Not wanted, had. They would love to do more. And in fact part of the fundraising around this is for that. GN and gamer jesus's only recently turned to heavy investigative journalism. But they don't have a sugar daddy to fund them or dedicated viewing area to sell advertising to. Their situation with alphabet and YouTube is very adversarial as well.

they NEED to do it to remain competitive

That might literally be true.

Imagine there are two factories. One spends $100 a week disposing of toxic waste. The other one saves that $100 a week by dumping their toxic waste into the local river. Absent of a robust regulatory state that can prevent and punish that kind of behavior, even if the first factory wants to be responsible environmental stewards, they might literally go bankrupt trying to compete with the evil factory.

You can apply this to anything that can be regulated. Companies might not have a choice between doing the evil thing or not; it might literally be a matter of "Well, everyone is doing it, and if I don't, then I'll be driven out of business anyway."

A functional government gets out in front of this phenomenon, makes doing evil shit illegal, and levies fines and punishments against companies that do evil/illegal shit such that doing the evil shit is no longer profitable.

But instead we've got... [gestures broadly at our current nightmare reality].

So what i'm hearing is I should spin up an open ssid and black hole the traffic

It can be even worse than that. It can use other TVs in the neighborhood that are connected to the internet and just proxy it through them. It’s called a mesh network.

May be. I'm still waiting for someone to show me a case of that happening, because I've been unable to find one.

True, updated above.

Cellular modems are getting cheaper. Maybe in a few years they're looking for Meshtastic nodes.

Wdym by unsecured? No password?

Wendell was having a blast for sure. 🤣

None of these use cases require modern "smart" things.

I like to be able to turn the fan/AC/heat on and off without getting out of bed, or when I'm on my way home.

Right now they're all just on isolated smart plugs, but if I was to set up more then I'd use homeassistant or something.

1. Build a cheap PC or buy an NVidia Shield to be your media center. (I actually use a SteamLink to my desktop PC.)

2. Never tell your TV your Wi-Fi password.

3. Use a wireless keyboard with touch-pad as your remote.

(4. Pirate stuff over a VPN.)

100%

Zigbee for me, but on the apple front you can integrate homekit and control what's exposed. As far as apple is concerned there's just a webhook "basement light" that has an on or off command i can say

Some applications make more sense to me than others. I haven't fully dipped into the bluetooth controlled stuff, but I have used other various wireless solutions for things. Funny enough, I've been thinking about adding a wireless power switch to my TV so that I know it isn't snooping on me when it's off. Can't snoop on me if you don't have any power.

I don’t use the default one from pihole, I had to dig around to find the ones that actually did block all the ads and other garbage. But I’ll definitely dig into the link you have provided. Much appreciated, fellow great human being <3

I know LG TVs can rooted, but I don’t know about Samsung. It actually won’t matter anymore until the government legislates something to make this shit illegal. All of this actually go against the 4th amendment in the US. I that LG has been talking about putting a little modem in their displays that gets its internet from the whole neighborhood’s routers after some deals with AT&T (I think). So then disconnecting the tv from your home network won’t matter.

They can get around your Pi Hole with DNS over HTTPS these days. I don't have one. Do you find yours still works well?

Just the next small step in obfuscating spyware: Removing a descriptive term to let it sound less harmful

Yeah, this is more like a damage control or a lesson for the future for me.

My browser get rid these popups in almost every site, so I cant confirm.

I guess it goes the slow way too by sending them an email with your info and that you dont have any number or email access, requesting them to delete everything.

In EU they are obliged to respond and do it (don't know the timeframe), or you can sue.

Oh that's all? Really? Have you tried to buy a "Not Smart" TV lately? Not exactly any options that are branded as TVs. I tried. I would have had to sacrifice quality and pay more for the privilege to buy a device intended to be used to display mostly static images as a menu board not be great at playing movies and high FPS video games. As a consumer, I was never really get a choice or a vote in this smart TV switchover decision.