This „we own the glass“ idea is completely insane. How does an industry degenerate to the point where they consider acceptable to base their business model on owning part of the product they sell you?
Big pivotal moment is probably the DMCA and the DRM it's enabled, it's really eroded the concept of ownership in both software and hardware (via firmware), to the point where we've completely lost all control over the devices we buy.
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.
I don't think "jailbreak and install your own software on your TV" would be common even without the DMCA...and it would still be necessary, nothing would be stopping the companies from writing these stock software systems.
I brought this up all the time I argued with co-workers I advocated for Open Source because I knew where this was headed and every time it played out the exact way this comic did.
Now I just post a link to this comic in discussion about these kind of things.
https://xkcd.com/743/
We didn’t have laws but every TV at the dawn of the era came with full schematics and documentation.
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.
yep one of the first rules of any market should be
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.)
I don't think the supplement information you quoted is correct. There are issues, but I don't think it is that prevalent. I subscribe to consumerlab.com, they do regular testing.
(1) is certainly correct, they're poorly understood when it comes to interactions and they almost never have much clinical evidence for claims (thus they say "support"). There are also heavy metal contaminants in all sorts of things, certainly stuff bad for babies.
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.
Lawmakers should have outlawed EULAs the moment they first showed up in software. The idea that someone could sell you a product which is completely broken until you sign away all your rights on a contract you don't get to see before the purchase is the most anti-consumer thing ever invented. Nothing worked like that before software came along.
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.
Companies are amoral. If killing people boosted their share price they would issue every employee a machine gun in a heartbeat. The only reason this doesn't happen is it's illegal.
Marketing executives thinking “out of the box” is how. Ethics cannot contain them inside. They have breached the perimeter and now trample everyone for MRR.
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.
How is it insane. Owning distribution channels has been valuable since the beginning of commerce. It's no different than a newspaper company saying they own the paper so they have the power to print ads in it.
You really aren't paying attention. They weren't talking about distribution channels. They were talking about capturing user data - "we know who's in the LG household. We know which devices are there. We know what you're exposed to on TV and we know how to extend that reach into mobile."
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.
> 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, ...
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.
What do you mean? I don’t recall ever asking manufacturers if I could trade my privacy for a discount. I don’t remember that at all…people will pay whatever the price is, if inflation hasn’t taught that to you, then I’m not sure what to tell you. The other thing inflation showed us, is that manufacturers will absolutely put a price on what they feel is “decent profit.” Cmon dude. Do you not remember how much we paid for eggs?!
Which, i think it was found later to be that the manufacturers “manufactured,” “scam-bled eggs.”
You know, I’ve been thinking, I don’t think im being paid enough! Im giving myself a raise. We can do that, right?!
> Companies can develop new products without your advice. In fact consumers often don't know what they want.
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'd urge reading up on revealed preference and product discovery
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.
You're expecting consumers to be able to compare these anti-features that are actively hidden from them. It's like airline seats - airlines get away with continually shrinking them because consumers have no way to actually compare airline seat sizes ahead of time.
This stance is so anti-consumer it's laughable. Are you seriously implying LG doesn't turn a decent profit with their massive empire? There's an issue with capitalism of chasing infinite growth rather than stability, and this is one of the consequences of chasing such growth.
I deeply regret buying my LG. Originally the plan was to never connect it to wifi, and use an external device (chromecast, apple tv, or whatever) but my wife was too excited to try out whatever features. Unfortunately we can't sell the TV for anywhere what we paid for it new (to replace it with a different brand) so we're stuck with it for another ~7-10 years, or whatever the standard TV replacement interval is these days. New "apps" keep showing up on the main screen, which I have to "delete" from the main screen once a month or so (they're not deleted, they're just undeletable apps in some massive library of preinstalled spyware we can fortunately mostly hide). Apparently Sony OLED screens are LG "glass" but without the spyware.
I have a Sony A95K and have kept it in basic mode because I have a shield I like to game and stream from. The sony is very minimal and out the way, and after many software updates hasn't offered me any ads, or programs to run even while connected to WiFi.
However if you run Android, you have to accept some level of snooping.
You're making a huge assumption that it does not remember wifi passwords and that it would actually honor your request. You're assuming it does not communicate with/via other LG devices owned by neighbors. You're assuming it does not communicate via partner apps on mobile and other partner devices over other protocols. You're assuming they won't eventually simply add cellular modems to circumvent all of this.
This is also my question, but I suppose the answer could be that we don't trust LG to actually forget the wifi password (and not use it surreptitiously later). You could also change the wifi info, but that might mean changing a whole lot of devices (including wife's and kids).
If someone is supposedly concerned about being recorded, having their privacy invaded etc. but they're too lazy to change the wifi password and deal with the trivial inconvenience of changing it on other household devices then in this case the revealed preference really is that they don't really care.
The fact you don't do it means you actually don't care at all about your privacy. It takes 5 minutes to bring every member in an household in the living room or kitchen and assist them to change the wifi password on their device.
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.
As others have said, cut off access and/or factory reset it.
My LG has never been granted net access, firmware upgrades through USB drives, and streaming through Onn 4K box(w/ a 3rd party launcher) and Apple TV. No surprise ads, apps, or anything.
I updated my LG C5 firmware via USB and my Nintendo Switch 2 now says “Switch 2” on the home page instead of “Unknown Device”. So that’s nice I guess. Also it seemed to fix something with the 120hz HDR 10:10:10 signal when connected to my PC if I recall correctly that before resulted in poor image quality.
Mostly bug fixes relevant to higher end home theatre setups. Typically bleeding edge stuff where a TV is released before a new HDMI spec is fully baked or whatnot. One of my older OLED panels needed a number of updates to get proper Dolby Vision profile support a few years back.
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.
Can we really trust it to honor your request to stop using the internet? After hearing them speak on this subject, I have my doubts it will honor your request so quickly and easily.
It feels like there must be multiple completely different implementations of LG OLED TVs. I would not say that my LG has a "main screen" of any kind. When I turn mine on it shows the last input that had been used or, if that thing is off, it shows the bouncy egg and "No Signal". If I press the button on the remote that says RECENTS and has a picture of a house on it, which I guess is the "main screen", it maintains the bouncy egg but shows a ribbon of apps on the bottom. Those are my installed apps: Hulu, Prime, Peacock, YouTube, Netflix, Apple TV, and Disney+ happen to be today's recents. Where is this "main screen" where unbidden appvertisements arise?
Mine has been strictly MRU forever. When I look at this video, it does not resemble the software on my LG OLED TV at all. There must be several platforms or generations.
I asked Claude to scan my network and check if LG tv is sending data, it said yes. Some domains were blocked by my router some were not, now Claude blocked all lg related tracking/ad domains on my router.
I like how you've piecemeal blocked the same subdomain 4 times. Will you do the same for the other 4-component subdomains? In fact, I'm curious what it means to "block a domain at a router".
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!
What you want to look for is called "Commercial Signage Display". These are basically large "TV" monitors that are sold to businesses like sports bars.
I used to go on here about Sceptre TVs, because they are relatively cheap and dumb as a brick. Was just shopping for one because of this LG news (wanted to replace my old one from 2014), and while Sceptre still lists them on their website, they tell me to go to Amazon or Walmart to buy one.
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!
TBH only hope at this point is for BOE/PRC panel makers to thoroughly involute and for bare panels + dumb connectors make it to aliexpress, i.e. like we have after market screens for everything else. Buy a screen, buy a case, get your dumb screen. TV manufactures will absolutely not pass up ad monetization, especially Korean ones that can't survive with lower margins.
I have an older LG Smart TV. It was cheap and big. I have never plugged it into my network, never let it on my wifi. When I turn it on, it complains for 5 sec, then displays what's on hdmi1. Works for me.
I think this is the important question. I've been searching, but all I found were deprecated and incomplete projects. If anyone knows some actual current development, even incomplete ones, let us know.
Gamer Nexus videos are hackneyed and their methodology is haphazard. There was no systematic analysis or procedure. There was no structured explanation of the situation. Various risks and capabilities and actual activity has been conflated.
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 so tired of "smart" tech. I don't want my TV, or fridge, or dryer or anything connecting to wifi and bluetooth and having an app to manage settings. It's hard to believe there's demand for any of these terrible "features". The peak of smart tech were watches you could do math on.
Oh no ... I think you do actually want those. It's quite amazing to receive a notification from your dryer that it finished its cycle.
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.
> 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.
It's almost certainly A/B test. Essentially everyone does it.
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.
On several channels I watch, I've noticed the top comment is always along the lines of "who was here when the video title was XYZ" because you know it's going to change.
Have you noticed that has become more common recently? Because I have. It seems over the past 3/4 months, reload and see a new title happens pretty much daily to me (it also seems to work because sometimes it causes me to click the video I didn't click with the old title).
I hate how this has become so normal. It degrades trust when people are fed different versions of the same experience without being informed. How are you supposed to reference something when the title changes without notice? Makes me feel like I’m going crazy sometimes.
Somewhat off topic but also ironic - I recently upgraded my version of Android, and when I opened YouTube for the first time on this video it asked for permission to detect nearby devices. I get why it would need that to cast, but at this point it's not paranoia to think that granting that permission just means it would scan whenever I have the app open and upload the data to YouTube servers for no good reason.
YouTube can cast to TVs on a local subnet and is looking for them. This isn't new. What's new is that Android now warns when an app starts poking around on your LAN.
The crazy part of this is that LG did not fear flat out admitting they do fingerprint the audio of what you watch. I already knew that, but I can't imagine it's common knowledge yet. How long ago was it that that would have been the crazy untrue accusation?
Not defending LG's stance, but hasn't LG always said they do this as part of ACR (automatic content recognition) for the purposes of targeted advertising?
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.
They're not doing it with consent. LG still covertly takes screenshots of everything you display on your screen even when you set every available option that's supposed to stop this:
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:
I just had a crazy idea: Are there any ways we (consumers) could leverage the (bad) DMCA "anti-circumvention" laws?
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.
This „we own the glass“ idea is completely insane. How does an industry degenerate to the point where they consider acceptable to base their business model on owning part of the product they sell you?
Big pivotal moment is probably the DMCA and the DRM it's enabled, it's really eroded the concept of ownership in both software and hardware (via firmware), to the point where we've completely lost all control over the devices we buy.
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.
I don't think "jailbreak and install your own software on your TV" would be common even without the DMCA...and it would still be necessary, nothing would be stopping the companies from writing these stock software systems.
Active regulation of the marketplace is needed.
I brought this up all the time I argued with co-workers I advocated for Open Source because I knew where this was headed and every time it played out the exact way this comic did. Now I just post a link to this comic in discussion about these kind of things. https://xkcd.com/743/
I hate that 2010 is 16 years ago
If you don't have laws, or don't enforce them, people will do whatever they want.
I can remember when this simple point was obvious to almost everyone.
We didn’t have laws but every TV at the dawn of the era came with full schematics and documentation.
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.
yep one of the first rules of any market should be
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.)
I don't think the supplement information you quoted is correct. There are issues, but I don't think it is that prevalent. I subscribe to consumerlab.com, they do regular testing.
(1) is certainly correct, they're poorly understood when it comes to interactions and they almost never have much clinical evidence for claims (thus they say "support"). There are also heavy metal contaminants in all sorts of things, certainly stuff bad for babies.
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.
Lawmakers should have outlawed EULAs the moment they first showed up in software. The idea that someone could sell you a product which is completely broken until you sign away all your rights on a contract you don't get to see before the purchase is the most anti-consumer thing ever invented. Nothing worked like that before software came along.
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.
Great question. Reminds me of social networks, but this is in the physical space. It's pretty hard to wrap my head around it.
If you do it, you have to be more subtle about it. See Apple.
Companies are amoral. If killing people boosted their share price they would issue every employee a machine gun in a heartbeat. The only reason this doesn't happen is it's illegal.
Sony and Microsoft fought to own the living room in console wars
Marketing executives thinking “out of the box” is how. Ethics cannot contain them inside. They have breached the perimeter and now trample everyone for MRR.
I'm not sure how anyone didn't see this coming.
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.
How is it insane. Owning distribution channels has been valuable since the beginning of commerce. It's no different than a newspaper company saying they own the paper so they have the power to print ads in it.
You really aren't paying attention. They weren't talking about distribution channels. They were talking about capturing user data - "we know who's in the LG household. We know which devices are there. We know what you're exposed to on TV and we know how to extend that reach into mobile."
It's not entirely the fault of the industry. Consumer preferences are part of this equation too.
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.
> 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, ...
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.
What do you mean? I don’t recall ever asking manufacturers if I could trade my privacy for a discount. I don’t remember that at all…people will pay whatever the price is, if inflation hasn’t taught that to you, then I’m not sure what to tell you. The other thing inflation showed us, is that manufacturers will absolutely put a price on what they feel is “decent profit.” Cmon dude. Do you not remember how much we paid for eggs?! Which, i think it was found later to be that the manufacturers “manufactured,” “scam-bled eggs.”
You know, I’ve been thinking, I don’t think im being paid enough! Im giving myself a raise. We can do that, right?!
>I don't recall asking
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?
> Companies can develop new products without your advice. In fact consumers often don't know what they want.
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'd urge reading up on revealed preference and product discovery
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.
You're expecting consumers to be able to compare these anti-features that are actively hidden from them. It's like airline seats - airlines get away with continually shrinking them because consumers have no way to actually compare airline seat sizes ahead of time.
This stance is so anti-consumer it's laughable. Are you seriously implying LG doesn't turn a decent profit with their massive empire? There's an issue with capitalism of chasing infinite growth rather than stability, and this is one of the consequences of chasing such growth.
I deeply regret buying my LG. Originally the plan was to never connect it to wifi, and use an external device (chromecast, apple tv, or whatever) but my wife was too excited to try out whatever features. Unfortunately we can't sell the TV for anywhere what we paid for it new (to replace it with a different brand) so we're stuck with it for another ~7-10 years, or whatever the standard TV replacement interval is these days. New "apps" keep showing up on the main screen, which I have to "delete" from the main screen once a month or so (they're not deleted, they're just undeletable apps in some massive library of preinstalled spyware we can fortunately mostly hide). Apparently Sony OLED screens are LG "glass" but without the spyware.
>Apparently Sony OLED screens are LG "glass" but without the spyware.
Without independent verification from someone like GN, I wouldn't trust "we installed rootkits" Sony not to be spying too.
Since Sony TVs run Android at least you can probably use ADB to remove a lot of junk.
... if they're rootable ...
You can actually do a lot without root sometimes. You can revoke permissions and disable apps.
... if they're rootable without the ability for Sony to revoke that rootability ...
I have a Sony A95K and have kept it in basic mode because I have a shield I like to game and stream from. The sony is very minimal and out the way, and after many software updates hasn't offered me any ads, or programs to run even while connected to WiFi.
However if you run Android, you have to accept some level of snooping.
Sony TVs are handled by TCL now, so time will tell how Sony-branded models act (up) in the future.
https://www.tomsguide.com/tvs/sony-just-handed-its-tv-busine...
What’s stopping you from disconnecting it from wifi mow?
You're making a huge assumption that it does not remember wifi passwords and that it would actually honor your request. You're assuming it does not communicate with/via other LG devices owned by neighbors. You're assuming it does not communicate via partner apps on mobile and other partner devices over other protocols. You're assuming they won't eventually simply add cellular modems to circumvent all of this.
> You're making a huge assumption that it does not remember wifi passwords and that it would actually honor your request.
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.
This is also my question, but I suppose the answer could be that we don't trust LG to actually forget the wifi password (and not use it surreptitiously later). You could also change the wifi info, but that might mean changing a whole lot of devices (including wife's and kids).
If someone is supposedly concerned about being recorded, having their privacy invaded etc. but they're too lazy to change the wifi password and deal with the trivial inconvenience of changing it on other household devices then in this case the revealed preference really is that they don't really care.
The gamers nexus thing touched on this.. Apparently some ignore that choice and connect to open wifi or something like Comcasts modem hijacking wifi.
So change the wifi password.
I did bring that up in the second sentence of my two-sentence comment.
The fact you don't do it means you actually don't care at all about your privacy. It takes 5 minutes to bring every member in an household in the living room or kitchen and assist them to change the wifi password on their device.
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.
As others have said, cut off access and/or factory reset it. My LG has never been granted net access, firmware upgrades through USB drives, and streaming through Onn 4K box(w/ a 3rd party launcher) and Apple TV. No surprise ads, apps, or anything.
What do you get from upgrading the firmware? I have a 10 yo smart tv that I simply treated as a dumb tv. Works fine.
I updated my LG C5 firmware via USB and my Nintendo Switch 2 now says “Switch 2” on the home page instead of “Unknown Device”. So that’s nice I guess. Also it seemed to fix something with the 120hz HDR 10:10:10 signal when connected to my PC if I recall correctly that before resulted in poor image quality.
Mostly bug fixes relevant to higher end home theatre setups. Typically bleeding edge stuff where a TV is released before a new HDMI spec is fully baked or whatnot. One of my older OLED panels needed a number of updates to get proper Dolby Vision profile support a few years back.
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.
Excuse me, YOUR LG?
Sony uses Google TV. Doesn't inspire trust as far as spying and data collection goes.
My Sony with Google TV is pretty good in "Basic Mode" without an internet connection though.
Disconnect it from the internet, buy a streaming device, and use the streaming device. It’s really not that complicated.
If you want a bit complicated, you can probably unscrew the back panel and remove the wifi card.
> It’s really not that complicated.
You can do that no the average joe.
Can we really trust it to honor your request to stop using the internet? After hearing them speak on this subject, I have my doubts it will honor your request so quickly and easily.
Buy a cast/apple tv anyway and then reset the LG screen to factory. Is that an option?
Why not reset it
It feels like there must be multiple completely different implementations of LG OLED TVs. I would not say that my LG has a "main screen" of any kind. When I turn mine on it shows the last input that had been used or, if that thing is off, it shows the bouncy egg and "No Signal". If I press the button on the remote that says RECENTS and has a picture of a house on it, which I guess is the "main screen", it maintains the bouncy egg but shows a ribbon of apps on the bottom. Those are my installed apps: Hulu, Prime, Peacock, YouTube, Netflix, Apple TV, and Disney+ happen to be today's recents. Where is this "main screen" where unbidden appvertisements arise?
That is WebOS 6.0 or older. Mine is the same. At some point they stopped updating older models. I think all those released before 2021 or so.
That ribbon got slammed full of advertisements at some point, last I knew.
Mine has been strictly MRU forever. When I look at this video, it does not resemble the software on my LG OLED TV at all. There must be several platforms or generations.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8atmvE0ArA
But how do you know which LG model does what?
I don't. That's the point of my thread. But it's clear to me that not every LG owner is seeing the same things.
Hulu, Prime, Peacock, YouTube, Netflix, Apple TV, and Disney+ happen to be today's recents.
Where do you find the time to post on HN?
Those are just all of the apps I used in 9 years in the order that I last opened them.
I asked Claude to scan my network and check if LG tv is sending data, it said yes. Some domains were blocked by my router some were not, now Claude blocked all lg related tracking/ad domains on my router.
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 like how you've piecemeal blocked the same subdomain 4 times. Will you do the same for the other 4-component subdomains? In fact, I'm curious what it means to "block a domain at a router".
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!
I gave claude ssh access to my router, the router has a block list where you can block domains. It monitored the network traffic from the router.
Who's selling dumb TV's again, Samsung? Who else? I'll happily pay a thousand bucks to not get screwed by my TV.
What you want to look for is called "Commercial Signage Display". These are basically large "TV" monitors that are sold to businesses like sports bars.
On Amazon, you can find a few here: https://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/industrial/18746933011... (which are mostly Samsung).
I used to go on here about Sceptre TVs, because they are relatively cheap and dumb as a brick. Was just shopping for one because of this LG news (wanted to replace my old one from 2014), and while Sceptre still lists them on their website, they tell me to go to Amazon or Walmart to buy one.
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!
TBH only hope at this point is for BOE/PRC panel makers to thoroughly involute and for bare panels + dumb connectors make it to aliexpress, i.e. like we have after market screens for everything else. Buy a screen, buy a case, get your dumb screen. TV manufactures will absolutely not pass up ad monetization, especially Korean ones that can't survive with lower margins.
In Germany I like the "OK" brand from Saturn/Mediamarkt. They're Ok.
The dumb models are very cheap and the picture is faithful due to lack of framerate-doubler and other picture-enhancement shenanigans.
Don’t you worry, mid/high end TVs cost thousands of bucks and have all the same spyware
panelook.com
I have an older LG Smart TV. It was cheap and big. I have never plugged it into my network, never let it on my wifi. When I turn it on, it complains for 5 sec, then displays what's on hdmi1. Works for me.
Is there an open firmware for LGs?
I think this is the important question. I've been searching, but all I found were deprecated and incomplete projects. If anyone knows some actual current development, even incomplete ones, let us know.
Huh. I never considered this. Hacking TVs with firmware would be a great project for LLMs to fuzz.
Heck, it'd be a great project for people too.
Honestly an incredible and educational video. The sheer effort of what went into this is astounding.
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.
Boy, how I would like LG to be sued out of existence.
Gamer Nexus videos are hackneyed and their methodology is haphazard. There was no systematic analysis or procedure. There was no structured explanation of the situation. Various risks and capabilities and actual activity has been conflated.
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.
The hours of video evidence overlaid with network capture and interviews with security researchers and lawyers they released is not enough for you?
I’m curious, what would meet your bar for investigativ journalism if that didn’t?
I'm so tired of "smart" tech. I don't want my TV, or fridge, or dryer or anything connecting to wifi and bluetooth and having an app to manage settings. It's hard to believe there's demand for any of these terrible "features". The peak of smart tech were watches you could do math on.
Oh no ... I think you do actually want those. It's quite amazing to receive a notification from your dryer that it finished its cycle.
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.
> I think you do actually want those.
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.
Question: if these run Android, and are rootable (unknown to me) is there open source software that can provide basic TV functionality?
Original Youtube title of the video I got a few hours ago was: "LG’s Manipulative, Gaslighting Response to GN Report"
Either they changed it for some legal reason, or Youtube allows for A/B testing of multiple titles for engagement.
Youtube allows you to AB test with up to 3 titles and thumbnails.
It's almost certainly A/B test. Essentially everyone does it.
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.
On several channels I watch, I've noticed the top comment is always along the lines of "who was here when the video title was XYZ" because you know it's going to change.
Have you noticed that has become more common recently? Because I have. It seems over the past 3/4 months, reload and see a new title happens pretty much daily to me (it also seems to work because sometimes it causes me to click the video I didn't click with the old title).
It was announced in December and took a while to catch.
https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/393332200/you-can-...
YouTube encourages A/B testing of both titles and thumbnails, but it could be either.
I hate how this has become so normal. It degrades trust when people are fed different versions of the same experience without being informed. How are you supposed to reference something when the title changes without notice? Makes me feel like I’m going crazy sometimes.
Somewhat off topic but also ironic - I recently upgraded my version of Android, and when I opened YouTube for the first time on this video it asked for permission to detect nearby devices. I get why it would need that to cast, but at this point it's not paranoia to think that granting that permission just means it would scan whenever I have the app open and upload the data to YouTube servers for no good reason.
YouTube can cast to TVs on a local subnet and is looking for them. This isn't new. What's new is that Android now warns when an app starts poking around on your LAN.
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49645480
The crazy part of this is that LG did not fear flat out admitting they do fingerprint the audio of what you watch. I already knew that, but I can't imagine it's common knowledge yet. How long ago was it that that would have been the crazy untrue accusation?
ACR is a documented feature so they can't deny that it exists. https://lgads.tv/technology/ https://www.consumerreports.org/electronics/privacy/how-to-t... (note that this is from a year ago)
Not defending LG's stance, but hasn't LG always said they do this as part of ACR (automatic content recognition) for the purposes of targeted advertising?
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.
They're not doing it with consent. LG still covertly takes screenshots of everything you display on your screen even when you set every available option that's supposed to stop this:
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:
https://www.reddit.com/r/webos/s/Vn0jFhKsXO
https://www.reddit.com/r/LGOLED/s/wRFMmQHXHG
We should start whitelisting the domains that is allowed from router. Otherwise, these smart shitty ads companies will never take responsibility.
I just had a crazy idea: Are there any ways we (consumers) could leverage the (bad) DMCA "anti-circumvention" laws?
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.
No.
Now bend over, citizen