Posted by tortilla 6 days ago
I appreciate them caring about what you watch being recorded but it’s pretty clear too they only care because the tv manufacturers are not “American Companies”. Walmart is getting special treatment and will be allowed to operate
Also, if i remember what I read well, he may not be aware that Samsung is not Chinese.
This explains why Vizio, who is owned by Walmart, was not sued.
Libertarian PD, by Tom O'Donnell [1]
I was shooting heroin and reading “The Fountainhead” in the front seat of my privately owned police cruiser when a call came in. I put a quarter in the radio to activate it. It was the chief.
“Bad news, detective. We got a situation.”
“What? Is the mayor trying to ban trans fats again?”
“Worse. Somebody just stole four hundred and forty-seven million dollars’ worth of bitcoins.”
The heroin needle practically fell out of my arm. “What kind of monster would do something like that? Bitcoins are the ultimate currency: virtual, anonymous, stateless. They represent true economic freedom, not subject to arbitrary manipulation by any government. Do we have any leads?”
“Not yet. But mark my words: we’re going to figure out who did this and we’re going to take them down … provided someone pays us a fair market rate to do so.”
“Easy, chief,” I said. “Any rate the market offers is, by definition, fair.”
He laughed. “That’s why you’re the best I got, Lisowski. Now you get out there and find those bitcoins.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m on it.”
I put a quarter in the siren. Ten minutes later, I was on the scene. It was a normal office building, strangled on all sides by public sidewalks. I hopped over them and went inside.
“Home Depot™ Presents the Police!®” I said, flashing my badge and my gun and a small picture of Ron Paul. “Nobody move unless you want to!” They didn’t.
“Now, which one of you punks is going to pay me to investigate this crime?” No one spoke up.
“Come on,” I said. “Don’t you all understand that the protection of private property is the foundation of all personal liberty?”
It didn’t seem like they did.
“Seriously, guys. Without a strong economic motivator, I’m just going to stand here and not solve this case. Cash is fine, but I prefer being paid in gold bullion or autographed Penn Jillette posters.”
Nothing. These people were stonewalling me. It almost seemed like they didn’t care that a fortune in computer money invented to buy drugs was missing.
I figured I could wait them out. I lit several cigarettes indoors. A pregnant lady coughed, and I told her that secondhand smoke is a myth. Just then, a man in glasses made a break for it.
“Subway™ Eat Fresh and Freeze, Scumbag!®” I yelled.
Too late. He was already out the front door. I went after him.
“Stop right there!” I yelled as I ran. He was faster than me because I always try to avoid stepping on public sidewalks. Our country needs a private-sidewalk voucher system, but, thanks to the incestuous interplay between our corrupt federal government and the public-sidewalk lobby, it will never happen.
I was losing him. “Listen, I’ll pay you to stop!” I yelled. “What would you consider an appropriate price point for stopping? I’ll offer you a thirteenth of an ounce of gold and a gently worn ‘Bob Barr ‘08’ extra-large long-sleeved men’s T-shirt!”
He turned. In his hand was a revolver that the Constitution said he had every right to own. He fired at me and missed. I pulled my own gun, put a quarter in it, and fired back. The bullet lodged in a U.S.P.S. mailbox less than a foot from his head. I shot the mailbox again, on purpose.
“All right, all right!” the man yelled, throwing down his weapon. “I give up, cop! I confess: I took the bitcoins.”
“Why’d you do it?” I asked, as I slapped a pair of Oikos™ Greek Yogurt Presents Handcuffs® on the guy.
“Because I was afraid.”
“Afraid?”
“Afraid of an economic future free from the pernicious meddling of central bankers,” he said. “I’m a central banker.”
I wanted to coldcock the guy. Years ago, a central banker killed my partner. Instead, I shook my head.
“Let this be a message to all your central-banker friends out on the street,” I said. “No matter how many bitcoins you steal, you’ll never take away the dream of an open society based on the principles of personal and economic freedom.”
He nodded, because he knew I was right. Then he swiped his credit card to pay me.
[1] https://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/l-p-d-libertari...
The lack of a capital L is because I'm not whole hog on the "Libertarian" party's kool-aid. In fact, I often argue against much of it as it runs contrary to individual liberty.
On this topic specifically, privacy is an integral part of individual liberty. So claiming to care about privacy, only to simplistically dunk on the more general subject is just odd.
Furthermore, elsewhere in this thread you've espoused the idea of examining arguments on their merits and not who is making them. So it's directly hypocritical to be dismissing my argument based on a quick self-description that I only threw out to mitigate the dynamic of destructionist/fascist cheerleaders writing off all dissent like it's only coming from progressive democrats with blue hair.
Worst take ever. So mid as to be published in a major publication.
Also do you have anything to say about my other points? Your other comments were seemingly substantive, but now you're just being combative for combativeness's sake.
You are making points about their "movement" and generalities about what those politicians do. I don't care about their movement or their general behavior, because I will take this win for privacy to the extent that it is successful at getting devices like this more regulated or (unlikely) eliminated.
Do you think that Trump's coalition is internally values-consistent? I sure don't; but they effectively made abortion illegal in a lot of places, and it seemed to make them happy like it had been a long term goal of theirs or something.
A fundamental difficulty is that there is very little legal basis for a right to privacy. An AG is incapable of changing that, especially after commercial surveillance practices have been around for decades (precluding common-law approaches to novel behavior). Legislatures are where we need constructive action on this topic.
Which is why the generally performative behavior of the destructionists on the vast majority of causes they claim to champion is highly relevant. I'd say the few "successful goals" of the destructionist movement (criminalizing abortion, jackboots attacking minorities, appointing destructionist judges) are exceptions that prove the rule on how generally non-constructive their pushes are.
The American Government wants to have the cake and eat it too, as per usual. They want to leave the massive column of the economy that is surveillance capitalism intact and operating, and making them money, and they want to make sure those scary communists can't do the same. Unfortunately there isn't really a way to take down one without taking down the other, unless you legally enshrine that only American corporations have a right to spy on Americans. And (at time of comment anyway) they seem to not want to openly say the reason is just naked nationalism/racism.
> In August 2015, Vizio acquired Cognitive Media Networks, Inc, a provider of automatic content recognition (ACR). Cognitive Media Networks was subsequently renamed Inscape Data. Inscape functioned as an independent entity until the end of 2020, when it was combined with Vizio Ads and SmartCast; the three divisions combining to operate as a single unit.[1]
But I'm sure Texans are fully aware and consented to this, right?
Sure the method is different but it’s the same goal. Company x learns your interests so It can monetize you by selling to advertisers
Anyways, the whole thing sucks for consumer privacy and needs to be outlawed. The problem is that companies come up with unique, tricky ways of exploiting you, and people can never fully understand it without a lot of effort. Someone might be ok using Google and seeing contextual ads, but wouldn’t be ok if they knew Google was saving a screenshot of their browser every second and uploading and reselling it. The first can feel innocuous, the second feels evil.
It's all garbage all the way down.
Users are tracked without real consent, advertisers still waste budgets, and everyone loses except the platforms collecting the data.
What’s interesting is that you can actually build effective ads without spying at all — by targeting intent signals instead of identities, and rewarding users transparently for engagement.
The tech is already there, but the incentives are still backwards.
I'm surprised they haven't switched to using DoH, which would prevent this from working.
Regardless, what is the benefit of putting the TV on the network but preventing it from doing DNS lookups anyway, even if you could be sure you succeed?
Modern cars have cellular modems, I unplugged mine, and would not hesitate to take apart a TV and physically rip off the modem.
https://www.resmed.com/en-us/products/cpap/machines/airsense...
For bandwidth, maybe. It's still going to add cost to the BOM. They'll have to recoup that somehow. Say a 5G modem costs $20 (random number). For it to actually make money, it'll need to be otherwise not connected to the internet, otherwise it can just use wifi instead. Out of 100 people, how many do you think won't connect it to the internet for privacy reasons? 1? 5? 10? Keep in mind, if they don't connect to the internet, they'll need to go out and get another device to watch netflix or whatever, so they're highly incentivized to. Say 10 out of 100 don't, and with this sneaky backdoor you now can sell ads to them. For that privilege, you paid $200 per disconnected TV, because for every disconnected TV with a 5G module, you need to have a 5G module in 9 other TVs that were already connected to the internet. How could you ever hope to recoup that expense?
again the above is the plan, reality often changes.
The most vulnerable part might be the antenna? Required by laws of physics to be a certain size and shape, and is not easily integrated into another more essential component?
If found, it can be removed entirely, or replaced with a dummy load to satisfy any presence detection circuits. But radiation can be minimized or eliminated.
Now obviously a device can choose not to function (or to be especially annoying in its UI) if it doesn't find a network. But people take cars (and TVs) to places with no WiFi or mobile coverage, and I don't know how the device manufacturers deal with that.
[1] https://www.derstandard.de/story/3000000298248/hearing-in-la...
Paxton, however, doesn't give one iota of damn about individual freedom. So, this is either a misdirection, shakedown or revenge.
Unfortunately, we don't have Molly Ivins around anymore to tell us what is really going on here in the Texas Laboratory for Bad Government.
This is about being in the news as much as possible. He is in a close 3 way race for the 2026 Republican spot for US Senate. The other two are current old-school conservative senator John Cornyn, and new comer MAGA Wesley Hunt (but not as MAGA as Paxton). Lots of in-fighting over funding, so Paxton is making sure to get in the news as much as possible.
Throughout the year he has been in the news for things that are useful like this and another suit against a utility company for causing a fire and others for typical maga things like lawsuit to stop harris county (Houston) funding legal services for immigrants facing deportation or immigrant-serving nonprofits or a "tip-line" for bathroom enforcement or lawsuits against doctors...it goes on and on and on. It's a page out of the Trump playblook, its like watching a trump clone. And thats the point.
There's only so much time in the day, only so much life to live. Could a blog post written by the worst person you know have a good point, even though it's titled something like "An argument in favor of kicking puppies" by Satan himself? I mean, true, I haven't read it, yet. There could be a sound, logical argument buried within.
This is also what "The Boy Who Cried Wolf" teaches, essentially. Trust is hard-won, and easily squandered.
"A lie is around the world before the truth has finished tying its shoes."
"Flood the Zone" is why some of us are so exhausted, though.
In these instances, the argument has to come from someone who is self-aware enough of the short-circuit to say "okay, look, I am going to address that elephant" — but mostly, that's not what happens.
Thankfully in this case, all we need get through is the title.
Roman Polanski and Woody Allen: terrible humans, but they have still made some of the best films that exist.
This guy does nothing good on purpose.
It's always important to read the fine print. That would be part of evaluating an argument on its merits. His lawsuit over Tylenol + autism is easily rejected on its merits. That means nothing about this issue.
.its an insane lawsuit, there are basically two outcomes crazy side effects from his lawsuit:
Tvs are banned. (Possibly can only texas permitted tv)
Or if he loses, which might be his donors goal of him litigating so terribly, all your data now belongs to the companies.
Theres no consumer friendly option here
I like the suggested "Don't Upload My Bits" backronym.
I currently have volume control on my TV, one on the OS on the computer that drives it and one on the application that makes the picture. That is only half the problem
https://www.reddit.com/r/techsupport/comments/pblj86/windows...
I own a 60 year old black and white tv. If the volume knob vanished people would know the problem is in my head.
In the life of my last TV (10+ yrs), I've had to switch out that separate box three times. It would have sucked & been way more expensive to have had to replace the TV each time.
Firmware can be updated, sure, but there's the risk of some internal component failing. There's the risk of the services I want to use not being compatible. I'd also prefer to use an operating system I'm familiar with, because, well, I'm familiar with it, rather than some custom firmware from a TV company whose goal is to sell your data, not make a good user experience...
Of course, this ties back to the enshittification of the Internet. Every company is trying to be a data broker now though, because they see it as free passive income.
I have a TV that's only about 5-6 years old and has a built in Roku. It mostly works fine, but the built in hardware is simply not fast enough to play some streaming services, specifically some stuff on F1TV. And before anyone asks, it's not a bandwidth problem--I have gigabit fiber and the TV is using ethernet.
Anyway, between that, general UI sluggishness and the proliferation of ads in the Roku interface, I switched to an Apple TV and haven't looked back.
Yes I know there is a theoretical capability for it to connect to unsecured WIFI. No one still has unsecured WIFI anymore
And instead of a full brick, let's just downgrade to 360p and call it an "expiration of your complementary free Enhanced Video trial".
Same thing that prevents your phone manufacturer from adding a firmware level backdoor that uploads all your nudes to the mothership 1 day after the warranty expires. At some point you just have to assume they're not going to screw you over.
That'd be quite naive in my opinion.
Google devices are out because they are developed by a advertising company.
The Roku CEO outright said they sell Roku devices below costs to advertise to you.
The stick is $30 and trivially replaced. The TV is closer to $1000. Worst-case scenario I'll just hook up an HTPC or Blue-Ray player to the TV.
I've literally never seen a router with a guest wifi enabled by default, from any ISP or otherwise - is that a common thing where you live?
The trick was finding TV's and what not that don't need an Internet connection. Vizio was the only brand I could find that still had just dumb tv flat screens, believe it or not.
I isolate smart TVs and other IOT devices to a separate network/subnet, and usually block their network access unless they need an update.
A DUMB TV costs $x, while a badly behaved smart TV costs $y up front, plus $z per hour for the next few years, where y is potentially slightly less than x.
I only found this out because I thought my 15 year old plasma TV had died, but it ended up being the power cord.
They cost more because they aren’t subsidised by this junk.
It’s a good hypothesis. Every one I’ve seen is the consumer version in a more-rugged exterior running different software, so I’m sceptical.
I'm not certain of this, but I'm fairly confident it's a factor.
So the answer is no, it doesn't.
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/06/windows-recall-demands-an...
As long as there are no clear laws this will only get worse. Imagine a TV with an e-sim. There will be no way to turn the connection off unless you pack it in aluminum foil.
Talking about e-sim, Texas should also sue all modern car brands. Most cars today are online and spy on your driving behavior.