LG says we're fake news [video](youtube.com) |
LG says we're fake news [video](youtube.com) |
These days devices do what we ask when it benefits their real owners, and refuse to do what we ask of them when it doesn't.
It wasn't an overnight thing, but the temperature in the pot has been increasing for well over a two decades and it's getting more than a bit sweaty.
It's not like Doctorow, the EFF, and a bunch of others didn't warn us. They told us this would happen. Like exactly this.
Active regulation of the marketplace is needed.
I can remember when this simple point was obvious to almost everyone.
I'm implying that parliaments in multiple developed countries are rapidly devolving and ceding their powers and/or work to the unelected or unrelated officials.
That said, I’m not arguing that we don’t need laws today - we do, or at least I have no other idea how to do a course correction from where we are. Preferably wide-range ones that alter the whole consumer-producer relationships.
But the key thing is not the laws, it’s the attitude (individual and corporate) towards others. Can’t legislate that, I’m afraid.
you sell a product -> you are responsible about the product
with a ".. -> you must be honest about the product (/what the products does, provides, etc.)"
to see how absurdly not followed this common sense(^1) is in the us look at supplements
1. provider are not hold responsible, non small parts of sold supplements are harmful in one way or another. Even cases like supplements advertised for pregnant woman with highly dangerous components for pregnant woman existed, no major change followed.
2. high amounts (AFIK 80% or so) of supplements sold in the US are severely dishonest and don't quite contain what is advertised. And this isn't just about it technically containing the supplements, but in a form the body can't absurd. But it goes so bad that "it's just sugar pills" is more on the harmless side... (and even that is dangerous given that many people take supplements for fixing health issues caused by to little of what the supplement).
not only has the US not fixed it when it started going out of hand, they went explicitly out of their way to not fix it.
(^1): (Common sense for anyone looking a bit into market dynamics/consumer protection etc.)
The fact that it's now infecting other non-software consumer products is a reason why congress should kill this with fire. Companies are putting screens onto products specifically so they can force an EULA on customers.
Literally every business is working towards a solution where consumers own nothing and they own everything. Games, music, movies. They want to sell you subscriptions to use shit like your car or your fridge. They want to double dip on that by making you not only pay for the ability to use the stuff you bought, but also so that they can sell everything you do on it to advertisers. This is even especially true with all the shit people feed LLMs daily for work or personal purposes.
This is the end state of an unregulated capitalist market without consumer protections.
It's called stage-4 capitalism: profit by any and all means.
Alternatives existed. People thought they were getting more for their money with “smart” tvs, and bought those. It was fucking dumb, and nearly everyone participated.
Sony is out there with no ad/data platform to speak of, I believe? And projectors, I suppose. But there are almost no clean alternatives in living room appropriate panels. Even monitors are starting to go the way TVs did.
Neoliberalism. The only thing that keeps companies in good behaviour are strong regulations and harsh penalties (prison time) for perpetrators. Remove that and corporations will become feudal systems to pay tribute to.
https://www.streamtvinsider.com/advertising/roku-vizio-lean-...
If consumers are unwilling to shell out for a TV priced high enough that the manufacturer doesn't need to do things like this to earn a (decent) profit, then what we've got is what you get.
You could certainly argue that the industry should've held the line, but that ignores human nature. One "innovative" manufacturer was always going to break ranks then the rest would follow, especially since the typical consumer appears (judging by the lack of non smart TV's for sale at consumer prices) to prefer lower prices to lack of tracking features. I think people very much like being able to buy a 65" tv for USD399.
If you want to mandate the sales of TVs that don't track, get a law passed. I suspect it'd be deeply unpopular once the resulting price rises were known.
The problem is, even if the device is priced at cost plus a reasonable margin, they can make more margin by selling data that they acquire by spying. No matter the margin on the sale, there's still more money to make by selling that data. There is no upper limit that magically prevents the manufacturer from looking for other avenues to increase profit. "Premium" device priced 3x the "reasonable" price? Still more money to be made selling data.
Now, factor in the race to the bottom on selling price, and those data sales just look that much more enticing.
The reason it's bullshit is that we don't have a free market. There are constraints and asymmetric information and inelastic demand and all kinds of other forces at play that completely negate any supposed wisdom you might hope to find in free market theory.
And if the market is not free—if consumers do not have a fully open choice, where every possible feature and option (including things like "lower price in exchange for constant surveillance") is individually selectable, or they don't have enough access to different options, or they don't have enough time and brainpower to exhaustively research every option—then what consumers buy in aggregate is not reflective of what they choose.
It's reflective of what the manufacturers choose to push.
You know, I’ve been thinking, I don’t think im being paid enough! Im giving myself a raise. We can do that, right?!
It’s incredible how these brands are, one by one, destroying any affinity and good will left for them (LG, Sony, Microsoft, etc.). Nowadays whenever I hear a company has a custom OS I think custom what? Custom tracking and ad pipeline? This just makes me turn elsewhere entirely, not want to "upgrade" to an even more expensive product that _might_ not track me. Might isn’t good enough.
I’ll take a cheap TCL panel with all the latest bells and whistles, and be done with it. Sure, the software will be janky, but it will be cheap and just as good at showing moving pictures, if not better. If I suspect something nefarious, I’ll get an old Android box and install a rooted system on there that I control, and use that instead of the inbuilt Android TV. But I _won’t_ be paying extra for the trouble.
Domains which are blocked now.
prov-lg.alphonso.tv au.info.lgsmartad.com kic.cdpbeacon.lgtvcommon.com au.nextlgsdp.com kic.tv.wiselg.com kic.wiseconfig.lgtvcommon.com kic.homeprv.lgtvcommon.com kic.recommend.lgtvcommon.com au.elastic.lgwebostv.com
I asked DeepSeek to do the same scan, but given everything goes through AdGuard it’s much simpler to sift through it’s logs. This is what I got:
* br.rdx2.lgtvsdp.com, br.lgtvsdp.com — 1,200 hits: LG’s ad/content-delivery platform (SDP)
* br.info.lgsmartad.com — 64 hits: LG Smart AD advertising network
* aic.cdpsvc.lgtvcommon.com — 141 hits: LG customer-data platform (CDP)
* aic.cdpbeacon.lgtvcommon.com — 34 hits: CDP data-collection beacon
* aic*.lgtviot.com, *.lgthinq.com — ~410 hits: LG ThinQ / IoT cloud
* lgtvonline.lge.com — 350 hits: LG online services / telemetry
* br.lgeapi.com, ngfts.lge.com, aic-gfts.lge.com, snu.lge.com — ~210 hits: LG APIs + telemetry
* rdx2.lgtvsdp.com (600/600) — LG ad platform
* cdpsvc.lgtvcommon.com (~370) — LG customer-data platform & beacons
* info.lgsmartad.com (78/78) — LG Smart AD
* ibs.lgappstv.com (86/86) — LG app store
* aic-ngfts.lge.com (36/36)
Though some domains still are going through, which are now blocked :)
1. Teenagers exist
2. Teenagers hook up with other teenagers
3. Sometimes that might happen on the couch in front of the TV
If that TV records and transmits anything, who is on the hook for production and distribution of illicit materials? The parents? The kids? Or LG?
PR/legal wise this might be the worst case scenario and might even get some of those legislators and law enforcement people interested.
5. Discover there is absolutely zero enforcement if you are govt. intertwined oligarchy owned conglomerate.
6. Sell collected data (akshully it will be synthetic data "of course", wink-wink) to a legal front to a Nexus darknet laundromat. Also known as "identity verification provider or other somesuch.
7. Insurance companies legally partner with a different legal Nexus front corpo, which will ingest stolen data and make it "sythetic data" again, wink-wink; then provide it to the insurance corpos.
8. Insurance is opaquely "adjusted" to those same teenagers.
9. Profit :)
And, of course, sell it to the Epstein class behind closed doors for undisclosed kickbacks and favouritism.
If ACR is turned on when I install an app, and click 'next', 'next', 'open' then that is not an OPT-IN feature.
If I have to perform an action to not have ACR during normal use of the TV then that is OPT-OUT in my opinion.
If IoT devices like this do connect to open WiFi and use those connections, without asking or notifying the user or seeking consent, then that is a breach of ethics. My neighbor's open WiFi, my employer's open WiFi, have not authorized LG to access.
But if LG does connect to random and unknown networks, then they should not be surprised when they find themselves in a forest of pineapples, so to speak. I would like to see some Smart TVs set up in a cyberwarfare range, and what activity could be elicited when they elect to connect to a non-standard network.
I’m curious, what would meet your bar for investigativ journalism if that didn’t?
LG says it's opt in, and I think the devil is really in the details about what the consent screen says, but the only way I think it would be a "crazy accusation" is if LG was doing this without consent.
https://www.reddit.com/r/LGOLED/s/x8iBNCPya5
And there are cases of LG re-enabling these ACR options without your consent when they push firmware updates, and even randomly without updating, at which point the TV will send all the past and present ACR data it's harvested from you to LG, without your consent:
All my TVs are LG and I bought a fancy one for my mother and sisters. Now I'm having nightmares and trying to figure out what the hell to do.
But that doesn't stop people from repeating it any time someone gives the incredibly straightforward suggestion to just disconnect WiFi if you're concerned about intrusive monitoring.
What you do not want instead is :
- being mandatory
- requiring a proprietary application
- expecting the app to force onto you services
- expecting the setup to fail and making the hardware unusable over time
because honestly when it does work, it's great. It's really not the features that are problematic, it's the predatory surveillance and locking down way to provide them that is absolutely horrible.
No, I rather know I do not.
> It's quite amazing to receive a notification from your dryer that it finished its cycle.
It’s really quite useless to me.
What I may want is an ODB so I can plug in whatever external observation and possibly control plane I wish, were I so inclined (I am not), and could make my device smart. Hell for a dryer you could probably have a plug or panel feeding into HA and send an alert based on load.
Anything that’s “smart” out of the box is rife for abuse and will eventually sink into that.
Either they changed it for some legal reason, or Youtube allows for A/B testing of multiple titles for engagement.
You can even sometimes see when a list of videos on YT first loads and a given video has one title, and it suddenly switches to another without you reloading the page.
Ex:
1. The noise happening in my house is copyrighted.
2. I protected my copyright by blocking the TV from transmitting it to known manufacturer domains.
3. By switching to obfuscated domains or alternate transmission paths, the manufacturer started circumventing my copyright controls.
... I suppose the boring answer will be that the literally-unreadable stack of Terms Of Service has some "everything we ever do is permitted by you" clause.
Now bend over, citizen
Without independent verification from someone like GN, I wouldn't trust "we installed rootkits" Sony not to be spying too.
https://www.tomsguide.com/tvs/sony-just-handed-its-tv-busine...
Where do you find the time to post on HN?
In fact, due to DRM licensing, it's not possible to have a legit TV streaming device that isn't full of spyware and still allows you to watch streaming services like Netflix, Disney+ etc in full resolution.
However if you run Android, you have to accept some level of snooping.
If you want a bit complicated, you can probably unscrew the back panel and remove the wifi card.
You can do that no the average joe.
God knows how many millions of people could drive a car from 2004 forever, use small dumb screens and other appliances, etc, etc, if not for other members of their household.
Would love to use a free software alternative.
Really? Did you give Claude the credentials to your managed switch so it could set up a mirror port? Did Claude enable promiscuous mode on your Ethernet interface? Did Claude get a master-mode WiFi AP to intercept all the frames, or did it use SDR? Tell us more about how Claude scanned your network. I am HN-curious about this!
On Amazon, you can find a few here: https://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/industrial/18746933011... (which are mostly Samsung).
Amazon and Walmart say they are out of stock, with no expected date.
My conclusion is that Sceptre, the last holdout in the dumb TV industry, has quit in favor of focusing on monitors/displays for computers. Now I'm not sure if I'm going to ever replace my TV!
The dumb models are very cheap and the picture is faithful due to lack of framerate-doubler and other picture-enhancement shenanigans.
The reports of user-disconnected TVs jumping on open wifis or Amazon sidewalk by themselves are not credible. All of the problems stem from connecting the TV so don't.
I would be surprised if a truly dumb TV would be as good quality as modern LGs etc for the price. Maybe I'm wrong. But please don't pay _more_ for a dumb TV.
Seems like the only options are:
1. Buy a smart TV and not connect it to the internet and/or physically neuter it by unplugging the Wifi/Bluetooth module. I wish there was more info about this out there as I assume there are some models that don’t allow this
2. Buy a projector. I’ve been using a cheap $80 projector for a few years due to space constraints in the apartment I was living in. Now that I’m in a larger apartment, I wanted to buy a TV. But all this has me wondering whether I should just buy a better projector
It does have the “drawback” that it can only be used after sunset (assuming you don’t have a basement or blackout curtains or something). But I find that this provides a natural hard cap to the screen time that everyone is trying so hard to cut back on
"I bought a TV with NO 'Smart' Features": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJh72_O4pXE
It's pretty much "this is cheap, but the picture quality turns out to be crap". :(
Until smart projectors are a thing, I suppose...
I set the TV up and was immediately pleased. The first thing it did was ask me if I wanted "smart" or "basic" mode. I selected basic mode, skipped the network connection, and disagreed to as many policies as it would let me. One week in, it hasn't nagged me a single time to connect to the internet or tried to push any other BS on me. I have it hooked up to an Apple TV and my Switch, and it seems to just work.
So yeah, I hope I'm not jinxing something here, but TCL was a great way to go for a delightful dumb TV experience.
So lots of manufacturers support this.
These are nicely dumb and cheap.
https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/393332200/you-can-...
Typically not all that relevant most of the time to the average consumer, but if you’re having a persistent annoyance it’s worth looking through release notes from time to time.
This ignores that the vast majority of consumers actually use the smart tv features like the Netflix app. Then updates start to become far more relevant and eventually mandatory.
I mean, someone like Trump is probably capable of doing it from the inside, but Korea's educational standards are too high to elect him...
They wanted the “smart” tvs. Overwhelmingly. “We” chose this hellscape when we had the opportunity to say no.
So I think the person you’re replying to is kinda right. We didn’t get forced into this so much as everyone collectively said, “Yeah, that’s what I want.”
But you're right: obviously there must have been people buying smart tvs in a time when there were still dumb tvs available, but what motivated these "people", where they came from, and where they have been hiding,... it's all a complete mystery to me. Last time I bought a tv, there were still some dumb models available. I may get a new display for whatever computer I'm working on every couple of years, but to me a tv is the sort of appliance you'd replace maybe once every 20 or 30 years at most, so I guess I have only been able to vote with my wallet once. Obviously voting with your wallet is as pointless as voting for certain politicians: so far I have yet to find any evidence that anything people vote for is subsequently reflected in reality in any way.
I do like "smart" lights that are based on presence, and various sensors and "smart" automatic irrigation, but don't see much point in home appliances being connected to my phone/network.
Companies can develop new products without your advice. In fact consumers often don't know what they want.
>people will pay whatever the price is
Then why do businesses have sales? If prices don't matter why would businesses choose to make less money per sale?
I'd urge reading up on revealed preference and product discovery. It cuts both ways in that, sure, a company can offer a product on the market that no buyer asked for and have it sell well, but then, the media can expose some rather unsavory facts about that same product and subsequently (consequently?) have it not sell.
> Then why do businesses have sales? If prices don't matter why would businesses choose to make less money per sale?
It's worth picking this apart. Prices not mattering is usually expressed in economics-ese as price-inelastic demand, and that's usually not what's happening. Sales are a mechanism for drumming up demand for a product, with the hope that the additional volume will compensate for the marginally lower margin.
I'm not sure what point you are contesting.
>It's worth picking this apart.
They were rhetorical questions.
>price-inelastic demand
With this you could argue that the absolute price does not matter, but the relative price between products that can substitute each other do. In this comment chain it is being argued that this kind of device wins on relative price.
>Sales are a mechanism for drumming up demand for a product, with the hope that the additional volume will compensate for the marginally lower margin.
It is for increasing demand, but making a higher rate of profit on the item is not the main reason. Things like being able to clear inventory, or to learn about what the current demand curve looks like (to know if prices should be adjusted) are more common purposes.
It's as simple as buying a TV, never hooking it up, and then buying something like an Apple TV that you do hook up to the internet.
It also wasn't universally true. E.g. the story of Mad Munz creating TVs that worked only for 90% of the customers (who had good enough reception and needed less signal cleanup). His idea was to capture 90% of the market with a cheaper product, while shafting 10% of the consumers and shamelessly send them to other vendors when they reported their troubles and he already had their money.
https://www.autodesk.com/products/fusion-360/blog/madman-mun...
Just to make clear that while (2) is at least an exaggeration unless you really stretch the issues with GRAS components not being adequately safety tested, it's certainly true that evidence of benefit is thin.
Personally I'd love to see the FDA actually regulate supplements, including actually testing additives for safety rather than falling back on GRAS sketchiness.
But we can't even test food for parasites and bacteria so I guess it falls to the consumer to somehow get enough information to make an informed decision.
If it does MAC spoofing, then just take it out back and shoot it. That's properly malicious.
I would expect an hn member to be able to change their own wifi password and assist members of their household in changing it on their device.
> You're making a huge assumption that it does not remember wifi passwords and that it would actually honor your request.
Has it been observed?
> You're making a huge assumption that it does not remember wifi passwords and that it would actually honor your request.
Like what? I don't think mobile apps can roll and implement their own protocol on an android or apple phone without specific authorization.
> You're making a huge assumption that it does not remember wifi passwords and that it would actually honor your request.
We are talking here about a specific, already owned device.
So yes I insist you do want those, just not in the way it's been currently forced. IMHO you are right to reject this as it is but wrong to reject the possibilities when done right.
We are just so disgusted by the way it's currently done that we reject the entire possibly. Quite sad really.
Edit: I have been using HA daily for years now. Smart plugs work and are useful but it's rarely enough. You can infer the device state based on instant consumption but you can't convenient control back.
And I think their point is that, even with strong legislation, giving every device unlimited internet connectivity is a siren song for the corporations which will always be incentivized to shoehorn their interests into the product you own. Things like control through external connectors, on-device modifiable configurations, only local connectivity or flashable firmware would not qualify as 'smart' but would go a long way to do the things you're looking for without giving them the physical possibility of future abuse.
This false dichotomy is precisely the problem. I DO want to program my hardware, even ones with actuators, but I do NOT want for this to happen to rely on the infrastructure of the manufacturer if I don't explicit ask for it.
No??? Revealed preference is dependent on what information is known. The analysis is made easier if the information is perfect, but that is not at all a prerequisite to being able to lean on revealed preference.
> In fact, the revealed preferences is for TVs that appear not to spy on you, that's why they hide that information!
Exactly! Consider though that, as the information landscape changes, so does the revealed preference. Notably, when things like TVs spying on their buyers comes to light, a preference can be revealed that buyers don't want TVs that spy on them.
Like, it's entirely rational for LG to want to hide this fact about their televisions, provided that they have the inkling that this would be unpopular. Their behavior in trying to suppress this press leads me to believe that they know exactly how unpopular this is, and they're trying to get away with it anyway.
- "no idea what you’re talking" = "you have outsourced expertise to an LLM"
- "solution that doesn’t actually work" = "piecemeal blocking leaves many problems still active"
- "used to be free" = "you / others in general now pay LLM services for the outsourcing leading to poor solutions while in the past poor solutions came for free"
If it isn't connected to the network, it can't communicate.
How do you know that your dryer won't lock onto an open wifi? How do you know that your smart TV won't download malware? You don't.
Contrarily, if you accept that you only hear the dryer "DONE!" bell if you are within 20' or so, you can be certain that the dryer is yours and yours alone.
I really don't understand how people give models run on somebody else's server these wide-reaching permissions. Do you really trust Anthropic that much? The government that's hosting Anthropic?
No matter how you set it up, you're giving a cloud service the ability to SSH into your private network.
Surely you must see the glaring security risk this creates?
Jesus.
[1] Zig is, I think, the only living counterexample.
But you're right I'm sure that if there hadn't been the GCC there wouldn've been a ton of competing compilers. I'm sure that it was the existence of Apache that ruined computing and brought about the enshittification of the web not MS trying to force everyone to cater to IE and then Google doing the same with Chrome, it's all just because of that evil Open Source.
Sure, sure. And how exactly is software not also free-as-in-beer when any consumer can just download it themselves?
> if there hadn't been the GCC there wouldn've been a ton of competing compilers.
As I already noted in reply to your sibling comment, which you conveniently chose to ignore, every single one of those competing compilers bar one is funded by big tech. You can count the number of compiler developers who make a living without being funded by big tech, in the entire world, on your hands. GCC development is itself supported by big tech.
> Google doing the same with Chrome, it's all just because of that evil Open Source.
Do you need to be reminded that Chromium is open-source software? There is no market for competition to Chrome because no browser developer could compete with "free". Firefox is open-source and also propped up by billions in Google funding. There are zero consumer-viable browsers that are not just a Chromium or Firefox reskin.
You even brought up IE, which is an example of the exact principle I'm talking about. It wasn't open-source, but, same as open-source software, it was free, and this big tech-funded free software killed its paid competitor (Netscape). This was a huge deal at the time, enough for the US government to get involved in antitrust. Then MS got let off with a gentle warning, everybody shrugged their shoulders, developed amnesia, and decided actually it's great if we let 5 or so tech monopolies undercut all of their competitors with 'free' software and solidify complete control of the market.
GM did show that the devices scan for open wifi networks, and users in the comments have claimed that it connects without their permission.
Gamers nexus did not make that claim about them actually connecting though.
I don't mean to be rude but it sounds like you just don't want to confront the rest of your household about taking the TV offline and are coming up with excuses to tell yourself this is actually fine.
You can even prepare for it by printing the details + qrcode beforehand.
Connecting to a wifi network is one of those things every terminally connected non tech savy people are able to do these days.
But not exactly sure what the main issue, how can claude even access the router from the internet. Its not accessible.
Enlighten me.
https://www.crowdstrike.com/en-us/cybersecurity-101/cyberatt...
Are you going to stop using your browser? It probably has note vulnerability than you can count
Not "my network has a default or empty password, I can't make people sign in again."
Also, some people have a lot of wifi connected devices, including stuff like light bulbs. (Again, not me.)