I got this a few months ago -- 4k, solid brightness, and ok color.
Is it the OMG BEST? no. But I Disabled wifi, and even the channel display.
I use it with an apple TV with CEC on the TV -- I turn on the apple tv, TV turns on straight to apple interface. I turn off from the apple remote, TV turns off.
>Is it the OMG BEST? no. But I Disabled wifi, and even the channel display.
Why not just get a (presumably subsidized) smart TV instead, and skipping the premium? It'd also be not disconnected from the internet, and despite vague HN/reddit speculation that TVs have cell modems in them, that has yet to be confirmed.
I wanted more control and no UI. The commercial ones do that -- I think this was like $150 more than the "samsung smart ui" one... Never seeing a smart TV interface was worth that for me. YMMV.
Idk. I mean I have the equivalent experience on a Samsung TV that has the smarts. I only see the Apple TV interface and control it with the Apple remote, including volume and power.
While I have WiFi disabled on the TV, I do like that I can still hook up a broadcast TV antenna and have the TV scan for channels and all that, which Apple TV can’t do
I have a TCL Roku TV that I use disconnected and with an Apple TV. It still has annoyances here and there, like pausing for three seconds or so on every startup before it switches inputs. I’d pay a mild premium to not have that.
I've noticed that older TCLs are a bit laggier than Samsung smart tvs. Nice to have one that actually has a fast response to the remote. There was an app that was super slow on it- one of the less popular streaming apps. Although when the firmware updated, it might have erased the entire account and started anew. The Google Play store manages the apps, so I would imagine they get purged when they aren't up to the latest requirements. I am not sure how long the Android/Google OS version would get supports though).
If you do this, connect it to the internet at least once, because most smart TVs ship with missing features that aren't activated until you do a firmware update.
Hmm generally I want the smart tv to have as few features as possible, ideally never ever even show me their "home / launcher".
Kinda on the opposite recommendation that the fw it shipped with had to meet SOME minimally functional bar and every update after that is an opportunity to make it worse.
Were I an enterprising enshittificator, I would certainly make sure to force being online as a prerequisite for basic functionality for any TV that has ever been seen online since that proves that it's capable of connecting. So.. be careful upgrading the shitware, you might get more functionality that you've bargained for. Functionality that you can't downgrade because you don't own the TV.
I haven't seen an open network around me or anywhere I go in years. Even places like gyms, coffee shops, and restaurants require passwords typically.
I think it's much more likely TVs make deals with cell phone companies and offer hardware that only works with their cellular service. Many pay more than $100 a month on their phone bill to pay off a phone. People might accept another $20 or so for a large screen TV with bundled apps-costs can be kept down for the carrier with ads and tracking that can't be bypasssed as it will use the carrier's network connection.
I use HDMI on my Smart TV and just disabled wifi because I realized it was downloading more than half my bandwidth (a small amount, in fact). It could have been doing an update but I found no reason to leave it on. Occasionally I'll use YT or Prime since it doesn't have to be tethered to a PC, but overall it's nicer as a monitor than a streaming app.
Not that I believe it is used, but an ethernet connection can actually ride over HDMI. Possible to share your network connection by plugging in a display.
I am curious if PoE (Power over ethernet) ever worked on HDMI. I know there is some minimal data sent, but would be hesitant to leave an HDMI cable plugged in if it has any Ethernet or power capabilities. I wouldn't be surprised the feature was dropped due to general security concerns (not that it's a useless feature- in fact I would prefer that in some cases, although newer monitors can also be powered by USB-C, negating some of that need.
We keep our TV dumb, have a laptop behind it running Kubuntu Linux. Stream in everything in Chrome. Use an Air Mouse and wireless keyboard sometimes. Works great.
This would be my dream tv. I like the matte look of the Frame a lot (I have one), but it's not at all worth the being subjected to the terrible Samsung software experience
The 2020 and 2021 versions of The Frame had direct API access for updating artwork. Newer versions apparently have access through cloud services, but I haven't tried it yet.
Never ever connect your "Smart"-TV to your network, or if you have an incurable impulse to then make sure it's on a firewalled gateway-less VLAN. Take the money you save buying the thing (compared to what a profitable "dumb" version would cost) and buy a surplus corporate mini-workstation system, and slap LibreELEC/Kodi or whatever on it, and use that device as your "smart" device. No good for you can ever come from bringing the TV onto the internet... ever!
This, but LibreELEC or other Kodi distributions suck. They are too limited. Until recently, the best solution was to run a full Linux DE, but now there is Plasma Bigscreen[0] for that. This is basically a DE optimized for couch use with a remote. You can run Kodi as an app, but also stream from a browser, or play games with Steam, etc.
An airmouse remote, ideally with a keyboard on the back, works very well. It's particularly useful if you want to run "apps" that that not specifically designed for ten-foot use, and expect mouse or keyboard input.
Why not ever subscribe? I mean, yeah, subscriptions are getting pricey these days, but you can subscribe to one network, watch the things you want, then cancel and go to another.
There's plenty you can trash Amazon for, but at least on Prime Video, you can subscribe to the other services through them, watch on any browser, and reliably cancel easily when you're done.
I've heard this wisdom before, usually with an apple TV positioned as the alternative, but I've had that setup before and didn't enjoy having to use 2 remotes instead of one.
A better solution would be to root the damn TV and neuter its spyware/adware crap.
Put the TV remote in a drawer and only use the Apple TV remote. With CEC enabled, that one remote will control power and volume for the TV and any connected audio devices. It'll also switch to the proper input when the Apple TV is turned on.
I only use one remote. The tv remote. I just enable HDMI-CEC
I keep the Apple TV remote around for extremely rare situations where that doesn’t work but even then, my cell phone has a built in Apple TV remote as well, which makes it even less necessary
The only time mine were ever connected to the internet was to update the software, and for that the easiest thing I thought was to host a temporary wifi hotspot (using a phone).
I've always have a deep, instinctive revulsion for smart TVs, but every year I read of some new mandmade horrors beyond comprehension, and it escalates by a few more points.
This. The only "smart" things allowed in my home are those under my control. This means devices that work over Zigbee, or that that run free firmware natively (like ESP32-based devices), or that can be hacked to run free firmware. Everything is orchestrated via Home Assistant and in its own VLAN. It's surprising how far you can get. For example, I recently set up a voice assistant by wiring together a few Home Assistant components and a small local LLM (Qwen 4B). Response times are basically on par with commercial solutions like Alexa, and all processing is done locally.
The experience with this is so much better. Hacking most Tuya based devices has become extremely easy when you use https://docs.libretiny.eu/ Replacing MyQ with ratgdo was one of the best IoT decisions I have ever made.
If you could anonymously proxy from anywhere to anywhere else, the internet would be region-lock-free and anonymous again, just like it was to support it's boom in 1999.
Good on these guys I say. When it becomes normalized, we can integrate these 'privacy proxies' into desktop and mobile OS's too.
Just browsing the list of apps raises eyebrows for even the most non-tech audiences. 99% of it is spam, with maybe 1% being well known apps like YouTube.
The rest are weird IPTV Players, Wallpaper apps. It feels like a portal into 2009 apps, but its not.
2009 indeed. Their app store was an absolute cesspit even in the early, pre-WebOS days and it hasn't changed much since, like, who would install any of this and why? Even the "official" app selection isn't the best. OS aside, they are pretty good TVs and quite popular, so I find this mind-boggling.
In the article they mentioned that Amazon and Roku block apps from using these SDK’s, and specifically after Roku recently made a change to disallow this kind of thing, many of the affected apps were withdrawn from the Roku app store. The implication is that those other smart TVs don’t have the same third-party apps because these apps were specifically created to act as a foothold for these residential proxy networks.
Basically all smart TVs do that. It is how they provide "contextual" features based on the content you're watching, like the names of the actors visible on screen.
This turned out to be more ethical than I thought. I'd thought there wasn't any consent at all, or the actual mention of proxying was buried in a 20 page EULA.
Yeah, this does seem somewhat reasonable. I get that most users will probably accept it without thinking twice, but if you’re going to do something like this, this is at least a fairly upfront and consenting way of doing it. For the TV platforms where this isn’t allowed, you have to wonder if apps are still doing it but just completely secretly, and trying to hide their tracks as well.
I cannot think of a legitimate purpose for residential proxies existing. They take advantage of people who don't understand what they're being asked to give "consent" to, and then offer up those people's internet connections to whatever actor wants to abuse it, including malware authors, aggressive scrapers, and anyone with ill intent.
Why do you think this rampant abuse is a good thing? What benefit does this provide to society?
Why? The only thing that's vaguely objectionable is the fact the consent screen's wording of "download public web data from the internet" omits important information on what's actually happening and the associated risks. Otherwise I'm not sure how you can come up with a principled justification of the ban beyond just "AI scrapers bad" or "hiding identity". Tor relays and VPNs are basically doing the same thing, except with clearer disclosure about what actually goes on.
Does there need to be a principled justification beyond that? I used to be on the side of the traffic, as in, it does not matter where traffic originates as long as it's not abusive. But the fact is that too many scrapers exist which are, in fact, bad. Their behavior is bad, their programming is bad, and they result in way too high costs for free infrastructure, thus they are morally bad.
I expect AT&T and Comcast to offer a residential proxy service any day now.
From the content hosting side (getting reamed by scrapers overloading infrastructure), the problem is that we have to be able to set "reasonable" ratelimits to share finite network uplink and server cpu resources between all of our real users and these scrapers.
When you can identify the nature of the traffic (quickly in realtime, based on simple deterministic rules), you can protect the resources: you can rate/concurrency -limit the AI scrapers in the name of saving resources for the real humans, effectively putting the scrapers in a lower priority band (which is how it generally worked for search engine scrapers before!).
The problem is they're using resiproxies to disperse and whitewash their traffic, making it extremely difficult to tell their requests apart from the legitimate human requests. They're basically lying to us about the origin, and thus denying us the ability to put them in a lower priority band than humans.
They may scrape us at, say, 25K reqs/second, but it's coming from 50K random residential eyeball IPs at an average rate of only 0.5 reqs/second/IP, and then they're intentionally lying with the UA and headers and other fingerprint details as best they can to "blend in" with the humans so that we can't differentiate.
Let's do an analogy: Imagine if there was a neighborhood grocery store you and all your neighbors rely on for food. It's cheap because they keep their margins low, and more importantly the next store down the road is like 50 miles further away. That store 50 miles down the road also charges double the price. Now they've decided to play arbitrage: they load up 100 employees in the back of an air conditioned semi, clothe them to look like local shoppers, park it 3 blocks from your neighborhood store hidden inside a fenced property, and have them all go in and buy out all the inventory in the store over the course of a couple hours. The store just looks like it's having a great sales day at first. All these customers waiting in line, each getting just a few things at a time. But two hours later, the store shelves are empty, the semi is loaded up, and they're headed 50 miles back to double the price and sell it to someone else. You go in to buy some veggies to cook dinner and there's nothing to buy.
We've been playing this game with AI scrapers and resiproxies for way too long, and someone needs to hold them accountable for their fraud.
All the arguments you made applies to VPNs or tor as well. I'm sure rightsholders would be very happy if VPNs are banned, because that gets rid of one avenue for pirating with impunity. Same goes with every ad network ever, which has to fight click fraud.
This is why I don't run a tor endpoint; possibly objectionable traffic I don't control sourced from my network. All it takes is one horrible request to come from your IP and you're on a list
But if these are popular apps / APIs, then the number of affected households is significant. Authorities / investigators will have to treat IPs as likely proxies and not the geolocation of the human initiating the request.
I absolutely adore my 2018 jailbroken LG OLED, although it pains me that everything I love about this TV are features the manufacturer actively discourages and wishes I never had access to.
It's not Smart TV apps specifically, it's all free apps. They have to monetize those somehow, don't they? And you get upset when you see ads, don't you?
If you're not paying for the product, you are the product.
If you are paying for the product, you're still the product.
Indeed, if you're a paying customer, there's more incentive to push ads at you, not less, since you obviously have more money to spend. The only winning move is not to p(l)ay.
Yes and no. I understand that Youtube needs to generate revenue, has staff to pay, etc. About a decade ago, I got an occasional 10 second commercial at the start of a clip, and I could live with that. But Youtube pushed me too far when it started playing two consecutive commercials at regular intervals that cannot be skipped, and I now use uBlock or VacuumTube on all my devices.
Not only this, it also enables sneaker/pokemon/5090 scalping, Chinese/Russian using ChatGPT/Claude. A residential IP in the US is very valuable elsewhere.
I have a 2018 Samsung QLED SmartTV, I use Pihole to block data collection and since it has Google DNS hardcoded in it, I use OPNSense Firewall rules to enforce any DNS request to Pihole.
My TV has only one AD that no longer shows for years now, LG is ADs all over the place. My home setup allows me to have a smartTV without compromises it.
Since it runs TizenOS, I can use my Linux PC to install remove apps from it like installing Jellyfin App so I do not depend on Samsung releasing it to the app store.
I just implemented bot and crawler detection as well as ASN based blocking for our website, because I’ve seen a massive rise in scraping coming from VPNs and other networks that mix legit and illegitimate traffic to our service. My theory is that small companies are scraping the shit out of everything and selling results to llm creators. It’s going to be interesting to see this expand into residential internet providers through holes like this… wild new world!
Oh, I'm sure there's all sorts of illicit use as well. But scraping is what the network is being actively marketed for, and it probably amounts to most of their traffic by volume.
I have a few LG OLED tv's. I do not ever connect them to the internet - I just treat them as dumb hdmi/dp displays. One is driven by an Apple TV, the other is connected to a Linux gaming pc. Haven't had any issues at all.
I'm not sure the adtech is even enough to subsidize the price in a meaningful way.
Google’s global ad revenue equates to roughly $61 per user per year, most TV manufacturers would be unable to extract that much out per user, even with crazy levels of tracking, ads, etc.
I haven't used a modern TV in a very long time, but I can't imagine LG is extracting over $20 in ad revenue/data revenue per year. It might move the needle on <$500 displays, but when LG displays costing over $5,000 still have this spyware its hard to defend.
What makes you think LG would not be hitting the Google numbers (Instagram ad-free is ~$6 / month for example, roughly the same ballpark)? A device that's connected to a high speed internet connection, often allowed to do background tasks and being able to track all data being consumed through it (Streaming services, gaming etc.) is extremely valuable.
Yes, that's kind of the point. If you have the choice between $500 black rectangle and $1000 black rectangle where the only difference is some boring privacy policy details most people will go with option 1.
The companies that make these TVs love that we are this point since they can now take away the subsidy, and you also coincidentally now have no option to buy a non-smart TV, so they are now collecting $ from both the purchase and from the ads. Tada! Grossness all around.
It’s exhausting. It’s like every article is written by the same author and that author is also your coworker and personal assistant and also moonlights as Brian, a waiter at Chotchkie’s.
Exactly. This is like that Sci fi show where the whole world is taken over by an alien organism and everyone you meet is basically the same one person. The AI is also off-puttingly nice, just like the alien.
Yeah, wading through an endless stream of AI slop articles posted here (and elsewhere like on reddit) is exhausting. I suspect I won't be coming here as often anymore, which is a shame, because I used to find this site very informative and engaging.
Though we've always had our fair share of marketing and growth hack posts this turn with AI is just a different level of frustrating. The dead internet theory is unfortunately very real.
I'll get on my high horse and say you can get solid "DID/Commercial" TVs for not that much more: https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1788343-REG/samsung_q...
I got this a few months ago -- 4k, solid brightness, and ok color.
Is it the OMG BEST? no. But I Disabled wifi, and even the channel display.
I use it with an apple TV with CEC on the TV -- I turn on the apple tv, TV turns on straight to apple interface. I turn off from the apple remote, TV turns off.
It's effectively "an apple TV" -- I'm happy.
>Is it the OMG BEST? no. But I Disabled wifi, and even the channel display.
Why not just get a (presumably subsidized) smart TV instead, and skipping the premium? It'd also be not disconnected from the internet, and despite vague HN/reddit speculation that TVs have cell modems in them, that has yet to be confirmed.
I wanted more control and no UI. The commercial ones do that -- I think this was like $150 more than the "samsung smart ui" one... Never seeing a smart TV interface was worth that for me. YMMV.
Idk. I mean I have the equivalent experience on a Samsung TV that has the smarts. I only see the Apple TV interface and control it with the Apple remote, including volume and power.
While I have WiFi disabled on the TV, I do like that I can still hook up a broadcast TV antenna and have the TV scan for channels and all that, which Apple TV can’t do
I have a TCL Roku TV that I use disconnected and with an Apple TV. It still has annoyances here and there, like pausing for three seconds or so on every startup before it switches inputs. I’d pay a mild premium to not have that.
I've noticed that older TCLs are a bit laggier than Samsung smart tvs. Nice to have one that actually has a fast response to the remote. There was an app that was super slow on it- one of the less popular streaming apps. Although when the firmware updated, it might have erased the entire account and started anew. The Google Play store manages the apps, so I would imagine they get purged when they aren't up to the latest requirements. I am not sure how long the Android/Google OS version would get supports though).
Same. Our data is worth a lot I guess (not the whole differential but):
$627 - commercial display
~$200 - comparable invasive options
If you do this, connect it to the internet at least once, because most smart TVs ship with missing features that aren't activated until you do a firmware update.
Hmm generally I want the smart tv to have as few features as possible, ideally never ever even show me their "home / launcher".
Kinda on the opposite recommendation that the fw it shipped with had to meet SOME minimally functional bar and every update after that is an opportunity to make it worse.
Were I an enterprising enshittificator, I would certainly make sure to force being online as a prerequisite for basic functionality for any TV that has ever been seen online since that proves that it's capable of connecting. So.. be careful upgrading the shitware, you might get more functionality that you've bargained for. Functionality that you can't downgrade because you don't own the TV.
These days a lot of them will nag you if you don't connect them to the internet and only use them as a dumb display.
Some instead assert TVs might connect to the first open network available, like if a neighbor briefly opened a hotspot, which sounds more believable.
I haven't seen an open network around me or anywhere I go in years. Even places like gyms, coffee shops, and restaurants require passwords typically.
I think it's much more likely TVs make deals with cell phone companies and offer hardware that only works with their cellular service. Many pay more than $100 a month on their phone bill to pay off a phone. People might accept another $20 or so for a large screen TV with bundled apps-costs can be kept down for the carrier with ads and tracking that can't be bypasssed as it will use the carrier's network connection.
Both theories would be easily testable. The danger is also much smaller if it's not on your Wi-Fi regardless.
Not really. There’s zero reason that a manufacturer wouldn’t just program it to wait several months before attempting to connect to open networks.
I use HDMI on my Smart TV and just disabled wifi because I realized it was downloading more than half my bandwidth (a small amount, in fact). It could have been doing an update but I found no reason to leave it on. Occasionally I'll use YT or Prime since it doesn't have to be tethered to a PC, but overall it's nicer as a monitor than a streaming app.
Not that I believe it is used, but an ethernet connection can actually ride over HDMI. Possible to share your network connection by plugging in a display.
I believe that was eventually dropped from the standard due to disuse, but I might be mistaken.
I am curious if PoE (Power over ethernet) ever worked on HDMI. I know there is some minimal data sent, but would be hesitant to leave an HDMI cable plugged in if it has any Ethernet or power capabilities. I wouldn't be surprised the feature was dropped due to general security concerns (not that it's a useless feature- in fact I would prefer that in some cases, although newer monitors can also be powered by USB-C, negating some of that need.
I don't think you can use the ones at wal-mart without an internet connection of some kind
We keep our TV dumb, have a laptop behind it running Kubuntu Linux. Stream in everything in Chrome. Use an Air Mouse and wireless keyboard sometimes. Works great.
That looks like The Frame from Samsung. Does it have a matte surface? What version of Tizen is it running? Does it have API access?
This would be my dream tv. I like the matte look of the Frame a lot (I have one), but it's not at all worth the being subjected to the terrible Samsung software experience
The 2020 and 2021 versions of The Frame had direct API access for updating artwork. Newer versions apparently have access through cloud services, but I haven't tried it yet.
- https://github.com/ow/samsung-frame-art (older models)
- https://github.com/TheFab21/ha-samsungtv-smart (newer models)
Begs the question - why has apple never come out with a TV.
Why should they? It’s an absolute cutthroat business with next to no profit margin.
All you gotta do is add an Apple TV and you got everything they would give you. And they make nice margins.
Apple seems to have next to no interest in making displays at all. We are lucky whenever a new one gets announced.
What's the current OLED recommendation today?
Last time I looked, I couldn't find an OLED commercial display like that.
Nitpick, hobby horse, not high horse.
Never ever connect your "Smart"-TV to your network, or if you have an incurable impulse to then make sure it's on a firewalled gateway-less VLAN. Take the money you save buying the thing (compared to what a profitable "dumb" version would cost) and buy a surplus corporate mini-workstation system, and slap LibreELEC/Kodi or whatever on it, and use that device as your "smart" device. No good for you can ever come from bringing the TV onto the internet... ever!
(Also: never paypig, never subscribe!)
This, but LibreELEC or other Kodi distributions suck. They are too limited. Until recently, the best solution was to run a full Linux DE, but now there is Plasma Bigscreen[0] for that. This is basically a DE optimized for couch use with a remote. You can run Kodi as an app, but also stream from a browser, or play games with Steam, etc.
[0] https://plasma-bigscreen.org/
This looks great, it just needs some hardware to run on with a nice remote. Does any hardware like that exist?
An airmouse remote, ideally with a keyboard on the back, works very well. It's particularly useful if you want to run "apps" that that not specifically designed for ten-foot use, and expect mouse or keyboard input.
An Xbox/PlayStation controller is cheap and high quality.
Why not ever subscribe? I mean, yeah, subscriptions are getting pricey these days, but you can subscribe to one network, watch the things you want, then cancel and go to another.
There's plenty you can trash Amazon for, but at least on Prime Video, you can subscribe to the other services through them, watch on any browser, and reliably cancel easily when you're done.
I've heard this wisdom before, usually with an apple TV positioned as the alternative, but I've had that setup before and didn't enjoy having to use 2 remotes instead of one.
A better solution would be to root the damn TV and neuter its spyware/adware crap.
Put the TV remote in a drawer and only use the Apple TV remote. With CEC enabled, that one remote will control power and volume for the TV and any connected audio devices. It'll also switch to the proper input when the Apple TV is turned on.
I only use one remote. The tv remote. I just enable HDMI-CEC
I keep the Apple TV remote around for extremely rare situations where that doesn’t work but even then, my cell phone has a built in Apple TV remote as well, which makes it even less necessary
> A better solution would be to root the damn TV and neuter its spyware/adware crap.
That sounds like a lot of work. I don't want to sign up to this much work for every product I own that I want an iota of control over.
So I would argue if this is "better" by any stretch of the word
this is a solved problem on basically any modern tv: HDMI-CEC lets your appletv control your tv without using the tv remote.
Having 2 remotes is so much easier than trying to flash custom firmware on the TV
You don't necessarily have to flash a custom firmware. Rooting the TV and killing the ad processes is usually sufficient.
why were you using 2 remotes? did you have other systems attached to the television, such as a game console, or cable?
the Apple TV provides hdmi cec, which should control your television through the hdmi cable.
The only time mine were ever connected to the internet was to update the software, and for that the easiest thing I thought was to host a temporary wifi hotspot (using a phone).
My concern is your telemetry may have been stored up to that point, then forwarded upon connecting.
Surely they will just make it mandatory, at some point?
I remember seeing reports a few years ago about some TV that would constantly complain if it wasn’t connected. I don’t know what brand it was.
I've always have a deep, instinctive revulsion for smart TVs, but every year I read of some new mandmade horrors beyond comprehension, and it escalates by a few more points.
Same, but for "smart" anything in the home that requires an internet connection and does not let me set it up or run it LAN only.
People forget the reasons TVs got cheaper is because smart TVs are heavily subsidized with ads and your watch data.
I have the most "low tech" home of any of my peers, intentionally.
This. The only "smart" things allowed in my home are those under my control. This means devices that work over Zigbee, or that that run free firmware natively (like ESP32-based devices), or that can be hacked to run free firmware. Everything is orchestrated via Home Assistant and in its own VLAN. It's surprising how far you can get. For example, I recently set up a voice assistant by wiring together a few Home Assistant components and a small local LLM (Qwen 4B). Response times are basically on par with commercial solutions like Alexa, and all processing is done locally.
The experience with this is so much better. Hacking most Tuya based devices has become extremely easy when you use https://docs.libretiny.eu/ Replacing MyQ with ratgdo was one of the best IoT decisions I have ever made.
Coming for PC monitors as well, LG again leading the charge.. see "smart gaming monitor", same BS.
This is a good thing.
If you could anonymously proxy from anywhere to anywhere else, the internet would be region-lock-free and anonymous again, just like it was to support it's boom in 1999.
Good on these guys I say. When it becomes normalized, we can integrate these 'privacy proxies' into desktop and mobile OS's too.
I think it’s worth emphasizing that based on the article, those are third party apps, not first party LG apps.
Based on the headline I thought it’s the built-in apps.
LG runs its own spyware already (content recognition).
This does raise the question if other Smart TVs with the same third party apps have the same issue.
The LG WebOS Store is a different beast.
Just browsing the list of apps raises eyebrows for even the most non-tech audiences. 99% of it is spam, with maybe 1% being well known apps like YouTube.
The rest are weird IPTV Players, Wallpaper apps. It feels like a portal into 2009 apps, but its not.
2009 indeed. Their app store was an absolute cesspit even in the early, pre-WebOS days and it hasn't changed much since, like, who would install any of this and why? Even the "official" app selection isn't the best. OS aside, they are pretty good TVs and quite popular, so I find this mind-boggling.
In the article they mentioned that Amazon and Roku block apps from using these SDK’s, and specifically after Roku recently made a change to disallow this kind of thing, many of the affected apps were withdrawn from the Roku app store. The implication is that those other smart TVs don’t have the same third-party apps because these apps were specifically created to act as a foothold for these residential proxy networks.
Vizio was caught taking screen grabs and sending them to a server a few years ago.
Basically all smart TVs do that. It is how they provide "contextual" features based on the content you're watching, like the names of the actors visible on screen.
Not really. They do it to sell to advertisers what you are watching
"Publishes with the most proxy flagged apps"
1. Desoline (based in Netanya (Israel)
2. Bright Data (based in Israel)
Interesting.
This turned out to be more ethical than I thought. I'd thought there wasn't any consent at all, or the actual mention of proxying was buried in a 20 page EULA.
Yeah, this does seem somewhat reasonable. I get that most users will probably accept it without thinking twice, but if you’re going to do something like this, this is at least a fairly upfront and consenting way of doing it. For the TV platforms where this isn’t allowed, you have to wonder if apps are still doing it but just completely secretly, and trying to hide their tracks as well.
I think the person you were responding to was being sarcastic.
I didn't read it that way. "Please allow us to use your IP to download data" is way more consenty than I thought these apps would get.
This needs to be illegal.
What would be illegal about it?
I cannot think of a legitimate purpose for residential proxies existing. They take advantage of people who don't understand what they're being asked to give "consent" to, and then offer up those people's internet connections to whatever actor wants to abuse it, including malware authors, aggressive scrapers, and anyone with ill intent.
Why do you think this rampant abuse is a good thing? What benefit does this provide to society?
Also these proxies are against the terms of service of every ISP.
Why? The only thing that's vaguely objectionable is the fact the consent screen's wording of "download public web data from the internet" omits important information on what's actually happening and the associated risks. Otherwise I'm not sure how you can come up with a principled justification of the ban beyond just "AI scrapers bad" or "hiding identity". Tor relays and VPNs are basically doing the same thing, except with clearer disclosure about what actually goes on.
Does there need to be a principled justification beyond that? I used to be on the side of the traffic, as in, it does not matter where traffic originates as long as it's not abusive. But the fact is that too many scrapers exist which are, in fact, bad. Their behavior is bad, their programming is bad, and they result in way too high costs for free infrastructure, thus they are morally bad.
I expect AT&T and Comcast to offer a residential proxy service any day now.
From the content hosting side (getting reamed by scrapers overloading infrastructure), the problem is that we have to be able to set "reasonable" ratelimits to share finite network uplink and server cpu resources between all of our real users and these scrapers.
When you can identify the nature of the traffic (quickly in realtime, based on simple deterministic rules), you can protect the resources: you can rate/concurrency -limit the AI scrapers in the name of saving resources for the real humans, effectively putting the scrapers in a lower priority band (which is how it generally worked for search engine scrapers before!).
The problem is they're using resiproxies to disperse and whitewash their traffic, making it extremely difficult to tell their requests apart from the legitimate human requests. They're basically lying to us about the origin, and thus denying us the ability to put them in a lower priority band than humans.
They may scrape us at, say, 25K reqs/second, but it's coming from 50K random residential eyeball IPs at an average rate of only 0.5 reqs/second/IP, and then they're intentionally lying with the UA and headers and other fingerprint details as best they can to "blend in" with the humans so that we can't differentiate.
Let's do an analogy: Imagine if there was a neighborhood grocery store you and all your neighbors rely on for food. It's cheap because they keep their margins low, and more importantly the next store down the road is like 50 miles further away. That store 50 miles down the road also charges double the price. Now they've decided to play arbitrage: they load up 100 employees in the back of an air conditioned semi, clothe them to look like local shoppers, park it 3 blocks from your neighborhood store hidden inside a fenced property, and have them all go in and buy out all the inventory in the store over the course of a couple hours. The store just looks like it's having a great sales day at first. All these customers waiting in line, each getting just a few things at a time. But two hours later, the store shelves are empty, the semi is loaded up, and they're headed 50 miles back to double the price and sell it to someone else. You go in to buy some veggies to cook dinner and there's nothing to buy.
We've been playing this game with AI scrapers and resiproxies for way too long, and someone needs to hold them accountable for their fraud.
All the arguments you made applies to VPNs or tor as well. I'm sure rightsholders would be very happy if VPNs are banned, because that gets rid of one avenue for pirating with impunity. Same goes with every ad network ever, which has to fight click fraud.
How exactly does that also apply to VPN or Tor?
Who's using VPNs and Tor to blend in their automated scraping traffic with real human traffic?
Who's using multiple VPNs or Tor exit nodes to avoid rate limits?
No one, but I would have no problem with that being illegal too.
This is why I don't run a tor endpoint; possibly objectionable traffic I don't control sourced from my network. All it takes is one horrible request to come from your IP and you're on a list
Perhaps.
But if these are popular apps / APIs, then the number of affected households is significant. Authorities / investigators will have to treat IPs as likely proxies and not the geolocation of the human initiating the request.
I absolutely adore my 2018 jailbroken LG OLED, although it pains me that everything I love about this TV are features the manufacturer actively discourages and wishes I never had access to.
It's not Smart TV apps specifically, it's all free apps. They have to monetize those somehow, don't they? And you get upset when you see ads, don't you?
Basically it's either this or pay for your apps.
Not sure if this is ironic, but I know it's possible for apps to exist without being monetized. I'm using Paint.net right now.
Not ironic at all, and you want apps you use to be monetized because otherwise there's no incentive to support them. I feel like that's common sense.
To parody the Arthur quote [1]
Do you really think somebody would do that? Just go write apps for the love of programming and not to make money?
[1] https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRGIV3u...
Yes it's possible for the apps to exist but not the apps programmers if they can't make money to eat
> Basically it's either this or pay for your apps.
And then paid apps show you ads and monetize anyway.
If you're not paying for the product, you are the product.
If you are paying for the product, you're still the product.
Indeed, if you're a paying customer, there's more incentive to push ads at you, not less, since you obviously have more money to spend. The only winning move is not to p(l)ay.
> And you get upset when you see ads, don't you?
Yes and no. I understand that Youtube needs to generate revenue, has staff to pay, etc. About a decade ago, I got an occasional 10 second commercial at the start of a clip, and I could live with that. But Youtube pushed me too far when it started playing two consecutive commercials at regular intervals that cannot be skipped, and I now use uBlock or VacuumTube on all my devices.
I solved that by paying for premium.
I pay for apps whenever possible, in some cases it just isn't. Also, you have to trust that paid apps aren't also doing this shit.
Well, that's how data for training LLMs is scraped.
Not only this, it also enables sneaker/pokemon/5090 scalping, Chinese/Russian using ChatGPT/Claude. A residential IP in the US is very valuable elsewhere.
And price comparison sites big companies don't like since they want to price discriminate. There are positives to it.
I have a 2018 Samsung QLED SmartTV, I use Pihole to block data collection and since it has Google DNS hardcoded in it, I use OPNSense Firewall rules to enforce any DNS request to Pihole.
My TV has only one AD that no longer shows for years now, LG is ADs all over the place. My home setup allows me to have a smartTV without compromises it.
Since it runs TizenOS, I can use my Linux PC to install remove apps from it like installing Jellyfin App so I do not depend on Samsung releasing it to the app store.
TV never connected to internet, streaming box, and streaming box on its own isolated vlan (or guest network)
I just implemented bot and crawler detection as well as ASN based blocking for our website, because I’ve seen a massive rise in scraping coming from VPNs and other networks that mix legit and illegitimate traffic to our service. My theory is that small companies are scraping the shit out of everything and selling results to llm creators. It’s going to be interesting to see this expand into residential internet providers through holes like this… wild new world!
What portion of Fox's acquisition thesis for Roku was activating residential proxies (distributed AI crawling!) across all the units?
Is bypassing scraping blocks the main purpose of these residential proxy networks?
Yes. For instance, Bright Data describes itself, on its home page, as the "all in one platform for proxies and web scraping".
From the article it can be used by botnets as well, linking to https://krebsonsecurity.com/2026/01/the-kimwolf-botnet-is-st...
Oh, I'm sure there's all sorts of illicit use as well. But scraping is what the network is being actively marketed for, and it probably amounts to most of their traffic by volume.
So is there a residential proxy blacklist I can run on my firewall? Any action I can take as an admin to put a stop to this?
Has anyone reversed their SDKs to run a swarm that captures enough traffic to see what requests are actually getting made?
It'll be HTTPS but you might be able to know the website, if it proxies DNS or doesn't use ESNI.
I have my smart tv on a separate router and it's powered off most of the time. An accident of wiring.
this is a way smaller deal than acr. i personally don’t connect my smart tv to my network and use an apple tv instead
I have a few LG OLED tv's. I do not ever connect them to the internet - I just treat them as dumb hdmi/dp displays. One is driven by an Apple TV, the other is connected to a Linux gaming pc. Haven't had any issues at all.
Maybe Valve will make a TV next
Palmer Luckey said he might make a ModRetro TV.
I imagine most smart TVs don't support multitasking or apps staying alive in the background, hopefully?
The consent screens say that they "may continue running in the background after you close the app".
Why would you imagine that? Which non-multitasking OS do you think these devices are based on?
Specific to LG tvs:
https://webostv.developer.lge.com/develop/getting-started/ap...
Thank you. One of the app states mentioned is:
And the next sentence says this:
> The app can be suspended for a short time
Short time, short lived, not long running.
That doesn't make it okay obviously, just means the blast radius is limited.
For example OS running on Amazon fire stick 4K kills your background processes after ~20 minutes.
Walked past a TV and it was advertising a security guard.
Why does a TV need security software?
Because most people (HN is not a representative sample set) are not willing to pay the real price of a TV if it wouldn't be subsidized by adtech.
TVs were unsubsidized by ad tech up until 10 years ago, and I’m pretty sure most people bought TVs back then.
It's been a very long time since they were given an option.
I'm not sure the adtech is even enough to subsidize the price in a meaningful way.
Google’s global ad revenue equates to roughly $61 per user per year, most TV manufacturers would be unable to extract that much out per user, even with crazy levels of tracking, ads, etc.
I haven't used a modern TV in a very long time, but I can't imagine LG is extracting over $20 in ad revenue/data revenue per year. It might move the needle on <$500 displays, but when LG displays costing over $5,000 still have this spyware its hard to defend.
What makes you think LG would not be hitting the Google numbers (Instagram ad-free is ~$6 / month for example, roughly the same ballpark)? A device that's connected to a high speed internet connection, often allowed to do background tasks and being able to track all data being consumed through it (Streaming services, gaming etc.) is extremely valuable.
Indeed, many of these TVs serve ads by default on their screensavers and home screens.
Aren't consumer class dumb TVs gone?
Yes, that's kind of the point. If you have the choice between $500 black rectangle and $1000 black rectangle where the only difference is some boring privacy policy details most people will go with option 1.
The companies that make these TVs love that we are this point since they can now take away the subsidy, and you also coincidentally now have no option to buy a non-smart TV, so they are now collecting $ from both the purchase and from the ads. Tada! Grossness all around.
Windows needs antivirus so why wouldn't a TV? Unfortunately there's a lot of placebo software out there.
12 minute article.
70% AI.
The only content not flagged?
Copy and pasted PR comments.
Invisible Unicode characters, triads, unnecessary markdown.
Good work, obviated by bloviating. Readers dropping off near-instantly.
A company leaving a slop trail behind its wake.
AI DDOSing should be shameful.
https://www.folklore.org/Saving_Lives.html
It’s exhausting. It’s like every article is written by the same author and that author is also your coworker and personal assistant and also moonlights as Brian, a waiter at Chotchkie’s.
Exactly. This is like that Sci fi show where the whole world is taken over by an alien organism and everyone you meet is basically the same one person. The AI is also off-puttingly nice, just like the alien.
The page has scroll hijacking, too.
Here's a bookmarklet which fixes that:
Yes very LLM (Chatgpt?) style, short sentences e.g.:
Headers are very chatgpt style too: "Why this is dangerous"The information in the article is valid and they've done the work to get the data, but the LLM style is irritating.
Yeah, wading through an endless stream of AI slop articles posted here (and elsewhere like on reddit) is exhausting. I suspect I won't be coming here as often anymore, which is a shame, because I used to find this site very informative and engaging.
Though we've always had our fair share of marketing and growth hack posts this turn with AI is just a different level of frustrating. The dead internet theory is unfortunately very real.
The concept of consent-based privacy has completely failed, first with GDPR then this.
This feels straight out of Silicon Valley (show)
It also feels straight out of Silicon Valley (place)
LOL I posted a few days ago with bullshit from LG smart TVs.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48618246
I still do not know how the damned thing got internet.
Good. Fuck Cloudflare and other internet gatekeepers. Confuse their signal as much as possible.
Agreed. Information wants to be free. I am sad nobody has a LOIC powerful enough to disable CloudF{lare,ront}.
Huh? This is almost assuredly being used for botnets… that’s not a good thing.