Nearly half of LG smart TV apps contain residential proxy SDKs

(spur.us)

Comments

lbotos 21 hours ago
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.

rustcleaner 21 hours ago
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!)

andai 22 hours ago
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.
cube2222 22 hours ago
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.

HDBaseT 21 hours ago
"Publishes with the most proxy flagged apps"

1. Desoline (based in Netanya (Israel)

2. Bright Data (based in Israel)

Interesting.

gruez 22 hours ago
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.
201984 22 hours ago
This needs to be illegal.
memcg 6 hours ago
Is there enough 4K content available to justify replacing an older Samsung 1080P LCD? I still find free TVs on Craigslist. When I see 4K TVs running in demo mode at Costco I'm impressed, but at home watching World Cup over the air or on Fios at 1080P looks good enough. I don't pay extra for Netflix 4k and most Fios content is not 4K.
TurdF3rguson 22 hours ago
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.

ctippett 21 hours ago
I absolutely adore my 2018 jailbroken LG OLED, although it pains me that everything I love about this TV are features the manufacturer actively discourages and wishes I never had access to.
lukax 22 hours ago
Well, that's how data for training LLMs is scraped.
h4kunamata 19 hours ago
I have a 2018 Samsung QLED SmartTV, I use Pihole to block data collection and since it has Google DNS hardcoded in it, I use OPNSense Firewall rules to enforce any DNS request to Pihole.

My TV has only one AD that no longer shows for years now, LG is ADs all over the place. My home setup allows me to have a smartTV without compromises it.

Since it runs TizenOS, I can use my Linux PC to install remove apps from it like installing Jellyfin App so I do not depend on Samsung releasing it to the app store.

cullenking 20 hours ago
I just implemented bot and crawler detection as well as ASN based blocking for our website, because I’ve seen a massive rise in scraping coming from VPNs and other networks that mix legit and illegitimate traffic to our service. My theory is that small companies are scraping the shit out of everything and selling results to llm creators. It’s going to be interesting to see this expand into residential internet providers through holes like this… wild new world!
xnx 21 hours ago
What portion of Fox's acquisition thesis for Roku was activating residential proxies (distributed AI crawling!) across all the units?
hnburnsy 18 hours ago
TV never connected to internet, streaming box, and streaming box on its own isolated vlan (or guest network)
throwawa14223 21 hours ago
So is there a residential proxy blacklist I can run on my firewall? Any action I can take as an admin to put a stop to this?
captn3m0 22 hours ago
Has anyone reversed their SDKs to run a swarm that captures enough traffic to see what requests are actually getting made?
londons_explore 14 hours ago
This is a good thing.

If you could anonymously proxy from anywhere to anywhere else, the internet would be region-lock-free and anonymous again, just like it was to support it's boom in 1999.

Good on these guys I say. When it becomes normalized, we can integrate these 'privacy proxies' into desktop and mobile OS's too.

whalesalad 20 hours ago
I have a few LG OLED tv's. I do not ever connect them to the internet - I just treat them as dumb hdmi/dp displays. One is driven by an Apple TV, the other is connected to a Linux gaming pc. Haven't had any issues at all.
NordStreamYacht 19 hours ago
I have my smart tv on a separate router and it's powered off most of the time. An accident of wiring.
tulio_ribeiro 9 hours ago
LG’s guidelines state:

- “Your app should only collect the minimum user data required for providing service and should avoid collecting unnecessary data.”

- “LG performs security reviews on submitted apps before distribution, using the vulnerability analyzing system.”

- “All app developers must complete and submit well-defined and comprehensible data safety information detailing collection, usage, and sharing of user data.” They explicitly classify the "IP address" under Device Identifier Information.

https://webostv.developer.lge.com/develop/guides/privacy-gui...

Blatant lies.

dupontcyborg 21 hours ago
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
ortusdux 22 hours ago
Maybe Valve will make a TV next
cj 22 hours ago
I imagine most smart TVs don't support multitasking or apps staying alive in the background, hopefully?
doublerabbit 22 hours ago
Walked past a TV and it was advertising a security guard.

Why does a TV need security software?

wmf 21 hours ago
The concept of consent-based privacy has completely failed, first with GDPR then this.
refulgentis 22 hours ago
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

knollimar 22 hours ago
This feels straight out of Silicon Valley (show)
nekusar 21 hours ago
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.

pocksuppet 22 hours ago
Good. Fuck Cloudflare and other internet gatekeepers. Confuse their signal as much as possible.