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I believe you can still get “dumb” flatscreens, but they’re getting rare, and they cost at least hundreds more than their “smart” brethren. So of course those sell very slowly.
The older I get the more I miss the sheer freedom that was built into our daily lives back when technology was just a notch or two less advanced. Phones that stayed trapped on their wall, not in your pocket, tracking you. TVs that were made of dumb stuff that could still pull free content from the air. You had to be part of a special “Nielson family”, fully set up with a little tracking box and all that, for the TV to tell anybody what you were watching.
People expected you to basically fall off the earth for 8 hours at work, and didn’t expect to contact you for less than a housefire-level emergency, which meant you spent most of the day free, and not just while you were at work. Nobody blinked if you stepped out for the evening to go shopping and could not be contacted for hours. Now people end up in screaming arguments because they didn’t answer that text fast enough. It’s misery.
I had a shock the other day, watching some YouTube short featuring a young woman (an adult, not a minor) complaining humorously about her mother, who always knows where she is, and thus has all sorts of unwanted opinions on her location. Mother always knows because of an app called Life360, which is basically the kind of spying app that an abusive spouse would hide on your phone. But it’s not hidden. You force your children to install it on their phones. It’s a leash. So now this adult woman, who of course cannot quite afford to leave home, because economy, cannot simply delete this spying app from her phone without consequences and arguments, so she has no privacy in her movements, from anyone, never mind the government and such. Never mind what actual minors are now putting up with.
We have officially left the era where the adults pissed and grumbled about them damn kids wanting them damn phones they don’t need, and we are now in the era where some kid has absolutely been beaten with a belt because he tried to leave his phone in the bedroom and slip out of the house in privacy.
Things like Life360 are normalized among children and parents, so other people will now expect to track you and treat a refusal of tracking as a violation of trust, and probably a sign that you are elderly, thus your rights are becoming debatable.
Again, 5 minutes ago this was evil shit that abusive spouses snuck onto people’s phones, suddenly, it’s normal, and people will just expect it.
I guess the ongoing shock is that we expected Big Brother to somehow slap a shackle on our necks that we can’t take off, but this is all worse. This is putting the shackle on your neck, every morning. It doesn’t even lock. You could, theoretically, throw it into the lake at will. Nobody would stop you. But you don’t. All the chains are made of other people. The whips at your back are the opinions of children, and what they think is normal. The surveillance cameras do not loom from posts in the sky, no. They’re in every pocket. They’re much harder to hide from than a security camera ever would be.
I hope I’m just melodramatic, or something.
Great writeup, hope the world moves away from crap like this
“The greatest form of control is when you think you’re free, when you’re being fundamentally manipulated and dictated to. One form of dictatorship is being in a prison cell and you can see the bars and touch them. The other one is sitting in a prison cell but you can’t see the bars and you think you’re free.”
-David Icke
Imagine quoting david Icke unironically lol
A broken clock is right two times a day.
The most egregious action I’ve seen was from a Vizio smart TV I bought several years ago. It shipped with a simple remote control, and a tablet with a control app preinstalled. One day I turned the TV on and was notified that in order to use the updated UI I would need to reach out to support to order (and pay for!) a new remote that had additional buttons.
This is why I have a dumb TV hooked up to a Linus htpc
Does Linus know that you use his PC??
For those with similar problems, use pihole dns to effectively block all that bullshit
Also, do NOT buy a Samsung TV, it’s the worst offender of them all. Nothing but bad experiences with itl
Don’t buy Samsung anything. Their hardware is junk. They used to be okay, but they decided years ago that they want to be an advertising company, not a hardware company, so they push cheap crap that is used solely as data harvesting and ad delivery devices. Even their home appliances spy on you and break down a few years later.
I thought Samsung phones were okay.
I have a samsung phone and its great…
You don’t mind the bloatware software? Or the artificial limitations out on your phone? At least it’s not an iPhone
Yeah the bloatware doesn’t interfere with anything I do. I use some apps like I’m trash so I use a dating app, and I use a podcast app to listen to a show and a banking app.
The bloatware is just kind of in the background and I never fully install it when I get a new phone so it just stays in limbo.
While they definitely have many products in the cheap junk category, but I think they have pretty good hardware in the mid-upper range.
Software is the real junk in Samsung products; their high-end TVs would be great if it wasn’t for the crappy software and updates.Sadly, if you are using Linux and want your firmware updates for your SSD through the proper native channels, Samsung was the only option last time I checked. Crucial used to have a half-assed solution that they abandoned recently.
Huh, I’ve never actually updated any firmware for SSD or any other drives. I’ve updated my BIOS, but only rarely. Are there any significant advantages for updating HDD firmware? I guess I wasn’t even really aware that was something that you could do.
I got a Kingston SSD once ( yes I should have known better) that kept freezing my laptop which needed to be restarted. I couldn’t narrow it down and put up with it for an embarrassingly long time, until while looking for unrelated stuff I found out that the firmware version was associated with freezes. And then I found out that it was basically impossible to upgrade it, even on windows. After many hours, I was almost ready to give up, until I found some random Russian video (which I don’t speak) that used some ancient version of their shity firmware updater that you could only find in sketchy forums and software sites that could actually upgrade the firmware to a non-crashy version. I think it still freezes, but it’s orders of magnitude rarer.
Long story short, Kingston, not even once.
Kingston! Once king and now just shite.
What is it with all brands of everything that once a brand turns great, it gets popular, and then immediately it turns shit?
That sounds like the good old days of computing. I followed so much sketchy advice that I barely understood when I was still learning computing and it somehow almost always worked out. There was that one time when a program started deleting my entire hard drive though, and I had to yank the plug out of the wall to stop it. The internet truly was the wild wild West for a time. Good times!
Why the hell would I connect my TV to the internet? It’s a display device.
You will take my Display Port/HDMI/RCA input and like it.
Who knew my anti-consumption / general frugalness would lead to me having a better TV experience than people who buy the high end gadgets
Back in my day you owned the hardware you bought and were allowed to install a custom operating system.
When I buy things like this, I try to buy hardware that supported by open source projects. Like routers that can run OpenWRT or Android phones that are supported by LineageOS.
It’s amazing that sometimes free projects that are made for people are better than commercial one.
They also spy on you and know what you watch, even if it’s not played from their apps and is just a raw display input. https://www.consumerreports.org/video/view/electronics/televisions-streaming-media/4151762767001/your-smart-tv-may-track-what-you-watch-and-say/
Alls I can say is that when the “smart” tv has “run out of memory” so it intermittently cuts out when I’m trying to beat Ridley in Super Metroid, it’s time for a lobotomy.
This is the future that Stallman warned us about. They mocked him and said it didn’t matter. It’s not going to get better until everyone stops buying TVs with spyware built in.
Vote with your wallets or quit removed. Self hosted is an option these days. But that means not being lazy. And people are really lazy.
Vote with your wallet
When are we going to finally accept that this is nothing but a delusion? How many failed boycotts over and over will it take?
Vote with your wallets or quit removed.
I never bought one but I can’t do anything about people who have AirBnB’s who buy them or hotels that install them in every room.
There are ways around that as well. Call ahead and ask what kind of TVs they have. Tell them why you are concerned and you might just get the hotel to worry about this as well if enough people start bothering them. If you don’t have a choice unplug the TV and bring your own laptop.
anything like this for Tizen? (Samsung TVs)
I would honestly love to try switching to an alternative than continue using Fire OS on my Insignia TV, but I don’t know of any good alternatives. Maybe I just haven’t dug deep enough, but most “3rd party” (not Amazon or Google) Android implementations seem to only support phones, not TVs.
Fortunately, Fire TV can still install apps from outside their app store (like SmartTubeNext), but that can only do so much.
Ok Amazon
I’m… literally saying I’d love to try anything other than Amazon’s Fire OS.
I would honestly love to try switching to an alternative than continue using Fire OS on my Insignia TV
, but…
Yeah, I would gladly switch if there was a good 3rd party implementation of Android for Insignia TVs. I’m tired of getting Amazon ads on my TV.
Unfortunately, I haven’t found one. Most 3rd party implementations are only for phones. If there is one for TVs that I don’t know of, feel free to send me the link, though.
I have one of our old computers hooked up to a dumb TV. I download pirated stuff from my seedbox through SFTP and stream Netflix and other such services through the browser. I can watch literally anything that has ever existed in the history of the world within 30 seconds of deciding I want to watch it.
No you don’t downloading, obscure torrents have almost no seeders.
I don’t use public trackers, which is what I assume you’re describing.
Private tracker are overrated!
You have no idea what you’re talking about.
Yes i do, you mentioned you use torrent to download stuff and you also mentioned that you don’t use public trackers, so that’s means you use private trackers and that’s why “i said private trackers are overrated” and almost all people on piracy sub agree on on this, you can search and read about it.
What brand of TV to you recommend that still sticks to the ‘old ways’?
My neither of my smart tv’s has never been given the WiFi password. After a week or so they quit asking and defaulted back to being of with on/off, volume change, input source change as the only actions it’s ever asked to do
My engineer had me buy 43" TVs instead of monitors for the lab. I bought Samsungs and they’re just annoying. With only one thing plugged into them and no internet connection at all, they still require you to select “PC” to see anything.
I mean, yeah, they were less than half the price of 43" Dells, but still.
