I got this a few months ago -- 4k, solid brightness, and ok color.
Is it the OMG BEST? no. But I Disabled wifi, and even the channel display.
I use it with an apple TV with CEC on the TV -- I turn on the apple tv, TV turns on straight to apple interface. I turn off from the apple remote, TV turns off.
It's effectively "an apple TV" -- I'm happy.
gruez 22 hours ago [-]
>Is it the OMG BEST? no. But I Disabled wifi, and even the channel display.
Why not just get a (presumably subsidized) smart TV instead, and skipping the premium? It'd also be not disconnected from the internet, and despite vague HN/reddit speculation that TVs have cell modems in them, that has yet to be confirmed.
lbotos 21 hours ago [-]
I wanted more control and no UI. The commercial ones do that -- I think this was like $150 more than the "samsung smart ui" one... Never seeing a smart TV interface was worth that for me. YMMV.
anon7000 20 hours ago [-]
Idk. I mean I have the equivalent experience on a Samsung TV that has the smarts. I only see the Apple TV interface and control it with the Apple remote, including volume and power.
While I have WiFi disabled on the TV, I do like that I can still hook up a broadcast TV antenna and have the TV scan for channels and all that, which Apple TV can’t do
afavour 21 hours ago [-]
I have a TCL Roku TV that I use disconnected and with an Apple TV. It still has annoyances here and there, like pausing for three seconds or so on every startup before it switches inputs. I’d pay a mild premium to not have that.
initramfs 21 hours ago [-]
I've noticed that older TCLs are a bit laggier than Samsung smart tvs. Nice to have one that actually has a fast response to the remote. There was an app that was super slow on it- one of the less popular streaming apps. Although when the firmware updated, it might have erased the entire account and started anew. The Google Play store manages the apps, so I would imagine they get purged when they aren't up to the latest requirements. I am not sure how long the Android/Google OS version would get supports though).
Barbing 21 hours ago [-]
Same. Our data is worth a lot I guess (not the whole differential but):
$627 - commercial display
~$200 - comparable invasive options
Barbing 21 hours ago [-]
Some instead assert TVs might connect to the first open network available, like if a neighbor briefly opened a hotspot, which sounds more believable.
RiverCrochet 19 hours ago [-]
I haven't seen an open network around me or anywhere I go in years. Even places like gyms, coffee shops, and restaurants require passwords typically.
I think it's much more likely TVs make deals with cell phone companies and offer hardware that only works with their cellular service. Many pay more than $100 a month on their phone bill to pay off a phone. People might accept another $20 or so for a large screen TV with bundled apps-costs can be kept down for the carrier with ads and tracking that can't be bypasssed as it will use the carrier's network connection.
mminer237 21 hours ago [-]
Both theories would be easily testable. The danger is also much smaller if it's not on your Wi-Fi regardless.
snowe2010 20 hours ago [-]
Not really. There’s zero reason that a manufacturer wouldn’t just program it to wait several months before attempting to connect to open networks.
initramfs 21 hours ago [-]
I use HDMI on my Smart TV and just disabled wifi because I realized it was downloading more than half my bandwidth (a small amount, in fact). It could have been doing an update but I found no reason to leave it on. Occasionally I'll use YT or Prime since it doesn't have to be tethered to a PC, but overall it's nicer as a monitor than a streaming app.
3eb7988a1663 20 hours ago [-]
Not that I believe it is used, but an ethernet connection can actually ride over HDMI. Possible to share your network connection by plugging in a display.
cwillu 20 hours ago [-]
I believe that was eventually dropped from the standard due to disuse, but I might be mistaken.
initramfs 18 hours ago [-]
I am curious if PoE (Power over ethernet) ever worked on HDMI. I know there is some minimal data sent, but would be hesitant to leave an HDMI cable plugged in if it has any Ethernet or power capabilities. I wouldn't be surprised the feature was dropped due to general security concerns (not that it's a useless feature- in fact I would prefer that in some cases, although newer monitors can also be powered by USB-C, negating some of that need.
helterskelter 20 hours ago [-]
These days a lot of them will nag you if you don't connect them to the internet and only use them as a dumb display.
account42 8 hours ago [-]
That hasn't been my experience.
LeoPanthera 21 hours ago [-]
If you do this, connect it to the internet at least once, because most smart TVs ship with missing features that aren't activated until you do a firmware update.
glaslong 21 hours ago [-]
Hmm generally I want the smart tv to have as few features as possible, ideally never ever even show me their "home / launcher".
Kinda on the opposite recommendation that the fw it shipped with had to meet SOME minimally functional bar and every update after that is an opportunity to make it worse.
05 21 hours ago [-]
Were I an enterprising enshittificator, I would certainly make sure to force being online as a prerequisite for basic functionality for any TV that has ever been seen online since that proves that it's capable of connecting. So.. be careful upgrading the shitware, you might get more functionality that you've bargained for. Functionality that you can't downgrade because you don't own the TV.
fmajid 3 hours ago [-]
Some TCL TVs will refuse to work if you don't connect them to the Internet. I'd never buy one in the first place, and if I did, I'd return it immediately as defective. Eventually retailers will get the message and stop carrying the despicable brand.
sidewndr46 20 hours ago [-]
I don't think you can use the ones at wal-mart without an internet connection of some kind
fmajid 3 hours ago [-]
Some TCL TVs will refuse to work unless you connect them to a network with access to the home base. Fortunately, my Samsung S95D doesn't (lovely matte OLED screen), and is perfectly usable without a network connection or even setting up the Smart TV features. The only controls I need on it are volume and HDMI input switching. Like you, I use two AppleTV 4Ks as sources, one tied to my US Apple ID, one for the UK one. At some point, I will also connect my Oppo UDP-203 4K Blu-Ray player, but I haven't needed to in the 2 years since I moved to the new house.
newsoftheday 21 hours ago [-]
We keep our TV dumb, have a laptop behind it running Kubuntu Linux. Stream in everything in Chrome. Use an Air Mouse and wireless keyboard sometimes. Works great.
hoherd 21 hours ago [-]
That looks like The Frame from Samsung. Does it have a matte surface? What version of Tizen is it running? Does it have API access?
glaslong 21 hours ago [-]
This would be my dream tv. I like the matte look of the Frame a lot (I have one), but it's not at all worth the being subjected to the terrible Samsung software experience
hoherd 20 hours ago [-]
The 2020 and 2021 versions of The Frame had direct API access for updating artwork. Newer versions apparently have access through cloud services, but I haven't tried it yet.
Begs the question - why has apple never come out with a TV.
MBCook 21 hours ago [-]
Why should they? It’s an absolute cutthroat business with next to no profit margin.
All you gotta do is add an Apple TV and you got everything they would give you. And they make nice margins.
Apple seems to have next to no interest in making displays at all. We are lucky whenever a new one gets announced.
Banditoz 21 hours ago [-]
What's the current OLED recommendation today?
fmajid 3 hours ago [-]
I'd recommend a Samsung S95. Great matte OLED screen, the TV works just fine even if you never set up the not-so-smart features.
thfuran 20 hours ago [-]
Last time I looked, I couldn't find an OLED commercial display like that.
cognitiveinline 18 hours ago [-]
Nitpick, hobby horse, not high horse.
lbotos 8 hours ago [-]
Huh?
“Get off your high horse” is the phrase I flipped because I was grandstanding.
What phrase are you referencing?
rustcleaner 22 hours ago [-]
Never ever connect your "Smart"-TV to your network, or if you have an incurable impulse to then make sure it's on a firewalled gateway-less VLAN. Take the money you save buying the thing (compared to what a profitable "dumb" version would cost) and buy a surplus corporate mini-workstation system, and slap LibreELEC/Kodi or whatever on it, and use that device as your "smart" device. No good for you can ever come from bringing the TV onto the internet... ever!
(Also: never paypig, never subscribe!)
drnick1 21 hours ago [-]
This, but LibreELEC or other Kodi distributions suck. They are too limited. Until recently, the best solution was to run a full Linux DE, but now there is Plasma Bigscreen[0] for that. This is basically a DE optimized for couch use with a remote. You can run Kodi as an app, but also stream from a browser, or play games with Steam, etc.
This looks great, it just needs some hardware to run on with a nice remote. Does any hardware like that exist?
drnick1 21 hours ago [-]
An airmouse remote, ideally with a keyboard on the back, works very well. It's particularly useful if you want to run "apps" that that not specifically designed for ten-foot use, and expect mouse or keyboard input.
eliaspro 9 hours ago [-]
Via KDE Connect, you can also use your smartphone as touchpad to control the cursor or to act as remote keyboard.
microcode 21 hours ago [-]
An Xbox/PlayStation controller is cheap and high quality.
ufmace 20 hours ago [-]
Why not ever subscribe? I mean, yeah, subscriptions are getting pricey these days, but you can subscribe to one network, watch the things you want, then cancel and go to another.
There's plenty you can trash Amazon for, but at least on Prime Video, you can subscribe to the other services through them, watch on any browser, and reliably cancel easily when you're done.
gozucito 21 hours ago [-]
I've heard this wisdom before, usually with an apple TV positioned as the alternative, but I've had that setup before and didn't enjoy having to use 2 remotes instead of one.
A better solution would be to root the damn TV and neuter its spyware/adware crap.
elahd 21 hours ago [-]
Put the TV remote in a drawer and only use the Apple TV remote. With CEC enabled, that one remote will control power and volume for the TV and any connected audio devices. It'll also switch to the proper input when the Apple TV is turned on.
cheschire 21 hours ago [-]
I only use one remote. The tv remote. I just enable HDMI-CEC
I keep the Apple TV remote around for extremely rare situations where that doesn’t work but even then, my cell phone has a built in Apple TV remote as well, which makes it even less necessary
wolttam 19 hours ago [-]
> A better solution would be to root the damn TV and neuter its spyware/adware crap.
That sounds like a lot of work. I don't want to sign up to this much work for every product I own that I want an iota of control over.
So I would argue if this is "better" by any stretch of the word
jerrysievert 21 hours ago [-]
why were you using 2 remotes? did you have other systems attached to the television, such as a game console, or cable?
the Apple TV provides hdmi cec, which should control your television through the hdmi cable.
notatoad 21 hours ago [-]
this is a solved problem on basically any modern tv: HDMI-CEC lets your appletv control your tv without using the tv remote.
SchemaLoad 21 hours ago [-]
Having 2 remotes is so much easier than trying to flash custom firmware on the TV
microcode 21 hours ago [-]
You don't necessarily have to flash a custom firmware. Rooting the TV and killing the ad processes is usually sufficient.
popcornricecake 21 hours ago [-]
The only time mine were ever connected to the internet was to update the software, and for that the easiest thing I thought was to host a temporary wifi hotspot (using a phone).
rustcleaner 21 hours ago [-]
My concern is your telemetry may have been stored up to that point, then forwarded upon connecting.
topranks 11 hours ago [-]
I connect every few months (with cable) to check for firmware updates and the like. Otherwise agree it stays offline.
lysace 21 hours ago [-]
Surely they will just make it mandatory, at some point?
MBCook 21 hours ago [-]
I remember seeing reports a few years ago about some TV that would constantly complain if it wasn’t connected. I don’t know what brand it was.
andai 22 hours ago [-]
I've always have a deep, instinctive revulsion for smart TVs, but every year I read of some new mandmade horrors beyond comprehension, and it escalates by a few more points.
thewebguyd 22 hours ago [-]
Same, but for "smart" anything in the home that requires an internet connection and does not let me set it up or run it LAN only.
People forget the reasons TVs got cheaper is because smart TVs are heavily subsidized with ads and your watch data.
I have the most "low tech" home of any of my peers, intentionally.
drnick1 21 hours ago [-]
This. The only "smart" things allowed in my home are those under my control. This means devices that work over Zigbee, or that that run free firmware natively (like ESP32-based devices), or that can be hacked to run free firmware. Everything is orchestrated via Home Assistant and in its own VLAN. It's surprising how far you can get. For example, I recently set up a voice assistant by wiring together a few Home Assistant components and a small local LLM (Qwen 4B). Response times are basically on par with commercial solutions like Alexa, and all processing is done locally.
microcode 21 hours ago [-]
The experience with this is so much better. Hacking most Tuya based devices has become extremely easy when you use https://docs.libretiny.eu/ Replacing MyQ with ratgdo was one of the best IoT decisions I have ever made.
layoric 21 hours ago [-]
Coming for PC monitors as well, LG again leading the charge.. see "smart gaming monitor", same BS.
cube2222 22 hours ago [-]
I think it’s worth emphasizing that based on the article, those are third party apps, not first party LG apps.
Based on the headline I thought it’s the built-in apps.
drnick1 21 hours ago [-]
LG runs its own spyware already (content recognition).
mycall 22 hours ago [-]
This does raise the question if other Smart TVs with the same third party apps have the same issue.
HDBaseT 22 hours ago [-]
The LG WebOS Store is a different beast.
Just browsing the list of apps raises eyebrows for even the most non-tech audiences. 99% of it is spam, with maybe 1% being well known apps like YouTube.
The rest are weird IPTV Players, Wallpaper apps. It feels like a portal into 2009 apps, but its not.
wowczarek 21 hours ago [-]
2009 indeed. Their app store was an absolute cesspit even in the early, pre-WebOS days and it hasn't changed much since, like, who would install any of this and why? Even the "official" app selection isn't the best. OS aside, they are pretty good TVs and quite popular, so I find this mind-boggling.
OkGoDoIt 22 hours ago [-]
In the article they mentioned that Amazon and Roku block apps from using these SDK’s, and specifically after Roku recently made a change to disallow this kind of thing, many of the affected apps were withdrawn from the Roku app store. The implication is that those other smart TVs don’t have the same third-party apps because these apps were specifically created to act as a foothold for these residential proxy networks.
MoonWalk 22 hours ago [-]
Vizio was caught taking screen grabs and sending them to a server a few years ago.
tadfisher 22 hours ago [-]
Basically all smart TVs do that. It is how they provide "contextual" features based on the content you're watching, like the names of the actors visible on screen.
deeth_starr_v 21 hours ago [-]
Not really. They do it to sell to advertisers what you are watching
HDBaseT 21 hours ago [-]
"Publishes with the most proxy flagged apps"
1. Desoline (based in Netanya (Israel)
2. Bright Data (based in Israel)
Interesting.
port11 9 hours ago [-]
A country known for plenty of spyware and iOS hacking tools. Interesting indeed.
(I didn’t draw any conclusions.)
sph 3 hours ago [-]
I did. Israel is with North Korea at the bottom of the list of countries I'd do business with.
In fact, it's worse: my problem with NK is with its leadership, as I don't have anything against its citizens. I can't say the same for the state of Israel. May they reap what they've sown.
smashah 21 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
smashah 20 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
throw468358 20 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
ewy1 19 hours ago [-]
we all know what they meant
smashah 17 hours ago [-]
Unironically a Grammar Nazi; concerned by the perceived errant H in "The Holocaust of Gaza" but not the 70,000 children that were sacrificed in it for a demonic supremacist anti-freedom ideology. Thanks for your reply, I appreciate the help in furthering my point.
throw477522 14 hours ago [-]
While it’s true that Hamas has sacrificed children for a demonic supremacist anti-freedom ideology, the number is much lower than 70,000, more like around 20,000.
smashah 13 hours ago [-]
Truly a Second Shoah having ones decsendetry co-opted by a coven of babybloodthirsty Holocaust Denying Epsteinist Apartheid state supporters and it's fifth column agents in occupied government actively destroying (constitutional) freedoms world-wide. The Ba'al worshippers will fail and extricated from humanity.
smashah 6 hours ago [-]
I'd appreciate if dang can report back why my factual comments are flagged and removed from anyone seeing them while the holocaust denial expressed by these throwaway accounts remain.
gruez 22 hours ago [-]
This turned out to be more ethical than I thought. I'd thought there wasn't any consent at all, or the actual mention of proxying was buried in a 20 page EULA.
OkGoDoIt 22 hours ago [-]
Yeah, this does seem somewhat reasonable. I get that most users will probably accept it without thinking twice, but if you’re going to do something like this, this is at least a fairly upfront and consenting way of doing it. For the TV platforms where this isn’t allowed, you have to wonder if apps are still doing it but just completely secretly, and trying to hide their tracks as well.
LastTrain 22 hours ago [-]
I think the person you were responding to was being sarcastic.
stavros 22 hours ago [-]
I didn't read it that way. "Please allow us to use your IP to download data" is way more consenty than I thought these apps would get.
201984 22 hours ago [-]
This needs to be illegal.
pocksuppet 22 hours ago [-]
What would be illegal about it?
201984 21 hours ago [-]
I cannot think of a legitimate purpose for residential proxies existing. They take advantage of people who don't understand what they're being asked to give "consent" to, and then offer up those people's internet connections to whatever actor wants to abuse it, including malware authors, aggressive scrapers, and anyone with ill intent.
Why do you think this rampant abuse is a good thing? What benefit does this provide to society?
wmf 20 hours ago [-]
Also these proxies are against the terms of service of every ISP.
20 hours ago [-]
gruez 22 hours ago [-]
Why? The only thing that's vaguely objectionable is the fact the consent screen's wording of "download public web data from the internet" omits important information on what's actually happening and the associated risks. Otherwise I'm not sure how you can come up with a principled justification of the ban beyond just "AI scrapers bad" or "hiding identity". Tor relays and VPNs are basically doing the same thing, except with clearer disclosure about what actually goes on.
tadfisher 21 hours ago [-]
Does there need to be a principled justification beyond that? I used to be on the side of the traffic, as in, it does not matter where traffic originates as long as it's not abusive. But the fact is that too many scrapers exist which are, in fact, bad. Their behavior is bad, their programming is bad, and they result in way too high costs for free infrastructure, thus they are morally bad.
I expect AT&T and Comcast to offer a residential proxy service any day now.
topranks 11 hours ago [-]
Absolutely.
Bear in mind the scrapers wouldn’t need to use these proxies were they not being blocked by the sites they are scraping. So it’s being used to evade blocks.
For some content the level of scraping is outweighing real users, driving up costs and pushing them towards more closed models.
Wikipedia for example make content available free, if you start hammering the site they will rate limit you to keep the lights on. If you need the data fast in bulk they have a paid program to get it without scraping. But some prefer to neither adhere to reasonable request limits nor pay for their use of the infra; instead they choose to pay these grifters to avoid the rate limits.
ff317 22 hours ago [-]
From the content hosting side (getting reamed by scrapers overloading infrastructure), the problem is that we have to be able to set "reasonable" ratelimits to share finite network uplink and server cpu resources between all of our real users and these scrapers.
When you can identify the nature of the traffic (quickly in realtime, based on simple deterministic rules), you can protect the resources: you can rate/concurrency -limit the AI scrapers in the name of saving resources for the real humans, effectively putting the scrapers in a lower priority band (which is how it generally worked for search engine scrapers before!).
The problem is they're using resiproxies to disperse and whitewash their traffic, making it extremely difficult to tell their requests apart from the legitimate human requests. They're basically lying to us about the origin, and thus denying us the ability to put them in a lower priority band than humans.
They may scrape us at, say, 25K reqs/second, but it's coming from 50K random residential eyeball IPs at an average rate of only 0.5 reqs/second/IP, and then they're intentionally lying with the UA and headers and other fingerprint details as best they can to "blend in" with the humans so that we can't differentiate.
Let's do an analogy: Imagine if there was a neighborhood grocery store you and all your neighbors rely on for food. It's cheap because they keep their margins low, and more importantly the next store down the road is like 50 miles further away. That store 50 miles down the road also charges double the price. Now they've decided to play arbitrage: they load up 100 employees in the back of an air conditioned semi, clothe them to look like local shoppers, park it 3 blocks from your neighborhood store hidden inside a fenced property, and have them all go in and buy out all the inventory in the store over the course of a couple hours. The store just looks like it's having a great sales day at first. All these customers waiting in line, each getting just a few things at a time. But two hours later, the store shelves are empty, the semi is loaded up, and they're headed 50 miles back to double the price and sell it to someone else. You go in to buy some veggies to cook dinner and there's nothing to buy.
We've been playing this game with AI scrapers and resiproxies for way too long, and someone needs to hold them accountable for their fraud.
gruez 22 hours ago [-]
All the arguments you made applies to VPNs or tor as well. I'm sure rightsholders would be very happy if VPNs are banned, because that gets rid of one avenue for pirating with impunity. Same goes with every ad network ever, which has to fight click fraud.
drdexebtjl 20 hours ago [-]
How exactly does that also apply to VPN or Tor?
Who's using VPNs and Tor to blend in their automated scraping traffic with real human traffic?
Who's using multiple VPNs or Tor exit nodes to avoid rate limits?
No one, but I would have no problem with that being illegal too.
topranks 11 hours ago [-]
VPN ranges at least are obvious so that’s different.
Tor less so but it doesn’t seem to be commonly used for this kind of abuse.
bigfishrunning 22 hours ago [-]
This is why I don't run a tor endpoint; possibly objectionable traffic I don't control sourced from my network. All it takes is one horrible request to come from your IP and you're on a list
thephyber 21 hours ago [-]
Perhaps.
But if these are popular apps / APIs, then the number of affected households is significant. Authorities / investigators will have to treat IPs as likely proxies and not the geolocation of the human initiating the request.
memcg 6 hours ago [-]
Is there enough 4K content available to justify replacing an older Samsung 1080P LCD? I still find free TVs on Craigslist. When I see 4K TVs running in demo mode at Costco I'm impressed, but at home watching World Cup over the air or on Fios at 1080P looks good enough. I don't pay extra for Netflix 4k and most Fios content is not 4K.
TurdF3rguson 22 hours ago [-]
It's not Smart TV apps specifically, it's all free apps. They have to monetize those somehow, don't they? And you get upset when you see ads, don't you?
Basically it's either this or pay for your apps.
recursive 22 hours ago [-]
Not sure if this is ironic, but I know it's possible for apps to exist without being monetized. I'm using Paint.net right now.
CursedSilicon 22 hours ago [-]
To parody the Arthur quote [1]
Do you really think somebody would do that? Just go write apps for the love of programming and not to make money?
Not ironic at all, and you want apps you use to be monetized because otherwise there's no incentive to support them. I feel like that's common sense.
owebmaster 22 hours ago [-]
Yes it's possible for the apps to exist but not the apps programmers if they can't make money to eat
zerobees 22 hours ago [-]
> Basically it's either this or pay for your apps.
And then paid apps show you ads and monetize anyway.
urbnspacecowboy 20 hours ago [-]
If you're not paying for the product, you are the product.
If you are paying for the product, you're still the product.
Indeed, if you're a paying customer, there's more incentive to push ads at you, not less, since you obviously have more money to spend. The only winning move is not to p(l)ay.
drnick1 21 hours ago [-]
> And you get upset when you see ads, don't you?
Yes and no. I understand that Youtube needs to generate revenue, has staff to pay, etc. About a decade ago, I got an occasional 10 second commercial at the start of a clip, and I could live with that. But Youtube pushed me too far when it started playing two consecutive commercials at regular intervals that cannot be skipped, and I now use uBlock or VacuumTube on all my devices.
TurdF3rguson 18 hours ago [-]
I solved that by paying for premium.
bigfishrunning 22 hours ago [-]
I pay for apps whenever possible, in some cases it just isn't. Also, you have to trust that paid apps aren't also doing this shit.
tabwidth 20 hours ago [-]
[dead]
ctippett 21 hours ago [-]
I absolutely adore my 2018 jailbroken LG OLED, although it pains me that everything I love about this TV are features the manufacturer actively discourages and wishes I never had access to.
lukax 22 hours ago [-]
Well, that's how data for training LLMs is scraped.
brikym 21 hours ago [-]
And price comparison sites big companies don't like since they want to price discriminate. There are positives to it.
handle584 15 hours ago [-]
Not only this, it also enables sneaker/pokemon/5090 scalping, Chinese/Russian using ChatGPT/Claude. A residential IP in the US is very valuable elsewhere.
h4kunamata 19 hours ago [-]
I have a 2018 Samsung QLED SmartTV, I use Pihole to block data collection and since it has Google DNS hardcoded in it, I use OPNSense Firewall rules to enforce any DNS request to Pihole.
My TV has only one AD that no longer shows for years now, LG is ADs all over the place. My home setup allows me to have a smartTV without compromises it.
Since it runs TizenOS, I can use my Linux PC to install remove apps from it like installing Jellyfin App so I do not depend on Samsung releasing it to the app store.
cullenking 21 hours ago [-]
I just implemented bot and crawler detection as well as ASN based blocking for our website, because I’ve seen a massive rise in scraping coming from VPNs and other networks that mix legit and illegitimate traffic to our service. My theory is that small companies are scraping the shit out of everything and selling results to llm creators. It’s going to be interesting to see this expand into residential internet providers through holes like this… wild new world!
xnx 21 hours ago [-]
What portion of Fox's acquisition thesis for Roku was activating residential proxies (distributed AI crawling!) across all the units?
kristianp 21 hours ago [-]
Is bypassing scraping blocks the main purpose of these residential proxy networks?
duskwuff 21 hours ago [-]
Yes. For instance, Bright Data describes itself, on its home page, as the "all in one platform for proxies and web scraping".
Oh, I'm sure there's all sorts of illicit use as well. But scraping is what the network is being actively marketed for, and it probably amounts to most of their traffic by volume.
hnburnsy 18 hours ago [-]
TV never connected to internet, streaming box, and streaming box on its own isolated vlan (or guest network)
throwawa14223 21 hours ago [-]
So is there a residential proxy blacklist I can run on my firewall? Any action I can take as an admin to put a stop to this?
topranks 11 hours ago [-]
It’s very tricky because the IPs are all on normal user ranges you can’t block without blocking those users.
The company behind this blog - spur.us - offer some paid services I think. There is also this project from Wikimedia which uses that data to produce more manageable lists:
Has anyone reversed their SDKs to run a swarm that captures enough traffic to see what requests are actually getting made?
topranks 10 hours ago [-]
A lot of web scraping. The ones that got KimWolf’d were/are doing a lot of DDoS (SYN floods etc).
pocksuppet 22 hours ago [-]
It'll be HTTPS but you might be able to know the website, if it proxies DNS or doesn't use ESNI.
londons_explore 14 hours ago [-]
This is a good thing.
If you could anonymously proxy from anywhere to anywhere else, the internet would be region-lock-free and anonymous again, just like it was to support it's boom in 1999.
Good on these guys I say. When it becomes normalized, we can integrate these 'privacy proxies' into desktop and mobile OS's too.
topranks 11 hours ago [-]
Nah it’s messing up peoples home internet, and massively abused to perform denial of service attacks and scraping of web content by large AI companies who are otherwise blocked.
Your vision of a randomly-routed mesh internet overlay is also not very scalable bandwidth or latency wise.
jhartikainen 13 hours ago [-]
Good point, hadn't thought at all of this kind of perspective. Though the fact it's some dodgy residential proxy provider that runs this stuff makes me feel like it isn't going to become available for something good.
ThePowerOfFuet 12 hours ago [-]
So you think until someone breaks your door down because of something sent from your connection.
whalesalad 21 hours ago [-]
I have a few LG OLED tv's. I do not ever connect them to the internet - I just treat them as dumb hdmi/dp displays. One is driven by an Apple TV, the other is connected to a Linux gaming pc. Haven't had any issues at all.
tulio_ribeiro 10 hours ago [-]
LG’s guidelines state:
- “Your app should only collect the minimum user data required for providing service and should avoid collecting unnecessary data.”
- “LG performs security reviews on submitted apps before distribution, using the vulnerability analyzing system.”
- “All app developers must complete and submit well-defined and comprehensible data safety information detailing collection, usage, and sharing of user data.” They explicitly classify the "IP address" under Device Identifier Information.
> Suspended : The app is suspended in the background.
cj 18 hours ago [-]
And the next sentence says this:
> The app can be suspended for a short time
Short time, short lived, not long running.
That doesn't make it okay obviously, just means the blast radius is limited.
dotancohen 8 hours ago [-]
I disagree. All it takes is one questionable HTTP request for CP or terrorist related materials to begin an investigation. Or, heaven forbid, pirate a Metallica album.
cj 7 hours ago [-]
I agree with your disagreement. Even though I’m the one you’re disagreeing with.
22 hours ago [-]
tumdum_ 22 hours ago [-]
For example OS running on Amazon fire stick 4K kills your background processes after ~20 minutes.
microcode 22 hours ago [-]
The consent screens say that they "may continue running in the background after you close the app".
doublerabbit 22 hours ago [-]
Walked past a TV and it was advertising a security guard.
Why does a TV need security software?
dewey 22 hours ago [-]
Because most people (HN is not a representative sample set) are not willing to pay the real price of a TV if it wouldn't be subsidized by adtech.
acheron 21 hours ago [-]
TVs were unsubsidized by ad tech up until 10 years ago, and I’m pretty sure most people bought TVs back then.
HDBaseT 21 hours ago [-]
I'm not sure the adtech is even enough to subsidize the price in a meaningful way.
Google’s global ad revenue equates to roughly $61 per user per year, most TV manufacturers would be unable to extract that much out per user, even with crazy levels of tracking, ads, etc.
I haven't used a modern TV in a very long time, but I can't imagine LG is extracting over $20 in ad revenue/data revenue per year. It might move the needle on <$500 displays, but when LG displays costing over $5,000 still have this spyware its hard to defend.
dewey 21 hours ago [-]
What makes you think LG would not be hitting the Google numbers (Instagram ad-free is ~$6 / month for example, roughly the same ballpark)? A device that's connected to a high speed internet connection, often allowed to do background tasks and being able to track all data being consumed through it (Streaming services, gaming etc.) is extremely valuable.
microcode 21 hours ago [-]
Indeed, many of these TVs serve ads by default on their screensavers and home screens.
21 hours ago [-]
bigfishrunning 22 hours ago [-]
It's been a very long time since they were given an option.
pixelmelt 21 hours ago [-]
Aren't consumer class dumb TVs gone?
dewey 21 hours ago [-]
Yes, that's kind of the point. If you have the choice between $500 black rectangle and $1000 black rectangle where the only difference is some boring privacy policy details most people will go with option 1.
wewtyflakes 20 hours ago [-]
The companies that make these TVs love that we are this point since they can now take away the subsidy, and you also coincidentally now have no option to buy a non-smart TV, so they are now collecting $ from both the purchase and from the ads. Tada! Grossness all around.
wmf 21 hours ago [-]
Windows needs antivirus so why wouldn't a TV? Unfortunately there's a lot of placebo software out there.
wmf 21 hours ago [-]
The concept of consent-based privacy has completely failed, first with GDPR then this.
It’s exhausting. It’s like every article is written by the same author and that author is also your coworker and personal assistant and also moonlights as Brian, a waiter at Chotchkie’s.
duckfruit 21 hours ago [-]
Exactly. This is like that Sci fi show where the whole world is taken over by an alien organism and everyone you meet is basically the same one person. The AI is also off-puttingly nice, just like the alien.
Retr0id 22 hours ago [-]
The page has scroll hijacking, too.
tantalor 21 hours ago [-]
Here's a bookmarklet which fixes that:
javascript:(function(){const e=['wheel','mousewheel','DOMMouseScroll','touchmove'];e.forEach(e=>{window.addEventListener(e,function(e){e.stopPropagation()},{capture:true,passive:true})});const t=e=>{if(!e)return;e.style.setProperty('overflow','auto','important');e.style.setProperty('overflow-y','auto','important');e.style.setProperty('overflow-x','visible','important');e.style.setProperty('scroll-behavior','auto','important');e.style.setProperty('position','static','important')};t(document.documentElement);t(document.body);const o=document.createElement('style');o.innerHTML='html, body { overflow: auto !important; overflow-y: auto !important; scroll-behavior: auto !important; position: static !important; height: auto !important; } ::-webkit-scrollbar { width: 12px !important; display: block !important; }';document.head.appendChild(o);})();
kristianp 21 hours ago [-]
Yes very LLM (Chatgpt?) style, short sentences e.g.:
"The app goes away. The proxy does not."
"The app is the wrapper. The residential IP is the product."
Headers are very chatgpt style too:
"Why this is dangerous"
The information in the article is valid and they've done the work to get the data, but the LLM style is irritating.
duckfruit 21 hours ago [-]
Yeah, wading through an endless stream of AI slop articles posted here (and elsewhere like on reddit) is exhausting. I suspect I won't be coming here as often anymore, which is a shame, because I used to find this site very informative and engaging.
Though we've always had our fair share of marketing and growth hack posts this turn with AI is just a different level of frustrating. The dead internet theory is unfortunately very real.
knollimar 23 hours ago [-]
This feels straight out of Silicon Valley (show)
bigfishrunning 22 hours ago [-]
It also feels straight out of Silicon Valley (place)
72027372920 19 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
nekusar 22 hours ago [-]
LOL I posted a few days ago with bullshit from LG smart TVs.
I got this a few months ago -- 4k, solid brightness, and ok color.
Is it the OMG BEST? no. But I Disabled wifi, and even the channel display.
I use it with an apple TV with CEC on the TV -- I turn on the apple tv, TV turns on straight to apple interface. I turn off from the apple remote, TV turns off.
It's effectively "an apple TV" -- I'm happy.
Why not just get a (presumably subsidized) smart TV instead, and skipping the premium? It'd also be not disconnected from the internet, and despite vague HN/reddit speculation that TVs have cell modems in them, that has yet to be confirmed.
While I have WiFi disabled on the TV, I do like that I can still hook up a broadcast TV antenna and have the TV scan for channels and all that, which Apple TV can’t do
$627 - commercial display
~$200 - comparable invasive options
I think it's much more likely TVs make deals with cell phone companies and offer hardware that only works with their cellular service. Many pay more than $100 a month on their phone bill to pay off a phone. People might accept another $20 or so for a large screen TV with bundled apps-costs can be kept down for the carrier with ads and tracking that can't be bypasssed as it will use the carrier's network connection.
Kinda on the opposite recommendation that the fw it shipped with had to meet SOME minimally functional bar and every update after that is an opportunity to make it worse.
- https://github.com/ow/samsung-frame-art (older models)
- https://github.com/TheFab21/ha-samsungtv-smart (newer models)
All you gotta do is add an Apple TV and you got everything they would give you. And they make nice margins.
Apple seems to have next to no interest in making displays at all. We are lucky whenever a new one gets announced.
“Get off your high horse” is the phrase I flipped because I was grandstanding.
What phrase are you referencing?
(Also: never paypig, never subscribe!)
[0] https://plasma-bigscreen.org/
There's plenty you can trash Amazon for, but at least on Prime Video, you can subscribe to the other services through them, watch on any browser, and reliably cancel easily when you're done.
A better solution would be to root the damn TV and neuter its spyware/adware crap.
I keep the Apple TV remote around for extremely rare situations where that doesn’t work but even then, my cell phone has a built in Apple TV remote as well, which makes it even less necessary
That sounds like a lot of work. I don't want to sign up to this much work for every product I own that I want an iota of control over.
So I would argue if this is "better" by any stretch of the word
the Apple TV provides hdmi cec, which should control your television through the hdmi cable.
People forget the reasons TVs got cheaper is because smart TVs are heavily subsidized with ads and your watch data.
I have the most "low tech" home of any of my peers, intentionally.
Based on the headline I thought it’s the built-in apps.
Just browsing the list of apps raises eyebrows for even the most non-tech audiences. 99% of it is spam, with maybe 1% being well known apps like YouTube.
The rest are weird IPTV Players, Wallpaper apps. It feels like a portal into 2009 apps, but its not.
1. Desoline (based in Netanya (Israel)
2. Bright Data (based in Israel)
Interesting.
(I didn’t draw any conclusions.)
In fact, it's worse: my problem with NK is with its leadership, as I don't have anything against its citizens. I can't say the same for the state of Israel. May they reap what they've sown.
Why do you think this rampant abuse is a good thing? What benefit does this provide to society?
I expect AT&T and Comcast to offer a residential proxy service any day now.
Bear in mind the scrapers wouldn’t need to use these proxies were they not being blocked by the sites they are scraping. So it’s being used to evade blocks.
For some content the level of scraping is outweighing real users, driving up costs and pushing them towards more closed models.
Wikipedia for example make content available free, if you start hammering the site they will rate limit you to keep the lights on. If you need the data fast in bulk they have a paid program to get it without scraping. But some prefer to neither adhere to reasonable request limits nor pay for their use of the infra; instead they choose to pay these grifters to avoid the rate limits.
When you can identify the nature of the traffic (quickly in realtime, based on simple deterministic rules), you can protect the resources: you can rate/concurrency -limit the AI scrapers in the name of saving resources for the real humans, effectively putting the scrapers in a lower priority band (which is how it generally worked for search engine scrapers before!).
The problem is they're using resiproxies to disperse and whitewash their traffic, making it extremely difficult to tell their requests apart from the legitimate human requests. They're basically lying to us about the origin, and thus denying us the ability to put them in a lower priority band than humans.
They may scrape us at, say, 25K reqs/second, but it's coming from 50K random residential eyeball IPs at an average rate of only 0.5 reqs/second/IP, and then they're intentionally lying with the UA and headers and other fingerprint details as best they can to "blend in" with the humans so that we can't differentiate.
Let's do an analogy: Imagine if there was a neighborhood grocery store you and all your neighbors rely on for food. It's cheap because they keep their margins low, and more importantly the next store down the road is like 50 miles further away. That store 50 miles down the road also charges double the price. Now they've decided to play arbitrage: they load up 100 employees in the back of an air conditioned semi, clothe them to look like local shoppers, park it 3 blocks from your neighborhood store hidden inside a fenced property, and have them all go in and buy out all the inventory in the store over the course of a couple hours. The store just looks like it's having a great sales day at first. All these customers waiting in line, each getting just a few things at a time. But two hours later, the store shelves are empty, the semi is loaded up, and they're headed 50 miles back to double the price and sell it to someone else. You go in to buy some veggies to cook dinner and there's nothing to buy.
We've been playing this game with AI scrapers and resiproxies for way too long, and someone needs to hold them accountable for their fraud.
Who's using VPNs and Tor to blend in their automated scraping traffic with real human traffic?
Who's using multiple VPNs or Tor exit nodes to avoid rate limits?
No one, but I would have no problem with that being illegal too.
Tor less so but it doesn’t seem to be commonly used for this kind of abuse.
But if these are popular apps / APIs, then the number of affected households is significant. Authorities / investigators will have to treat IPs as likely proxies and not the geolocation of the human initiating the request.
Basically it's either this or pay for your apps.
Do you really think somebody would do that? Just go write apps for the love of programming and not to make money?
[1] https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRGIV3u...
And then paid apps show you ads and monetize anyway.
If you are paying for the product, you're still the product.
Indeed, if you're a paying customer, there's more incentive to push ads at you, not less, since you obviously have more money to spend. The only winning move is not to p(l)ay.
Yes and no. I understand that Youtube needs to generate revenue, has staff to pay, etc. About a decade ago, I got an occasional 10 second commercial at the start of a clip, and I could live with that. But Youtube pushed me too far when it started playing two consecutive commercials at regular intervals that cannot be skipped, and I now use uBlock or VacuumTube on all my devices.
My TV has only one AD that no longer shows for years now, LG is ADs all over the place. My home setup allows me to have a smartTV without compromises it.
Since it runs TizenOS, I can use my Linux PC to install remove apps from it like installing Jellyfin App so I do not depend on Samsung releasing it to the app store.
The company behind this blog - spur.us - offer some paid services I think. There is also this project from Wikimedia which uses that data to produce more manageable lists:
https://gitlab.wikimedia.org/repos/sre/CIDERGRINDER
If you could anonymously proxy from anywhere to anywhere else, the internet would be region-lock-free and anonymous again, just like it was to support it's boom in 1999.
Good on these guys I say. When it becomes normalized, we can integrate these 'privacy proxies' into desktop and mobile OS's too.
Your vision of a randomly-routed mesh internet overlay is also not very scalable bandwidth or latency wise.
- “Your app should only collect the minimum user data required for providing service and should avoid collecting unnecessary data.”
- “LG performs security reviews on submitted apps before distribution, using the vulnerability analyzing system.”
- “All app developers must complete and submit well-defined and comprehensible data safety information detailing collection, usage, and sharing of user data.” They explicitly classify the "IP address" under Device Identifier Information.
https://webostv.developer.lge.com/develop/guides/privacy-gui...
Blatant lies.
https://webostv.developer.lge.com/develop/getting-started/ap...
> The app can be suspended for a short time
Short time, short lived, not long running.
That doesn't make it okay obviously, just means the blast radius is limited.
Why does a TV need security software?
Google’s global ad revenue equates to roughly $61 per user per year, most TV manufacturers would be unable to extract that much out per user, even with crazy levels of tracking, ads, etc.
I haven't used a modern TV in a very long time, but I can't imagine LG is extracting over $20 in ad revenue/data revenue per year. It might move the needle on <$500 displays, but when LG displays costing over $5,000 still have this spyware its hard to defend.
70% AI.
The only content not flagged?
Copy and pasted PR comments.
Invisible Unicode characters, triads, unnecessary markdown.
Good work, obviated by bloviating. Readers dropping off near-instantly.
A company leaving a slop trail behind its wake.
AI DDOSing should be shameful.
https://www.folklore.org/Saving_Lives.html
The information in the article is valid and they've done the work to get the data, but the LLM style is irritating.
Though we've always had our fair share of marketing and growth hack posts this turn with AI is just a different level of frustrating. The dead internet theory is unfortunately very real.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48618246
I still do not know how the damned thing got internet.