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by emptybits·6y ago·view on hn ↗
I'm in the market for a new TV. I'm impressed by display technology advances, but everything else about TV manufacturers is unimpressive. i.e. all the "smart" software, the OS, menus, apps, apps, and more apps. And surveillance. No thanks. Please give me compliant HDMI, USB, and other connections and let me feed sources of my choosing to your display controller.

My intention is to keep my TV offline right from the start, but maybe I'm screwing myself out of useful (display) firmware updates?

4 comments
Rest assured, 5 years from now your new TV will connect to the 5G wireless network without asking. For Your Convenience [TM].
That's what wire cutters are for.
The only wires left to cut are the power lines. Are you proposing pre-electricity housing as the only alternative to in-home surveillance? Maybe we should just get rid of the creeps by legal means, fat adtech paychecks be damned.
No I'm suggesting opening the case of your hypothetical 5g TV and clipping the antenna wire. Commercial displays with no smart features and projectors can be purchased right off Amazon. There are still options: we haven't quite yet made it to 1984's mandatory TVs that watch you.

But yeah I'm with you that's it's excessive and needs regulation.

I wish it were that easy. Nowadays we build systems-on-chip. Hard to cut specific parts out of the picture. But perhaps the antenna is still off-chip. https://www.androidauthority.com/how-it-works-systems-on-a-c...

> [...] you should have a general picture of what goes inside it: CPU, Memory, GPU, Northbridge, Southbrige, Cellular radios, Other radios [...]

> [...] Such is the case with the Snapdragon S4 from Qualcomm, which has an embedded LTE modem on board responsible for 4G LTE connectivity [...]

The radio chip may be on the SoC, but not the Antenna.
Good luck claiming the guarantee if something else breaks afterwards...
They will use the display panel matrix as an active antenna eventually. (note to self: patent this)

Good luck!

That's basically what I do. I don't let my TV connect to the net. But according to this twitter thread, that doesn't matter much, as my Roku is regurgitating my data all over the place anyway...
How sure are you your TV isn't joining open/sponsored wireless networks anyway?
Roku has a setting to disable tracking data.
From the link:

> Here’s a doozy: Roku has a “Limit Ad Tracking” option. Turning it on increased the number of tracking servers contacted It did prevent Roku’s AD ID from being leaked, but a whole bunch of other unique IDs are available. Even Pi-hole wasn’t that effective at limiting tracking.

Maybe buy a model that's couple of years old, update the firmware and disconnect from internet?
Maybe the next product to suggest to puri.sm or pine64?