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- Hacker News
- 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?
by FabCH - Devices that connect to open wifi networks is insane; not sure if LG does, but other devices do. Scary, as this is illegal/leads to legal liability, exposure, leakage, etc when you are close to a neighbors open network.by gbraad
- Is there an open firmware for LGs?by bpbp-mango
- Huh. I never considered this. Hacking TVs with firmware would be a great project for LLMs to fuzz.by icelancer
- 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.by itherseed
- ~"ACR is an OPT-IN feature"
If ACR is turned on when I install an app, and click 'next', 'next', 'open' then that is not an OPT-IN feature.
If I have to perform an action to not have ACR during normal use of the TV then that is OPT-OUT in my opinion.
by InsomniacL - Boy, how I would like LG to be sued out of existence.by 725686
- Not possible. They are part of the chaebol [1], meaning they are essentially part of the South Korean government. They can't really fail as long as the country exists. There's an old joke that South Korea isn't really a country, but five families/companies pretending to be one and there's some truth to this.by OroPla
- Who's selling dumb TV's again, Samsung? Who else? I'll happily pay a thousand bucks to not get screwed by my TV.by MisterTea
- This Linus Tech Tips video from ~4 months ago is probably useful then.
"I bought a TV with NO 'Smart' Features": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJh72_O4pXE
It's pretty much "this is cheap, but the picture quality turns out to be crap". :(
by justinclift - If you only watch at night, then a pull-down screen and a projector work great.
Until smart projectors are a thing, I suppose...
by ChoGGi - I’m looking for a TV and it seems like dumb ones simply aren’t available anymore
Seems like the only options are:
1. Buy a smart TV and not connect it to the internet and/or physically neuter it by unplugging the Wifi/Bluetooth module. I wish there was more info about this out there as I assume there are some models that don’t allow this
2. Buy a projector. I’ve been using a cheap $80 projector for a few years due to space constraints in the apartment I was living in. Now that I’m in a larger apartment, I wanted to buy a TV. But all this has me wondering whether I should just buy a better projector
It does have the “drawback” that it can only be used after sunset (assuming you don’t have a basement or blackout curtains or something). But I find that this provides a natural hard cap to the screen time that everyone is trying so hard to cut back on
- 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.by maxglute
- Just keep it disconnected and enjoy the "dumb" TV with a streamer box.
The reports of user-disconnected TVs jumping on open wifis or Amazon sidewalk by themselves are not credible. All of the problems stem from connecting the TV so don't.
I would be surprised if a truly dumb TV would be as good quality as modern LGs etc for the price. Maybe I'm wrong. But please don't pay _more_ for a dumb TV.
by spopejoy - 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.
by whstl - 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!
by rpdillon - 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).
by Metricon - 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.by kdmoyers
- I wonder if the following scenario ever occurred inside LG when they were designing this spyware.
1. Teenagers exist
2. Teenagers hook up with other teenagers
3. Sometimes that might happen on the couch in front of the TV
If that TV records and transmits anything, who is on the hook for production and distribution of illicit materials? The parents? The kids? Or LG?
PR/legal wise this might be the worst case scenario and might even get some of those legislators and law enforcement people interested.
by tomkarho - 4. Wait for anyone to come knocking regarding illegal spying.
5. Discover there is absolutely zero enforcement if you are govt. intertwined oligarchy owned conglomerate.
6. Sell collected data (akshully it will be synthetic data "of course", wink-wink) to a legal front to a Nexus darknet laundromat. Also known as "identity verification provider or other somesuch.
7. Insurance companies legally partner with a different legal Nexus front corpo, which will ingest stolen data and make it "sythetic data" again, wink-wink; then provide it to the insurance corpos.
8. Insurance is opaquely "adjusted" to those same teenagers.
9. Profit :)
by Yizahi - 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
by sumedh - Yknow, admitting you have no idea what you’re talking about and coming up with a solution that doesn’t actually work used to be free.by nearlyepic
- 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 have AdGuard running in my home lab and pointed the router to the AdGuard DNS resolver. I have some general block lists and a special Smart TV block list.
I asked DeepSeek to do the same scan, but given everything goes through AdGuard it’s much simpler to sift through it’s logs. This is what I got:
Of those, these were already blocked:* br.rdx2.lgtvsdp.com, br.lgtvsdp.com — 1,200 hits: LG’s ad/content-delivery platform (SDP) * br.info.lgsmartad.com — 64 hits: LG Smart AD advertising network * aic.cdpsvc.lgtvcommon.com — 141 hits: LG customer-data platform (CDP) * aic.cdpbeacon.lgtvcommon.com — 34 hits: CDP data-collection beacon * aic*.lgtviot.com, *.lgthinq.com — ~410 hits: LG ThinQ / IoT cloud * lgtvonline.lge.com — 350 hits: LG online services / telemetry * br.lgeapi.com, ngfts.lge.com, aic-gfts.lge.com, snu.lge.com — ~210 hits: LG APIs + telemetry
General list also catches: Netflix logs (6k), Amazon telemetry.insights.video.a2z.com (700), Datadog (600), Conviva (410), Google DoubleClick (98)* rdx2.lgtvsdp.com (600/600) — LG ad platform * cdpsvc.lgtvcommon.com (~370) — LG customer-data platform & beacons * info.lgsmartad.com (78/78) — LG Smart AD * ibs.lgappstv.com (86/86) — LG app store * aic-ngfts.lge.com (36/36)Though some domains still are going through, which are now blocked :)
by tmcz26 - I’m seeing that the old mantra is alive and kicking: "If the product is cheap/free, you are the product! Pay for the product!" Turns out that now both is true—they’ll charge you a steep price comparative to other brands, and they’ll _still_ spy on you. Why are some still defending corporations?
It’s incredible how these brands are, one by one, destroying any affinity and good will left for them (LG, Sony, Microsoft, etc.). Nowadays whenever I hear a company has a custom OS I think custom what? Custom tracking and ad pipeline? This just makes me turn elsewhere entirely, not want to "upgrade" to an even more expensive product that _might_ not track me. Might isn’t good enough.
I’ll take a cheap TCL panel with all the latest bells and whistles, and be done with it. Sure, the software will be janky, but it will be cheap and just as good at showing moving pictures, if not better. If I suspect something nefarious, I’ll get an old Android box and install a rooted system on there that I control, and use that instead of the inbuilt Android TV. But I _won’t_ be paying extra for the trouble.
by antibarbarus - It would have to be a fight to the death against trlion dollar companies, It can’t just be “don’t buy it”. What you are suggesting means companies like google meta etc. Get wiped out. There is no way they would go naturally.by ozgrakkurt
- 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.by hadlock
- >but my wife was too excited to try out whatever features.
God knows how many millions of people could drive a car from 2004 forever, use small dumb screens and other appliances, etc, etc, if not for other members of their household.
- 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.
by nullify88