On the other hand, as a Christian Conservative, I used to have people sniping my profile and replying nastily to me when I commented on completely unrelated topics, just because my ideals didn’t align with theirs. Or, auto banning me from subs based on which subs I commented to. In that way, hiding my profile has helped me, because Reddit as a whole is extremely left wing.
Unfortunately, what you state is also true and it is now harder to avoid replying to bots, obvious shills, or trolls.
yeah reddit but also its old as time I see people do it on HN as well
this type of behavior just comes from a deep place of misery and anger
the amount of time someone spends online is directly related to their socioeconomic status
someone with a rich vibrant and wholesome life with economic comforts to do travelling and hobbies dont have time to go through somebodys comment history and spend time judging and trying to instigate others
someone without those things are going to be online all day.
I have stopped using Reddit for several months now and haven’t looked back. For a time I tried to engage but it was in a sea of far left ideology that was very resistant to any discourse. It happens on HN when the topic is political though some level of descent still flourishes here as opposed to getting downvoted, flagged, or banned like on Reddit.
Those redditors are here on HN and it has inherited a lot of the same far left ideology. You can see it common place now, stalking comment history, flagging so that they will get banned. It's not even necessarily political but having different opinions or not agreeing with narratives they subscribe to, exactly the same flaws that Reddit has.
I've stopped engaging on HN a lot because of the characteristic change I notice especially since 2020.
I believe it’s checkbox-filling in the acquisition process for enterprise contracts, like a lot of other half-baked capabilities in their flagship products.
It doesn’t matter how they work, it matters you can tell leadership “yes, they have that too” to maintain existing contracts and vendor relationships.
You’re precisely right. In corporate purchases many times it’s not the best product that is bought but instead the one that can answer yes to the most questions.
I offended a coworker by asking him to not send me AI written things because they’re wrong in subtle ways and overly verbose. I’m glad someone else shares my opinion.
I'd expect that from a Christian as well, but not in the channel they bill as "I explore the world using science. That is pretty much all there is to it" in the description.
It's even more than fine to have a channel which mixes both, just don't claim science is all there is going to be to it.
Also debunked in the Gamer Nexus video. The TV will scan for public wifis and connect. Watching the video, it also seemed like a "missed opportunity" for LG to not create a mesh network of LG devices that would help eachother connect to the internet. So the LG device on your neighbours wifi might help your not connected TV to some tasty internet access. Or at least to unload its cache of A(V)CR fingerprints.
There are so many misunderstandings about that video. Which ain’t surprising as it was longer than a movie and mainly nonsense about what it can do rather than what it does do.
Agreed. I’ve come to believe that the video’s benefit from bringing awareness to the issue is outweighed by how misleading it is. Massive amounts of the video were “we hacked the TV and made it do [bad thing]” and was reported as “LG TVs do [bad thing]!”
Did we watch a different video? The point of hacking the TV, and making it do bad thing. Was to explain the privacy issues inherent with the hardware capabilites for video and audio recording, which combined with multiple known exploits to gain access.
It's a long video, and they cover more than one issue. Please explain what, in particular, you found was misleading.
So a Linux computer with a microphone and network access can send that mocrohpine to the Internet or record it. That’s obvious. That it can scan for WiFi networks is implied by the fact it had WiFi chip, and even exposes that functionality via the front end is also obvious. That it participates in MdNS is known for the fact it’s an mdns target.
What would be worthwhile is what is actually sent. The breathless reporting on it suggests it scans your network, I’ve never seen anything in my router logs to show any kind of port scan or even arp scan.
The only thing that’s seem to be a problem is the ages old adtech which the tech industry tends to be quite happy with as it pts so much of the bills for so many companies
All of the things you mention here are fairly obvious. But that doesn't make any of the reporting misleading. The parts that record audio, transcribes audio, scans networks for devices, and perhaps more importantly persists all of these records, combined with easily exploitable vulnerabilities, was one of the issues raised.
> What would be worthwhile is what is actually sent.
For you, perhaps? But again, that was covered in an earlier segment.
You still have to point out the part that was misleading.
Disclaimer: I haven’t yet watched the video, but on the point of security: yes, when data is collected without my clear approval and full understanding, and is not done in a secure way, it matters all the more.
It’s of little concern to me that the threat is theoretical when it’s only a matter of time before a script kiddy or some bored guy with a YouTube tutorial and $20 of AI credits sets it up himself, let alone well-funded groups or motivated actors.
Unmanaged IOT devices in general are not to be trusted. LG isn’t leading with transparency nor are they big enough like Microsoft or Apple to put out bug bounties and audits with hundreds of thousands of eyeballs on them. They make the device that sits in the corner of your living room and is forgotten about. They’re being cagey about the data they collect and how they collect it, and I’m asked to take the risk on “trust me bro” and “you’re required to tell anyone within earshot of the TV’s mic that they’re being recorded”? Fuck that.
Never mind that data being exposed even if encrypted is a risk all its own: the collection can start now, and whenever it’s detected and blocked it’s too late. It can be cracked later whenever they have the tech and the time.
I don't think it's unreasonable to think that the television would search for unsecured wi-fi or other ways of connecting to the internet without user input.
I agree, it would be easy for a security research to discover if a TV tried to do that and would result in an even greater stuffstorm than LG is dealing with now or that Samsung dealt with in the past.
It’s absolutely unreasonable. Each subscriber has a certain amount of fixed bandwidth available to them, and there are other devices connected to their network. By connecting an unauthorized device, that device now has both the ability to consume bandwidth to which it’s not entitled, and potentially scan the network for vulnerabilities.
It’s basically stealing.
Would you want some device connecting to your network that is not under your control?
And before you answer “well, you should lock it down,” yes, that’s true, but we do not blame the victim if they fail to do so. An unlocked door is not an invitation.
I'm not sure if any TVs currently do this, but they could connect to unsecured public WiFi without the user doing anything, if one were available with no password. Fortunately such networks aren't that common most places, but it's not a big leap from the sketchy things LG and other companies do. They could also put SIMs in them if they wanted. Again, I don't know that any do that, but I wouldn't put it past them. I'm not that paranoid, but I don't trust them to be up front and ethical.
A TV not on the Internet is basically worthless these days, unless you have a third-party streaming device like a Fire or Shield--and then you're just moving the trust point from the TV itself to the streaming device, and the same concerns exist. Do you trust Amazon any more than you trust LG?
I'm not sure of the current state of it, but a few years back specturm was selling access to a private network based on consumer routers. Tmobile could partner with them so that one of their customers could go through spectrum instead of the cell towers in cases where connections were spotty.
That's exactly the sort of thing I could see LG piggy backing on. Your neighbor might have spectrum so the LG TV connects to it's private network to phone home.
Xfinity/Comcast does the same thing. By default, the router they provide has a separate WiFi network supporting their distributed WiFi service. It's only for their customers, and it's not an open no-password network, but I'm certain they would offer it to any company that paid for access. They also have WiFi APs on telephone poles to broaden coverage.
If you live in a dense city, there's a good chance you can reach an open network. When I lived in midtown Manhattan, there were around 500 SSIDs reachable from my apartment.
> A TV not on the Internet is basically worthless these days, unless you have a third-party streaming device like a Fire or Shield--and then you're just moving the trust point from the TV itself to the streaming device, and the same concerns exist.
We use a Kubuntu Linux laptop behind the TV with a wireless mouse and keyboard (for searching and stuff), stream in Chrome, works great. And yes, we trust this combination.
> Do you trust Amazon any more than you trust LG?
We don't use Amazon device products just because we use Kubuntu Linux on PC's in our home but yes based on LG's behavior we trust Amazon more and we don't put our LG TV or any of our LG appliances we bought a few years ago, on the Internet.
I have a 10-year-old LG TV that runs webOS 3. The first update slowed it down - not that it was particularly fast to begin with - and every subsequent update made it even slower.
It also constantly nags you to update the firmware. You can’t just refuse once; every time you turn on the TV, it asks you again.
I won’t make the same mistake the next time I go shopping for a TV.
Forgot to mention - there were no improvements whatsoever in terms of functionality.
Agreed. I leave my tv disconnected from the internet, and connect my Apple TV instead… the default UX on most tvs is so much slower and add-riddled than Apple’s
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