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I want my smart Android TV to be dumb again
(www.androidauthority.com)
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this post was submitted on 10 Oct 2024
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The author of the article is under the mistaken impression that bundling the "smart" features into the TV increases the price. It's actually the opposite.
By injecting ads and bloatware into the TVs, the manufacturers earn more money, by far, than the cost of the features. A dumb TV would cost more.
The best solution is to decouple them; get the cheapest TV you can with the video quality/size you want, then attach your own device to stream content. I use a modified Fire Stick due to price, mostly with Stremio/Torrentio/Debrid, but there are lots of options.
that works until they start connecting to wifi networks that are open, or to which they somehow got to know the credentials
Fake news, as far as I can tell. Lots of claims this is happening, but nobody has brought receipts. Considering how easy it would be to catch, and how likely illegal it is to connect to and use networks without permission, this is definitely an urban legend.
I don't know of this is happening, but I don't see how a small automatic updare couldn't "add this feature"
how easy it would be?
Super easy. Anyone who knows networking could detect new device connections on an open network they set up. I know next to nothing about networking and I could set it up in 10 minutes, 5 of which would be finding my old router in the basement.
So I'm not going to give this a moment's thought until someone brings receipts. It's not hard to check if this is happening.
assuming that it will connect to your network. if it connects anywhere else, good luck to figure it out. at that point you can throw a laptop with capturing all nearby wifi traffic and hope you somehow recognize the TV if it appears among the possibly dozens of other devices
I don't think you're understanding how trivial this is to detect:
Set up an open WiFi network in an area without any other open WiFi networks. i.e. almost anywhere outside of dense urban areas. Then you don't even need to inspect traffic, just look at connected devices in admin controls. No devices should be connected aside from your monitoring device.
There's no way the TV manufacturers are going to risk the legal quagmire that would come from this when there's no plausible way to keep it remotely secret.
This, or show an annoying popup over the screen saying it can't connect to network and wifi needs to be configured