Yup, Smart TV's of any brand (at least in the US) are essentially spyware. I made a video about it recently.

The upside is that if you don't connect your TV to the Internet, all that data just sits in its internal memory and doesn't go anywhere. So don't connect it.

The weirdest thing in all this is that it's Texas, of all places, leading the charge to hold these TV manufacturers accountable. (And Ken Paxton, the most cartoonishly corrupt politician in recent memory at that.)

Their own harnesses breaking out of their test environments and hacking third party companies is “oopsi” but their customers using an agent in a controlled manner to reverse engineer firmware of a device they own is bad. I see. Fuckers.

One of the things that AI is actually useful for. Banned!

Hey guys, I am starting to think AI isn't actually for us.

"Shifted it to the consumer"

• The "Guest Consent" Clause: For example, Section 6(d) of LG's updated terms of service states that it is the owner's sole responsibility to obtain consent from household members and guests whose voices might be captured by the TV's artificial intelligence and voice recognition features.

• The Legal Trap: By agreeing to these terms, you contractually accept the responsibility to warn anyone sitting in your living room that the TV is listening. If a guest sues over an illegal recording under state wiretap laws, the manufacturer will use the EULA to argue that you breached the contract by failing to get that guest's consent. That's assuming someone actually reads the EULA

Especially in

• California • Delaware • Florida • Illinois • Maryland • Massachusetts • Montana • Nevada • New Hampshire • Pennsylvania • Washington

because they have all-party consent laws : In these states, recording an oral conversation requires the consent of everyone involved. Because a house guest has a reasonable expectation of privacy in a private home, a smart TV capturing their background audio without their explicit knowledge constitutes a violation of state wiretapping laws, regardless of what the TV's EULA say

So, you have to have everyone in your household agree to the EULA not just yourself if you use a smart tv in those 11 states to not violate wiretapping laws.

6 mos into owning a Samsung TV, I started getting ads.

So I put a pihole on my network which fixed it but I also started seeing the ENORMOUS amount of times ALL my samsung devices were being blocked. I'm talking THOUSANDS per day per device. Like the TV would be blocked 1,200 times in one day, my samsung smartphone would also be blocked 1,000+ times per day while my wife's iphone that she uses for every and all social media was being blocked maybe 100 times.

Since then I've never bought another Samsung device and hooked an apple tv up to my Samsung TV while disconnecting the tv from the internet. It's fucking disgusting how you buy their product and still get milked for data/money.

Why do people post things like this in twitter? Why can't they write it up in a single blog post on a site that does not require users to authenticate to view the whole thread? I have never understood these long twitter threads.

Edit: I just remembered that there is a solution for this: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/2113014142600953868.html but it's still ridiculous that an app needs to exist to aggregate dispirate tweets, and of course it doesn't work with the parent tweets because they're not all one thread. Also this app quit working during the twitter API debacle, which is why I forgot about it, but it looks like it's back.

In case anyone was ever curious if AI could be used against our corporate masters, here's your answer.

I suspect that if the AI industry ever gets any sort of regulation, it will be to wrench any kind of power that end users have that may threaten the capitalistic hegemony away from them. Can't have people reverse engineering their tech to figure out how they are using it to spy on you, cuz THAT'S CYBER ABUSE! :/

You are only allowed to use ai for evil

Everybody declared me an idiot when I didn’t hook up my smart tv to the internet. This is why

LoL

This "advanced tech" that's based on stolen IP won't even give you the lyrics to Happy Birthday to You.

Kimi K3.1 incoming 👾 Fuck this shit restricting REA / reverse engineering anything "DRM / encrypted" etc.

It's no surprise. They're all in bed together.

Softbank invested $122 billion in Open AI: https://tracxn.com/d/companies/openai/__kElhSG7uVGeFk1i71Co9-nwFtmtyMVT7f-YHMn4TFBg/funding-and-investors

Lee Jae-yong and Masayoshi Son Join Forces... Samsung and SoftBank to Collaborate on '6G and AI Network' Development

https://www.thelec.net/news/articleView.html?idxno=5132

The bosses of Samsung Electronics, OpenAI, and SoftBank held a three-way meeting in South Korea to discuss potential collaboration in AI. Samsung Electronics Executive Chairman Lee Jae-yong met OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son at Samsung’s office in Seoul on Tuesday.

This is why I don't connect my tv to the internet. My wife was super Luke warm about this when I told her about it, and we have a new Samsung TV, with their stupid AI in it...sigh.

So gross. I hope this gets more recognition by big news outlets / investigations. And then eventually regulation

This is one of the reasons why I don’t use American AI chatbots.

I have a related question: how feasible is it that a smart TV with wifi turned off can access the wifi connection of connected devices? E.g. a firestick, in my case.

I'm a web developer by day, my gut says a TV probably shouldn't be able to override a literal on/off setting, but I also know that a software setting is barely enforceable at all.

Wild, maybe they should ban all those "rogue" AI bots we keep hearing about too

Claude banned reverse engineering in general in their products... the ai will just stop the answer

Yeah I used to think the whole "At home data center" guys were insane but personally I'm digging up my old GPU's to get a small rig going. Nothing insane but enough to run some light weight models.

1. The AI techies were right, this is a revolutionary technology and 2. The companies that own it are evil in a no-joke-actually-evil-like-comic-book-evil kind of way. they-will-destroy-the-climate-and-world-just-to-be-the-one-that-did-it kind of way. Humans-are-too-expensive-kill-them type of way.

Time to build your rigs and pull down some open source models before the criminals (openai, et al) stick telemetry in them to track your usage. Get your own wiki reader while you're at it...

What the fuck is "cyber abuse?"

Here's a 4K 75" signage display that can run with or without internet connection, $800

https://www.cdw.com/product/tcl-te75n-ten-series-75-led-backlit-lcd-display-4k-for-digital-signa/8463452