Wow, that quote is pure gold.
this post was submitted on 25 Oct 2026
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I just want a dumb TV at this point or an open source one that has great user control.
Westinghouse and Magnavox TV brands both exist with dumb TV options, Max 32" though
The Westinghouse is unfortunately on Amazon, but I found the Magnavox at Canadian Tire for $200
Used TVs are dirt cheap. Just buy one
I say things in front of my cellphone and it advertises revelent content to me too
I don’t want a smart TV… my TV should just be a display.
It should be a hub with a display.
Find me in my living room, reading aloud SQL injection attacks and AI jailbreak promps like the newsreader from Rome
"No actors, tech-bros or other unclean professions may attend"
Little Bobby DropTables has entered the chat.
Samsung is the second Electronics maker I've started boycotted, after Sony.
Sony was all the way back since the Rootkit scandal, Samsung was about a decade ago when a small tablet I bough from them have filled with unremovable applications and after a few updates became pretty much unusable because it's didn't have enough memory (clearly planned obscolecence).
Patting myself on back (and a little gloating) aside, Samsung has been clearly abusive towards their customers for a while (it was maybe the second electronics make to enshittify, after Sony) and this is not at all surprising.
Samsung has been abusive format least a decade
Sony has been abusive for at least two
People should have been imprisoned over the Sony rootkit scandal.
For those who don't know - their music CDs had malware built in that automatically installed itself on PCs without prompting or notification that gave unsecured root access to any PC through a hidden service that couldn't be detected or disabled from within Windows. It was as bad as bad gets. There was no hidden EULA or anything. They just straight-up installed viruses on millions of PCs that opened the door for other malware to install itself at the root level where it couldn't be detected.
Sony should have been shut down entirely over it.
Wow. Yeah, fuck Sony. Seems they've always been in a race to the bottom. Now their insistance on a digital-only future makes so much more sense. They want to control any and all access to their products and don't want them changing hands IRL.
It's even a little worst than parent post makes it seem, it's worth a read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootkit_scandal
Wow! I remember the thing but never knew all the dirty deals.
Steve Heckler's quote on Napster sounds like Churchill after Dunkirk, "...we shall fight the users, we shall fight in the firewalls, we shall fight the cable companies and the phone companies, we shall fuck up your PC; we shall never surrender..."
I really hope one day people will look back at those practices the same way we look back at the normality of cigarettes being pushed on everyone back in the 50's.
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Imagine believing that they need "AI" to record us.
These TVs don't incorporate enough power to do any kind of serious LLM. The "AI" they're referring to here is likely an embedded speech-to-text engine. And that probably is pretty necessary for this--it would take too much data to send actual recordings to Samsung, but text transcripts are tiny and easier to search and index. It's easy to forget, but reliable speech-to-text has been around less than 20 years, and the tiny ones that can run on embedded chips are even newer.
Stm32 has made micro controllers with neural processors for years now and you don't need LLMs to do a lot of useful stuff for a spyware company. A small model can run even in really constrained hardware if you train it specifically for it. Afaik the STM32 ones are for machine vision processing on limited hardware where power is a concern. I'm sure you can do a lot more with a TV with constant power.
That's exactly the distinction I was making. The person I was replying to said "Imagine believing that they need “AI” to record us." I was clarifying that this isn't the AI we hear so much about that requires huge datacenters; it's the kind of simple, embedded, "edge" AI that you can do with whatever microcontroller you have lying around.
Yeah I know I was agreeing with you
Ah, sorry. Sometimes I can't tell because of the threading here.
Its ok, text is also really ambiguous so I don't blame you
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They're using a classifier to capture metadata (like “does a dog live there?” or “does a baby live there”) by categorizing sounds. That's all technically legal, that's why they do it that way.
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This is why I have a Sony TV, it doesn't listen to me of that I can garuntee. This is a shitpost, the TV is from 98 and weighs like 70 pounds.
I'm happy with my $200 non-wifiable Insignia and hope it lasts a long time.
Unregulated chaebols are just as dangerous as Kim Jong Un.
If these tvs are capturing private conversations for advertising, where’s the consent for that?
It's all in the EULA no one can opt out of, and no one reads, and they can change at any time.
You can blame companies who make hardware, but the laws on privacy are terrible.
EULA has T&C that the first users agree to when they fast forward with the accept accept accept accept screens
Doesn't matter if you technically consent, that shit is still illegal (at least in the EU)
Illegal only applies when the law is an enforced deterrence. If the fine is low enough, it's the price of doing business. If it's hard to sue or there's no enforcement, the law may as well not exist. Unfortunately, with these large companies it's been both: low fines and long lawsuits, so by the time they pay a fine, they have earned 100x the fine in a month or so
Legality is pointless when the laws are not enforced.
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Those things aren't legally valid for consumer electronics or software in many countries (possibly most of the World) because they're considered an attempt at forcing a change in the terms of the sale after the sale.
They would be totally valid if they're presented to the buyer for confirming acceptance during the purchase BEFORE they pay which, "curiously", they never are.
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Drink verification can!
Look AI code gets a ton of hate. And rightfully so. But you can use a coding agent to basically completely take control of hardware you own. It takes minutes.
Could you go into more detail for those of us who don't want to brick their tv? I think you're over estimating some of our knowledge base.
Was watching gamers nexus. Opened up codex. Gave it network permissions. It was able to fully take control of the TV in minutes. It even navigated to the admin panel and gave me the code to plug in. Very quickly had figured out some of the major API's. In a half hour, I was able to get a container/ program set up to just "send" any stream I wanted to the TV without having to use any Samsung services. Then, scramble/ poison telemetry data/ advertising data. Whatever you like. None of it is worth publishing. But I wanted to control the TV I bought. The one I own. In my house. That I paid for. And I think its royally fucked up the world we live in that there are any barriers to that.
Just don't use OpenAI or Anthropic cloud models for reverse engineering your TV's APIs. This guy got banned from OpenAI for doing this research on his Samsung TV, and there are reports of Anthropic models starting to refuse reverse engineering tasks, having been given new guidance. Apparently proles learning about the corporate surveillance they're under is a step too far.
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There’s a repo with ready-made APKs for many TV models: https://github.com/Gathin23/cleanyourtv
And if your specific one isn’t supported, it has instructions how to do it with AI yourself
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