Comment by noir_lord
1 month ago
Same they are off my list as well though I generally have less than zero interest in smart devices, I also have a Samsung "smart" TV as well, it asked for Wifi first time I turned it on, said "nope" connected a HDMI to a Fedora box and just use that.
I control what devices in my house connect to the internet.
I never thought I would connect my Hisense to the internet, but it turns out that it runs an MQTT broker and responds to WoL packets, so control via Home Assistant was really easy to setup and is much better than the IR blaster I was using before as response is almost instant and I can get power state so I can sync it to the rest of my living room. Most smart TVs seem to do well behind a DNS black hole, and if you're knowledgeable enough for that then self-hosting a dnsmasq instance on an old box you have lying around and pointing the TV at it is a snap.
Most modern TVs are fully controllable via their HDMI inputs. My shield and gaming systems are perfectly capable of turning my unconnected to the Internet TV on and off.
The shield also has a HA integration.
There's no need to risk an update that puts ads on the TV.
Yep, HDMI-CEC is pretty common these days, Samsung call it Anynet+ for..reasons I guess.
2 replies →
> I control what devices in my house connect to the internet.
That’s certainly admirable, but haven’t tv manufacturers beeen caught connecting to ANY WiFi they find, if it’s open? Amongst other various dark patterns?
Your statement here kind of characterizes it as user error, but the manufacturers are absolutely hostile actors here.
> That’s certainly admirable, but haven’t tv manufacturers beeen caught connecting to ANY WiFi they find, if it’s open?
Not yet. Wouldn't be surprising, but most of the time the problem is "person holding the remote wants it to work, connects it to wifi when it offers, doesn't know that they shouldn't".
This nonsense keeps getting repeated over and over again for years now and I have yet to find a single documented case of it happening. You'd think that with all the attention, someone would've actually documented it by now.
Enough people connect their TV/smart devices willingly to the internet that there is no need for adversarial approaches like this (which are not trivial to set up - they'd need to maintain per-country partnerships with Wi-Fi hotspot providers, pay them and hope the ROI is worth it).
Hmm I thought I had read it on an article posted here at some point, I could be wrong.
1 reply →
Scroll up a bit, we at least have a first-person claim: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45741064
Linux box to Samsung TV here as well. It's awesome, best of both worlds. Stable Debian with Plasma DE in my case.
It's really too bad that Plasma's big picture mode is very WIP these days; once it's stabilized it should be a good option for this kind of thing
I just run it as a desktop and boost scaling.
No one in my family has an issue with it, use a years and years old integrated wireless mouse/touchpad and happy days, everything works as you'd expect, you can use it as a regular PC (surprisingly handy sometimes) and I can adblock the crap out of everything/use unhook to decrappify YT.
I happened to have an "old" Thinkpad (T470P, 7700HQ w/ 32GB RAM and the nvidia GPU) I wasn't using so it's left on all the time, runs the TV and serves movies over HTTP for family to watch via VLC (VLC will happily "stream" over HTTP)
One of those easy to do things where I'll never go back :).
2 replies →
I'm going to sell this idea to Samsung and earn me some Wons:
> When showing that the user has switched to HDMI input, show the full screen information: "HDMI1, brought to you by _____ [insert advertiser here]. Best experienced with Monster HDMI cables. Gold plated for the digital clarity."
Do not create the Torment Nexus.
(<https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/torment-nexus>)
Until they start installing 5G modems in the things anyway. Or put a time bomb in the OS so the TV starts shutting down if it hasn't been connected to the internet after a week.