produce all 3 colors at once via 3 distinct lcds inside the chassis and mix them ahead of time. There are a few to choose from, but they all cost above 3000.
The reason why projectors don't use a single rgb lcd (like monitors) to produce the color is the same why all sub 5000$ projectors use pixel shift to fake 4k resolution: Too much light is blocked by the lcd itself if the individual pixels become too small.
I am somewhat sensitive to the effect and have been okay with an X3000i. If I scan my eyes across a black screen with white text, I can still perceive the effect - but it's nowhere near as bad as some older DLP projectors.
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.
The Vizio litigation is encouraging, but hardware-level hacking is still the most reliable way forward. Been running Linux on an old TV with HDMI-in for years - basically a dumb display with full control.
For budget-conscious setup: even older plasma/LCD displays that predate the "smart" era are increasingly available secondhand. Pair with a Raspberry Pi or similar and you get a system you actually own.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Vote with your wallet while there's still a chance
US government already decided for you, sorry.
Don’t think it makes sense for Apple but would be cool to see them sell dumb TV screens to hook up to an Apple TV box.
The is the modern version of "ditch your cable company's horrible DVR for a TiVO". What's old is new again, sadly.
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.
There's a lineageos template for Android TV. I don't think grapheneos will ever run on something like that (it doesn't even run on phones with ten times the security capabilities of TV SoCs) but alternative ROMs are available. There's also KDE Plasma if you want to go the non-Android route, though you'll struggle to find good support for that.
One problem with that approach is that you'll lose access to DRM'd contents, so while the official Netflix/HBO/Prime apps will install on lineageos, their video quality will be terrible or they will refuse to work.
There are a bunch of Google TV variants (brands like TCL and Philips) that will let you turn on "basic TV mode" (https://support.google.com/googletv/answer/10408998?hl=en), disabling pretty much everything other than displaying content.
As for why the Chinese TVs don't have a dumb mode, I think it's because the Chinese market is full of devices crammed to the brim with smart features, so smart TVs are sort of expected these days.
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.
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.
The fact they give you a half decent media PC whilst discounting the monitor in the hope you give them tracking and allow them to be a market gatekeeper; only needs to be mildly anoying in today's world. Just plug in whatever you want and ignore it.
For now. I can see a not-so-distant future where internet access is needed for "cloud AI" to enable full 8K resolution, or where Dolby Atmos/Eclipsa Audio/Amphi Hi-D has to be unlocked through an online account, or where "advanced" menu settings like color calibration are tied to a monthly subscription…
Sure, there will probably be some alternatives from independent/smaller manufacturers but they will inevitably be based on older tech and/or standards, come with serious tradeoffs and so on.
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.
Keeping it practical and not purist, how do new smart TVs (mainly LG, it's the brand I like the most for the hardware) act with ads in a PiHole'd network? Does that block ads? Do they notice?
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.
Please provide a specific example of a tv that does that, or stop spreading misinformation.
I was just extrapolating. Why wouldn't a "smart" device connect to any wifi it has credentials for, and why wouldn't the implementation consider "has credentials" to include "it doesn't need any"?
But now I wonder why your aggressivity sounds so defensive.
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?
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.
Other options than the suggested Apple TV route, include pihole (adblock), kodi, openelec (opensource media players).
> 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’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.
> Best ways to find a dumb TV
I did not give my TV network access. Works fine.
Manufacturers know people do this. The TV will attempt to connect to any open network (neighbors) and I'd be shocked if they haven't at least considered packaging them with 4G/5G antennas. You're gonna need a Faraday Cage.
Provide any evidence at all that this is happening.
I don't really watch TV now. Not scheduled TV anyway. Sometimes some sport in a bar or whatever. I do watch YouTube and some streaming services but old school TV never.
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...
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...
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.
Why not just buy a big monitor and use it to watch 'TV'?
"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
> 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?
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.
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.
Yes, the price is higher, maybe partially because it's not ad-subsidized. I was happy to pay it, this is what I bought: https://www.sharp.eu/sharp-nec-multisync-e868
There's historical speculation that a smart TV could connect to an open wireless access point, or more realistically, that it refuses to operate without internet access, perhaps after a certain number of power on hours.
Will it be smart if you don’t connect it to the internet? Am I missing something?
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.
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
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.
says the blog with tens of ads and hundreds of trackers
Is Ars going to install and run ads on your device, and view your locally stored information? No.
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.)
I think they are selling off old stock and exiting the TV business. Searching various sites in the US shows only a basic 50” 4K TV. A few years ago, they had a very wide variety of offerings - I bought a 65” 4K dumb TV from them. Amazon (US) shows a wide variety of available-to-buy computer monitors, so that is probably their focus at the moment. It’s probably a lot more lucrative.
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?
We shouldn't have to.
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.
Anecdotally, you may want to avoid Best Buy either way. There's a chance the TV box contains just rocks, no TV, and that they refuse to refund your purchase.
https://wonderfulengineering.com/rtx-5080-buyer-opens-box-to...
I know I'm sure never shopping there again.
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.