- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
You must log in or register to comment.
It’s so f’ing simple. JUST DON’T CONNECT YOUR TV TO YOUR WIFI. Get your streams from a separate device.
Wont be enough. Soon theyre gonna start mesh networking with neighboring devices over bluetooth.
Yeah, that’s what i did, but i had to dig through menus turning shit off because I kept getting pop-ups telling me it needed to connect to the Internet.
not enough, they might be using your neighbours’ tvs as access points. Physically remove the wireless module
tossed mine in the trash when i learned it wanted a bluetooth connection to the tv
What? Because I have to demonstrate my control, I understand almost nothing about technology. Don’t tell me it has a chip that controls everything, I make my own TV remote.
Anyone know when this started becoming ominous? I’m sure every TV in the sixties didn’t have a microphone on their remotes; I am sure pretty much each one being released today has.
I have a 4k LG TV from around 2020 and it doesn’t have a microphone.
Are you sure? We have two OLEDs (a CX from 2020 and a C1 from 2021), and both have these remotes with microphones:
Yeah no, lol
I have a cheapo Samsung 4K TV from 2019 and it does have one in the mic for sure, not sure about the TV itself. I don’t let the TV connect to the internet though. I did initially because convenience, but now I have an Android TV thingy. Which itself is not perfect, but I don’t live alone, having an HTPC with a mouse and keyboard would be a hassle. Aaaand upon writing this I realized HDMI-CEC is a thing and googled it and Plasma Bigscreen can support it and… shit I need a miniPC now
I bought a Steam Machine for this exact use case, and it’s been pretty sweet. Especially since it can do 4k video decoding. I have it set up to start a Jellyfin server and client when I launch it through steam. Also VacuumTube has been a life saver.
If it works for you, that’s great, for me it sits exactly where it makes zero sense to get. My PC is slightly more powerful so for gaming, it would be inferior. But it’s too expensive just for a HTPC. Something either much more powerful (that could also run local LLMs), or significantly cheaper, would make more sense for me. I’m now eyeing used miniPCs, but I’ll have to see if some of the cheap ones can handle 4k decoding.
The last TV I had was a 37 inch I sold in 2020. I stopped watching TV in 2003. I have been terminally online since late 2000 and 2001.
I’ve been terminally online for almost as long, but tbh the TV is good for background noise, or to watch something while you work, shitpost or play on your PC, situated so you can see the TV
Or just buy a cheap 3rd party off brand universal remote. Dont have to use the one that comes with the TV
FYI most modern TVs have a second microphone actually in the display that’s actually used for the nefarious tracking and listening for assistant wake words to save remote battery life
I CAN’T HEAR YOU!??
HELLOOO???
YOU SEEMS TO BE MUTED?
If you want to know
allsome of the ways your audio can be spied on.Benn Jordan on audio spying: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mEC6PM97IRI
He, surprisingly, did another: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5ynZ3lMQJc
Do people here still have their smartphones or are these things the first on the microphone hitlist?
my shitphone, I mean iphone is really pissed that the case (water resistant) I have blocks mic, and well the audio as well lol. And the aluminum tape on the cameras makes it glitch up so much.
based setup
GrapheneOS my brother
Yea, im stuck with not flashable phones sadly amd everytime i read something on here I get kinda sick
The Pixel 9a is getting cheap and looking for them on the used market is even better, do yourself the favor and get one!
Yeah, GrapheneOS is worth switching to by getting a compatible phone if you can afford it with how it is probably our most used and carried around electronic used for communication.
I’m tempted to try this but I’m not sure how to identify the microphone or whether it would be in my remote or the TV itself. Is there some sort of guide on doing this?
While it’s not always the case, try to look for a 2x4 silver rectangle with a hole in it like the one on my finger. The casing is to isolate it from the nearby radio waves and the hole to let sound through.
That’s actually your finger? Interesting.
While you’re at it, disconnect your “smart TV” from the internet!
This is the far easier approach, but if you live somewhere densely populated (like an apartment building) keep in mind it’s been rumored that smart TVs can make a mesh network to upload data without a connection. Though to my knowledge this has never been definitively shown to be true
What year do you think we’ll see the first repo for a Raspberry Pi spoofer?
Something that can act as a “peer” and intercept and blackhole the traffic.
Has to be proven that it occurs first I suppose. But it would also be a difficult thing to workaround. Like in your example the only thing stopping them is a firmware update that dictates the tv connect to as many other clients as possible and blacklist clients that can’t receive a challenge code or success packet or something
Of course I’m sure if that happened people much smarter than me would spoof all that too, make a spoofer that creates dozens of pseudo devices, break challenges and such, etc. cat and mouse game. Luckily these things are usually super lazily implemented by the ad scum but frustratingly that’s bc dedicating resources to this is not worth it usually (eg many people, a sizable and increasing percentage of users, may simply not connect their tv to the internet but once a raspberry pi or docker container or whatever is involved you’re in strictly nerd territory)
Which means disconnecting it’s WiFi, because some may connect to open hotspots without asking.
ISP routers/modems will often have secondary wifi networks that allow access to subscribers. I can absolutely believe these smart devices connect to them automatically.
Buy your own modem and router, and root the router to install Open Source firmware that gives you control of the internet.
And maybe do some Minecraft stuff with the Flock camera down the street.
…and then don’t live near anyone that doesn’t take the same precautions.
10 years ago OP would’ve been labeled a schizo, now we just accept there’s microphones in everything
PRISM leak was 13 years ago if you want to feel old yet, but then that was just a revelation about how prevelant mass surveillance is, it was Vault 7 in 2017 that detailed how built-in microphones in Smart TVs are used for spying, so that part would indeed be less than 10 years ago
i hate living in a cyberpunk dystopia
The least they could do is give us the damn body augmentations already. We got all the shitty parts and none of the cool tech.
They won’t even let me transition, let alone give most people general healthcare. Insurance would never cover augmentations
You can have botox and lip fillers and you’ll be happy about it.
the fun stuff from cyberpunk are getting banned,
It’ll only get worse don’t worry. The next TVs will brick if you physically remove the microphone or wifi.
It looks way cooler in the movies and video games. We were tricked!
Because in the movies and video games we see the main character. For the NPCs it sucks… and that’s us.
Who the hell are you calling NPC!
turns and casually walks face against wall
Must have been the wind…
You know the irony of this is? My ex-fiances father was labeled as schizophrenic. I mean he was by textbook definition. One day, I would take her to visit him, he says that computers are tracking you. Now, I brushed it off at the time, probably a conspiracy theory right? but I did think about it.
L3 was tracking internet data already, at least, in the early 2000’s. A little game of what’s connecting to my computer showed me that, but I didn’t know what it was at the time. Well now I know, g-sec company has been tracking us from routers for over twenty years; same company after the merger that makes EOTECHs. So the puzzle pieces came together.
I kind of wondered if he really was schizophrenic or medicated to be so? As an a example, tramadol made me have auditory hallucinations that I’ve never experience on acid or mushrooms (college lol).
If this guy is still alive, I bet he’d really appreciate you telling him he was right. It can be exhausting trying to get people to see the issues in society and having everyone just constantly write you off as crazy. Since you’re here posting this instead of reddit, you’ve probably had that experience yourself since then.
I’m not sure honestly it’s been over a decade. Yeah, reddit got weird, bots and people paid to down vote popular opinions. It’s like you get a bunch of down votes and nobody has a reply. A lot of it has to do with text being misunderstood. You can write a text and someone will think you mean something else. Also it’s more fun here, it’s like stepping back in time when people actually wrote to each other on a forum. And yeah, anything that touches change or addresses an actual issue, you’re a radical.
I do wonder if it is that as a society at least in these generations… We lost cause we never did a really good effort into teaching media literacy to everyone, many arguments i hear i think it boils down to lack of media literacy.
We made the effort to make almost everyone be able to read but the effort to find miss direction, biases and manipulation not so much
I think that’s a major point.
Critical thinking is demoralized.
I mean I showed court dockets about Tent Peg Rump to people supporting him—still. And it’s been interesting to see the stubbornness to still show support. It’s like you got rearended over the last year and like the dog meme in the fire, this is fine. Some people just don’t want to admit defeat. At least some people are waking up. Also the other thing is, you can’t show your opinion often. It’s like we’ve reached China’s level of censorship without even knowing.
The problem is not that is stubbornness, (maybe on high level it is) but is more like questioning became something of an insult rather than of dialogue. I get it we all want to believe we know what we know so challenging that is an insult
And the thing is that finding truth is really hard compared to making shit up, and it just continues to grow apart with AI powered stuff. It is something i worry a lot for the future and really don’t think i have a proper idea on how it can be solved
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest?
It’s sad isn’t it?
The walls are listening
I will still argue phones listen to us. Don’t care what you say, it happens. Act accordingly
Remove the microphone from your phone
So you are left with a -micro? A mega?!
Lmao
It has no way of sending any recordings if you don’t connect it to the Internet.
But what if
- your neighbor has open wifi?
- someone nearby has a connected device your tv can talk to?
- you sell the tv and it then gets connected?
then my neighbor is gonna have an interesting conversation with the cops about how much illegal drugs he’s been ordering over the internet. Geez man, that’s not even a reasonable argument, nobody has an open wifi, it’s not 2001 anymore.
There’s plenty of open networks still around
Also you ignored the other 2 points
I have heard that some vendors support joining adhoc networks with others of the same brand. So if you have an LG TV (as an example) that you dont connect to the internet, but your neighbor has one that is connected, they could theoretically link up and bridge the unconnected one.
To be fair, this would have to be functionality included in the factory, and may not actually be a thing. But I remember reading something about it with LGs a few years ago, and it stuck with me.
Even if that wasn’t a thing yet, WiFi chips can be bought for less than $1 each in bulk now, and companies can put a monetary value on one person’s private data in the range of $1000 and up, so schemes like that are inevitabilities.
I used to look forward to global Internet coverage. While I still think it’s overall a good thing, I fear the day it’s ubiquitous and reliable enough that electronics are widely built to connect to it automatically without fallbacks or user input and make it nigh impossible to disable while keeping the device functional. We seem to be getting there sooner rather than later. I definitely feel less guilty about hoarding older hardware now.
Yeah but those are only 2.4 ghz so they reach to your neighbors xfinity hotspot at a meager 150 mbps. Not nearly fast enough to exfiltrate the real time retina scans that skynet will need. Also, they are not less than a dollar in bulk.
They are exactly a dollar 😁
I’m fairly sure that is a thing.
What about LTE. I didn’t connect my new car to the internet. They did. 🙃
How did you find out there was a microphone? And how did you figure out which chip?
There will almost always be a hole above it in the plastic remote housing.
MEMs microphones are a silver or black rectangle and it has to have a small hole in the top of the package https://www.st.com/en/mems-and-sensors/mems-microphones.html
Generally you can also just put a dab of hot glue over the top of the hole and it won’t be able to hear shit, you don’t necessarily have to desolder it, but it is the most effective.
The TV advetises voice recognition in both the TV itself and the remote.
If you look at it, it’s likely going to be a 2x4mm silver rectangle with a small hole in it. Not always, but they mostly look like that.
Most smart tvs include microphones on their remotes for voice assistants. Both Amazon and Google mandate them for their TV OS’s
