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.
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…”
Samsung has been abusive format least a decade
Sony has been abusive for at least two
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
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
If you choose to hack your own TV, you can just stream this mp3 to servers:
First send this:
Then stream this:
On repeat
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.
To record us? Nah, to make it more useful than just metadata analysis, yeah, I could buy that
I don’t want a smart TV… my TV should just be a display.
It should be a hub with a display.
Drink verification can!
I’m happy with my $200 non-wifiable Insignia and hope it lasts a long time.
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.
Wow, that quote is pure gold.
Unregulated chaebols are just as dangerous as Kim Jong Un.
How do I find the camera to cover it?
I blacklisted my TV thru my router and I use a Google tv streamer
I have a tv that I can easily connect to my linux laptop but which can’t connect to internet on its own. So it basically acts as a big computer screen. This way I atleast need to manage just one exit point.
I say things in front of my cellphone and it advertises revelent content to me too
Ancient ass news.
Mmmm… ass news.
It’s ancient-ass ass-news, yes.
