my TV incurred my wrath by having the gall to show me a banner ad while I was in the middle of a game.
so I promptly cut its balls off. (disabled the internet entirely). now it is a dumb TV. and it behaves like a TV. and not an ad machine.
this post was submitted on 07 Oct 2024
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But what device do you use to stream? That's the dilemma I'm in, streaming sticks and devices are all so spammy.
I just run an old PC plugged in to my TV. It's been running Windows, but I'm strongly considering switching it to linux now that it seems HDR on linux is getting stable. I might even use SteamOS directly since it's got a nice interface for controller use.
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Honestly, the apple TV is the least spammy by a long shot. I also hear great things about the Nvidia shield, but it is pretty ancient by now. Or use a computer, but of course that's got its own annoyances. Of course these are all the most expensive options, apparently for a reason.
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I bought an Apple TV after I had some smart tv related issues with my Samsung. I’m happy with it and it supports any app you’d want.
Apple TV has been reliable for many years. Don't even have an iPhone or iPad anymore but the OS gets the fuck outta the way and it probably has the least spyware of all the commercial options.
Building your own with like, a Pi or a PC is the best option if you mainly have pirated content.... If you stream anything that option isn't great because your device won't pass all the DRM checks to play higher definition/4k stuff. (Someone correct me but last I looked into it this was still true)
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Join the darkside, and run something like a Raspberry Pi with Kodi, and/or Plex, etc.
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I've never given a tv my wifi password.
I'm not any techier than the average millennial. Maybe my trust issues are worse than average. I don't regret my actions.
Also - my xbox one s may have streamed more video content than provided rocket leaguery....until I tripped on a cord...
Laptop now. Learning how to utilize these new capabilities.
If only our fucking government would do something about this and actually regulate these evil bastards.
First you'd need to ban money from politics and change the voting system to better represent the people living there instead of wealthy elites, but that would just be the start.
Whenever wealthy elites have even a tiny bit of power (as they do in any capitalist system, including social democracies like what the Nordic countries have), they will seize as much control as possible. We saw this happen many times.
Nico Semsrott (Kabarettist and member of the EU parliament. Yes, both) proposed in jest sponsoring placement on the jackets of the political members that got donations by companies.
The jackets should then look like the race overalls from Formula 1 or (not US) football players.
And I am fully supporting this.
Edit:
Like this:
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Wait until they hear about cell phones.
And cars, and smart thermostats and smart cameras and smart fridges and routers and literally every fucking thing in your house that is connected to the fucking internet. Every single thing in our homes is a data miner.
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Or the patent with a camera to make sure you're watching the ad.
pi-hole ftw. the vast majority of my pi-hole's DNS drops are from various Roku and Roku-like devices. Also, put all your IoT stuff onto a guest network, or if your gear supports it, on its own VLAN.
See, I just don't connect it to the network. It complained when I set it up but now it just works as a screen.
I've got a raspberry pi steaming my desktop to it with gamestream/sunshine/moonlight, and it's now as smart as my computer. It can even stream from different computers no matter where they are in the house, watch anything with stremio, and play games from them too. It's way better than using the youtube or netflix button on the TV, most of the services it offers I don't use anyway.
But actually pihole does sound like a good idea and maybe I should get that set up one of these days.
So with all the recent drama I learned that some TVs look for other open networks or other same brand TVs in range, and if found will join those networks and still share data.
So not connecting it isn't enough in all cases.
A pihole wouldn't solve this either if it was smart enough to know it's blocked and look elsewhere.
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One way to get Congress to act on this would be to remind them of how Robert Bork's video rental history got released. They very quickly realized that they all had the same sleazy movies on their rental list and passed a law making it illegal to share them.
Call your Congressmen and tell them that their smart TV is sending screenshots of whatever they're watching back to home base, including stuff that's not streamed, and there might be swift action.
Better yet, hack Samsung and leak it to the press. That'll definitely light a fire under them.
I blocked my two TVs from phoning home via my pihole. They are the two noisiest devices on my network, by leaps and bounds.
On a day of heavy usage, my phone and desktop may get ~2000 blocked requests combined. That’s high, but not unheard of. It just means I did a lot of browsing, with a lot of blocked ad requests. My TVs average somewhere around 7500 blocked requests per day, on days that I haven’t even turned them on. That’s an attempt to phone home every ~12 seconds. And it is much worse on days that I actually use them.
To be clear though, that's largely because it is just repeating the same request over and over as it times out and retries. They're a lot less noisy when they actually connect successfully, though it is still undesirable for them to do so.
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can we just ban online features from tvs, cars, printers, light bulbs etc.
Cars being online has some tangible benefits in that they can transmit location data to emergency services, especially if the driver is unresponsive. Might save someone from dying in a ditch in the middle of nowhere.
Arguably, some of the data collected while driving is also very useful for maintenance and development (e.g. if a lot of vehicles start having a similar issue after X miles).
That said, this data should be limited in scope and use (e.g. must not be sold, especially not to insurance companies), as well as anonymized as much as possible. Which is currently not the case, and that definitely needs regulation.
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That ship, my friend, has already sailed.
Civilians used to own canons. For blowing up ships. And the occasional home invader. Doesn't matter if it has sailed if we sink it. We should sink that ship.
For example, Amazon Web Services and ad-tech company TripleLift are working with proprietary models and machine learning for dynamic product placement in streamed TV shows. The report, citing a 2021 AWS case study, says that "new scenes featuring product exposure can be inserted in real-time 'without interrupting the viewing experience.'"
Peacock is also working with TripleLift to develop "In-Scene" Peacock ads that owner NBCUniversal says it's currently testing:
When a user plays episodic content, your brand’s product or message is dynamically placed in the frame of targeted scenes, creating a non-interruptive ad experience that aligns the programming with your campaign theme/goals.
This could be hilarious when your omegaverse softcore porn drama gets plastered with prune juice, old people pill adverts, and trump propaganda on everyone's shirts, tattoos, jock straps, voice lines and whatever else the AI can scrounge up. "It totally fits with the narrative!"
Am I reading this wrong or are they literally hijacking a shot in the content by placing a product in there?
Sounds like they could literally go in there and replace the kid watching tele-shopping in a movie with watching a literal ad made to look like it's genuinley in the movie.
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They called me crazy.
I’m more than happy to buy a TV that uses post-purchase monetization, because I am never going to connect that fucker to the internet. It’s a display. I shall use it as a display. I do not care that it can replace my streaming box. I fully control my streaming box, and I will use that.
If I catch it doing any sketchy shit like trying to use unsecured/Comcast/etc WiFi to phone home, it’ll be time to pull out the screwdriver, though.
What happens when it no longer needs your WiFi and uses something like LoRa to phone home with your data and location? It may not know who you are exactly but it'll have a good guess.
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Why do we continue to be ok with this? Where is the outrage and call for change?
the overwhelming bulk of humanity cant be fucked to care about shit like this.. until it personally affects them.
Then they will wail like banshees about the great injustice of it all, and how could anyone let it happen to them.
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Technical fixes only work for the technical and often it's technically working against the law. We need the law on our side, not the corporations. So we need to engage with law as much as technology. Or we end having to break technologies like secure boot and laws.
Do you really think the lawmakers would listen to the poor instead of corporations?
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Just disconnect your TV from the Internet and get an Apple TV.
First yes, second no.
The dumber the device the happier the user.
Apple TV doesn't try to do much other than being a very technically capable passthrough. You get pretty much every streaming service, multiple Plex clients etc. And no ads.
My 1st Gen ATV4K is 7 years old now and was buttery smooth until last tvOS update, now it's only slightly smoother than most high end TVs. That's quite a good run.
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“CTV” is a new term that I wasn’t familiar with.
It's also slightly confusing because CTV is a major TV station in Canada. I've never heard CTV to mean Connected TV.
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Of course they are without any data privacy laws companies are going to collect and then sell as much of your personal data that they can get away with.
The situation is really bad for consumers. Even with a Pi-Hole and a dumb TV and something like a Fire TV stick (they tend to send lots of telemetry too and apps like Toggo will nag you to oblivion to consent to data mining - if an app asks at all that is).
I'm slowly building up a Jellyfin library and yeah I jumped the hoops to find a non-smart TV. Wrote about it at https://beko.famkos.net/2022/11/27/on-non-smart-tvs/ and settled with a https://www.homex.eu/u55nt1000.html that ticked all my boxes:
☑ ~~cheap~~ affordable ☑ 4k (UHD) ☑ ~~dumb~~ non-Smart ☑ HDMI ☑ 55″
No idea about it's tuner though[1] alas it's not really any longer available in any market space today and I hope it will not die on us any time soon or the quest to find a new one starts again 🤓
[1] We've a decent external receiver that does all the work and HDMI juggling but even that thing is on the WiFi for software updates and in-house streaming but from what I can tell it behaves at least, which is probably just because it's old by now.
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