Nearly half of LG smart TV apps contain residential proxy SDKs

knollimar

This feels straight out of Silicon Valley (show)

cj

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

andai

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.

201984

This needs to be illegal.

refulgentis

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

cube2222

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.

gruez

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.

lukax

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

doublerabbit

Walked past a TV and it was advertising a security guard. Why does a TV need security software?

captn3m0

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

TurdF3rguson

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.

pocksuppet

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

ortusdux

Maybe Valve will make a TV next

nekusar

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.

rustcleaner

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!)

lbotos

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.

dupontcyborg

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

wmf

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

xnx

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

HDBaseT

"Publishes with the most proxy flagged apps" 1. Desoline (based in Netanya (Israel) 2. Bright Data (based in Israel) Interesting.