• Routhinator@startrek.website
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      23 hours ago

      Westinghouse and Magnavox TV brands both exist with dumb TV options, Max 32" though

      The Westinghouse is unfortunately on Amazon, but I found the Magnavox at Canadian Tire for $200

  • Agent641@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    Find me in my living room, reading aloud SQL injection attacks and AI jailbreak promps like the newsreader from Rome

  • vaultdweller013@sh.itjust.works
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    23 hours ago

    This is why I have a Sony TV, it doesn’t listen to me of that I can garuntee. This is a shitpost, the TV is from 98 and weighs like 70 pounds.

  • Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    1 day ago

    Samsung is the second Electronics maker I’ve started boycotted, after Sony.

    Sony was all the way back since the Rootkit scandal, Samsung was about a decade ago when a small tablet I bough from them have filled with unremovable applications and after a few updates became pretty much unusable because it’s didn’t have enough memory (clearly planned obscolecence).

    Patting myself on back (and a little gloating) aside, Samsung has been clearly abusive towards their customers for a while (it was maybe the second electronics make to enshittify, after Sony) and this is not at all surprising.

    • Phoenixz@lemmy.ca
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      7 hours ago

      Samsung has been abusive format least a decade

      Sony has been abusive for at least two

    • chiliedogg@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      People should have been imprisoned over the Sony rootkit scandal.

      For those who don’t know - their music CDs had malware built in that automatically installed itself on PCs without prompting or notification that gave unsecured root access to any PC through a hidden service that couldn’t be detected or disabled from within Windows. It was as bad as bad gets. There was no hidden EULA or anything. They just straight-up installed viruses on millions of PCs that opened the door for other malware to install itself at the root level where it couldn’t be detected.

      Sony should have been shut down entirely over it.

      • Boo! Haunted House!@lemmy.world
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        1 day ago

        Wow. Yeah, fuck Sony. Seems they’ve always been in a race to the bottom. Now their insistance on a digital-only future makes so much more sense. They want to control any and all access to their products and don’t want them changing hands IRL.

    • flying_sheep@lemmy.ml
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      23 hours ago

      They’re using a classifier to capture metadata (like “does a dog live there?” or “does a baby live there”) by categorizing sounds. That’s all technically legal, that’s why they do it that way.

    • monotremata@lemmy.ca
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      1 day ago

      These TVs don’t incorporate enough power to do any kind of serious LLM. The “AI” they’re referring to here is likely an embedded speech-to-text engine. And that probably is pretty necessary for this–it would take too much data to send actual recordings to Samsung, but text transcripts are tiny and easier to search and index. It’s easy to forget, but reliable speech-to-text has been around less than 20 years, and the tiny ones that can run on embedded chips are even newer.

      • iocase@lemmy.zip
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        23 hours ago

        Stm32 has made micro controllers with neural processors for years now and you don’t need LLMs to do a lot of useful stuff for a spyware company. A small model can run even in really constrained hardware if you train it specifically for it. Afaik the STM32 ones are for machine vision processing on limited hardware where power is a concern. I’m sure you can do a lot more with a TV with constant power.

        • monotremata@lemmy.ca
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          22 hours ago

          That’s exactly the distinction I was making. The person I was replying to said “Imagine believing that they need “AI” to record us.” I was clarifying that this isn’t the AI we hear so much about that requires huge datacenters; it’s the kind of simple, embedded, “edge” AI that you can do with whatever microcontroller you have lying around.

      • TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world
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        1 day ago

        If you choose to hack your own TV, you can just stream this mp3 to servers:

        First send this:

        Then stream this:

        On repeat

    • kuhli@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      1 day ago

      To record us? Nah, to make it more useful than just metadata analysis, yeah, I could buy that

  • DaddleDew@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    I really hope one day people will look back at those practices the same way we look back at the normality of cigarettes being pushed on everyone back in the 50’s.

      • shalafi@lemmy.world
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        1 day ago

        Doctors aren’t making corporate vape ads. There are no ads at the movies and on TV. People aren’t openly vaping indoors and their way to the vape vending machine. Vapes are a whole different deal than old-time cigarettes. And kids sure aren’t vaping with teachers in the vape hole between classes.

        Gotta admit, I got a grin thinking someone out there find the two comparable. You should have seen the 80s after smoking was “dialed down”!

      • shalafi@lemmy.world
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        1 day ago

        If you think it’s bad now, come on over and we’ll take my time machine to 1988 when I started. My friend taught me walking around the indoor mega mall.

      • A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.world
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        2 days ago

        i mean, why wouldnt they?

        life sucks, society sucks, world sucks, who wouldnt want to check out faster.

        • porous_grey_matter@lemmy.ml
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          2 days ago

          the same sucky life is even worse with heart disease, not that I don’t sympathise with the desire to get out but that’s a really dumb way to do it

          • diablicja@lemmy.zip
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            2 days ago

            One of my favourite people used to say “you gotta die from something” whenever the topic of his smoking would come up. Then he got a stroke that didn’t kill him.

            • MycelialMass@lemmy.world
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              1 day ago

              Ya if it was just death itd be one thing, but becoming mentally disabled or something from a stroke is scarier to me

          • iuminou@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            2 days ago

            how about weaponizing your willingness to die against the world that made you want to instead of just dying peacefully

            WHY BE THE [[Little Sponge]] WHO HATES ITS [[$4.99]] LIFE WHEN YOU CAN BE A [[BIG SHOT!!!]]

            • WizardOfFrobozz@lemmy.ca
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              7 hours ago

              Suicidal people who don’t take at least one fascist with them? World is better off without them anyway.

  • stein2027@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    If these tvs are capturing private conversations for advertising, where’s the consent for that?

    • SaveTheTuaHawk@lemmy.ca
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      1 day ago

      It’s all in the EULA no one can opt out of, and no one reads, and they can change at any time.

      You can blame companies who make hardware, but the laws on privacy are terrible.

    • kunaltyagi@programming.dev
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      2 days ago

      EULA has T&C that the first users agree to when they fast forward with the accept accept accept accept screens

      • Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        1 day ago

        Those things aren’t legally valid for consumer electronics or software in many countries (possibly most of the World) because they’re considered an attempt at forcing a change in the terms of the sale after the sale.

        They would be totally valid if they’re presented to the buyer for confirming acceptance during the purchase BEFORE they pay which, “curiously”, they never are.

        • shalafi@lemmy.world
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          1 day ago

          IANAL, but EULAs are mostly enforceable in the US as they’re contracts. BUT, not every provision is a slam dunk win for the company. As I understand it, much law is decided on what a “reasonable person” would act, think or find fair at the moment action was taken, such as clicking “I Agree”. Would such a person expect the EULA to provide for spying on their voice and snapshotting their private viewing? Dunno, but I’d love to see a test case move forward.

          Someone should sue on behalf of a minor, who cannot agree to a contract, or another third-party in the home who did not agree. Bet there’s case law on this sort of thing in other contexts.

          • Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            1 day ago

            From what I read, the point of Law in the countries were EULAs have already been deemed not enforceable by courts (such as Germany) is that one can’t hold something one has sold to a customer hostage to the customer accepting a NEW contract after the sale (the sale itself is considered an implicit contract with certain rights, such as the right to freely use what was sold) before they can use it, so even if people click “I Accept” on such a thing it’s does not form a legally binding contract.

        • kunaltyagi@programming.dev
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          1 day ago

          Illegal only applies when the law is an enforced deterrence. If the fine is low enough, it’s the price of doing business. If it’s hard to sue or there’s no enforcement, the law may as well not exist. Unfortunately, with these large companies it’s been both: low fines and long lawsuits, so by the time they pay a fine, they have earned 100x the fine in a month or so

        • Latuga17@lemmy.world
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          1 day ago

          yes and I believe national courts in the EU are actually obligated by the EU unfair terms directive to look for any provision in these terms that are harmful to the consumers (I think it’s called ex officio review) when any of these terms are challenged in court. I am not sure how much protection this actually gets the consumer in practice though.

      • 01011@monero.town
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        2 days ago

        Isn’t that what class action law suits are for?

        Or better yet, consumer protection laws?

        • shalafi@lemmy.world
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          1 day ago

          Yep! If this would be a meritorious case, I’d bet lawyers would be salivating over it. There are also plenty of firms working for our collective good, pro bono. Witness Elias Law who is slam dunking voter rights cases, wins in state after state, not sure they’ve lost one.

        • MaggiWuerze@feddit.org
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          1 day ago

          The first doesn’t exist in most of the eu and the second need to be enforced or they will be ignored

        • Stern@lemmy.world
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          1 day ago

          wrt the former most t&c’s mandate forced arbitration to dodge class actions wrt the latter good luck getting consumer protection under this admin.

  • Avicenna@programming.dev
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    22 hours ago

    I have a tv that I can easily connect to my linux laptop but which can’t connect to internet on its own. So it basically acts as a big computer screen. This way I atleast need to manage just one exit point.