The most conspiratorially minded are also the most likely to miss the obvious.

During COVID lockdowns, while I worked retail, a few customers didn't want to use the QR codes to "check in" to the store because "tracking", but then used digital contactless payment without a thought.

"The issue's not whether you're paranoid, Lenny. I mean, look at this shit. The issue is whether you're paranoid enough."

In the early days of analog cell phones, any teenage punk with access to a Radio Shack and a modicum of soldering skills could listen to your conversations on the things, never mind the CIA.

yup. you gotta keep some nonsense, average data about yourself going (google thinks i'm a radiological oncologist, and i'm a musician. that's kind of funny and kind of sad) and have your paranoid conversations out in the woods

“Give me the man and I will give you the case against him” is a quote you might want to look into the history of.

I apparently read this differently from y'all.

A disturbingly large percentage of the populace does see it this way.

I read it as a sarcastic criticism of such people. Was it not?

Cat got your tongue?

Insane

Gamers' Nexus speculated on the ability to connect to the other SSIDs if memory serves, or did that ever get proven?

I have an offline LG TV and an open isolated guest network it could theoretically connect to. I check periodically and it has never attempted to do so.

Just an anecdote, but I personally have seen no evidence of this happening.

Do you have neighbors with a non password protected gateway or router to the open internet? Open unsecured networks seem so rare these days.

what the hell

what would happen if i set up a little router with a virtual internet right next to the tv? i was a hardware guy in the 90s so like, i am the teensiest bit out of date

"buy" it

According the terms of service his payment is for the use of the device according to manufacturer stated use-cases and any misuse or changes to the components negates the right to use and opens him to civil liability /s

(?)

• we live in the evil Harambe timeline

I bet this guy removed the tag from his mattress too. The sick fuck.

Here is a Samsung 65" 4K Non-Smart Hospitality Display in the US and here is the closest consumer Samsung TV also in the US.

The former is $1,023.00, the latter is $379.99.

HOWEVER, here is the Samsung commercial smart version of the first TV model.

Notice that it's actually a bit more expensive at $1080.

Also judging by figures I heard years ago for the cost to buy private information about people (well below $1 per person if I remember it correctly), I suspect Smart TV makers don't make all that much money from selling private information (especially if you consider that they're competing with the likes of Google as well as many other companies that also have massive surveillance operations) as a percentage of the total price of the TV.

I suspect that the difference in price between commercial and consumer TVs is mainly due to higher resilience in the device's design, longer and/or stricter warranties and support availability plus that they simply can extract more money from business customers (an effect you see in A LOT of things, not just this).

I suspect the current situation where non-smart consumer TVs are pretty much non-existent are a mix of big companies pursuing even small increases in profit (from selling private data) so they all inevitably end up doing that same thing that brings them a small additional revenue stream and consumers themselves being convinced that "smart" is a good thing on a TV and actually preferring those over non-smart TVs.

Certainly consumers favoring "smart" TVs would explain why even little no-brand Chinese TV manufacturers who really don't have the scale and systems for mass-surveillance are selling Smart TVs rather than non-Smart ones outside the cheapest possible TV sizes (you can find monitor-size non-smart TVs)

Don't get a smart TV, just use an external media player for the "smarts" - easiest is to put LibreELEC in a Pi and get a remoted like this.

Personally last TV I got (5 years ago) I went for something that did not advertise any "smarts" (a Blaupunkt which turned out to have some "smarts" so it has always been disconnected), though if it was nowadays I would probably spend the extra to get a commercial display - a commercial display is not only "smarts" free, it is also designed to last a long time under constant use rather than with built-in obsolescence like consumer products, so it should not need to be replaced for a long time.

I'm lucky that I've been an really early adopter of media players (well before Android TV) and quickly figure out that the life-cycle of medial players (i.e. the "smarts" in Smart TVs) is way shorter than the life-cycle of the actual display, mainly because of how often new codecs become widespread (video decoding of 1080p or higher content is only performant if done in hardware or it you throw a ton of general computing power at it), so it's economically wiser to have those things separate since you'll replaced the media player hardware much more often than display hardware, all of which is even more so when software updates of closed "smarts" solutions can literally make the device unusable simply by using too much memory, a common built-in obsolescence trick.

PS: I had a look around and above 40" 1080p the only non-smart TVs I found were indeed commercial things like "hospitality displays" and judging by example I checked from Samsung with the same spec, the explicitly "non-smart" "hospitality display" (65", 4K) was a bit over 2x the price of the "smart" consumer version.

So yeah, it's feasible to avoid smart TVs by going commercial (but costs over 2x) or be limited to the smaller sizes and resolutions, as well as simpler tech of small brands in the low-end of the consumer TV market.

None. Ads pay for part of the TV.

I wish I could find their European equivalent ...