Nearly half of LG smart TV apps contain residential proxy SDKs

I'll get on my high horse and say you can get solid "DID/Commercial" TVs for not that much more: https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1788343-REG/samsung_q...

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.

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!)

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.

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.

TV never connected to internet, streaming box, and streaming box on its own isolated vlan (or guest network)

"Publishes with the most proxy flagged apps"

1. Desoline (based in Netanya (Israel)

2. Bright Data (based in Israel)

Interesting.

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.

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.

This needs to be illegal.

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.

Well, that's how data for training LLMs is scraped.

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!

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.

I have my smart tv on a separate router and it's powered off most of the time. An accident of wiring.

What portion of Fox's acquisition thesis for Roku was activating residential proxies (distributed AI crawling!) across all the units?

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?

Has anyone reversed their SDKs to run a swarm that captures enough traffic to see what requests are actually getting made?

this is a way smaller deal than acr. i personally don’t connect my smart tv to my network and use an apple tv instead

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.

Maybe Valve will make a TV next

I imagine most smart TVs don't support multitasking or apps staying alive in the background, hopefully?

Walked past a TV and it was advertising a security guard.

Why does a TV need security software?

The concept of consent-based privacy has completely failed, first with GDPR then this.

12 minute article.

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

This feels straight out of Silicon Valley (show)

Good. Fuck Cloudflare and other internet gatekeepers. Confuse their signal as much as possible.

LOL I posted a few days ago with bullshit from LG smart TVs.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48618246

I still do not know how the damned thing got internet.