this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2026
89 points (96.8% liked)
Technology
86745 readers
3895 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Oof. I'm actually using the USB Hub on my LG Monitor like that (with my Laptop connected to the USB-C) and recently thought "it would have been practical if it had an Ethernet port" now I'm quite happy it doesn't. Thinking they could just be running a simple embedded Linux to show ads and forwarding the Ethernet connecting that would be sneaky ... (Tough I would wonder about an additional Device on my Network)
You wouldn’t even really question your new device on the network. Since the monitor must forward the packets from and to your PC it’s MAC address would show up in the network, but that’s expected. And good luck separating the traffic of your monitor from that of your PC if it originates from the very same MAC address as it’s basically the new network card of your PC connected via USB C. And since it could act like a bridge, it could strip out the responses to its own requests and not forward those to your PC so you don’t even see them there. On the other side it’s all TLS encrypted so nothing to see either. Heck, it could even only send its own requests when your PC is actively using the connection so that it’s less noticeable.
You might do some DPI and check what IPs you connect to but good luck finding if it really is your monitor and not some random app on your PC. If it’s using DoH, you can’t even inspect its DNS traffic to get a clue what’s going on (SNI in the handshake might still offer some clue).
Also all of the above enables tracking and spying on you covertly. Ads are quite obvious, so there’s nothing to hide there.