Technology

Oh the irony. The site reporting LG’s ads wants people to remove ad blockers.

Not only do I use pi-hole, my so called smart TV never connects to the Internet in my household. Hell, I don't buy any smart devices period.

I was always torn over what TV brand to buy. This helps narrow it down further.

I pirated for a long time, and even though I had(have) large media libraries and the home server capacity to manage everything just fine, I stopped.

Not sure when, or why, I'm guessing a service broke and I just said fuck it, I already have Prime+Netflix, and that was years ago at this point.

Netflix's password policy and Amazon showing adds had me spin them up again, and even migrate over to Jellyfin because Plex is just another enshitified privacy nightmare.

Which was a pleasant surprise, because the last I tried Jellyfin years ago, it was not worth the hassle. Also, Plex wasn't nearly as bad as it is now.

To swing this back around to this article, I'm betting eventually they'll force their TVs online by disabling features, capabilities, or even the device itself, if it's not phoning home.

If I'm not watching it, my TV stays off. But for how long anymore, I wonder..

Side thought: the smartphone ROMs/roots scene has slowed down, recently; maybe it's time to start with TVs rooting.

Remember the tv in Back to the Future 2, how absurd it was?

You guys are going about this all wrong. All you gotta do is connect your smart tv to the internet. Don't use pihole. Let your tv communicate exactly how it wants to. Then buy some DVDs of local indy pro wrestling. The kind where women staple each other with staple guns, and smash light tubes over each others heads and bleed profusely.

Now......why would you do this? Because advertisers HATE advertising with pro wrestling. They also have nothing TO advertise for women with bloody faces, and broken noses.

Let THAT data get back to them. Who's going to advertise to the guy who watches pro-wrestling from a high school gym where women leave pools of blood on the ground??? If everyone did this, for 10 hours a day, advertisers would deem the American market not worth the money to advertise to.

The fabled HTPC is a fix that few people know exists for a problem that few people know they can do anything about.

Where are all the hackers out there that have the skills to crack a TV to load something open source? They're computers. There has to be a way to jailbreak/root then.

Cool. No internet anymore for my TV.

Every day I turn on my LG TV, it wants an update. It's been doing this for like 3 years now. Given the article, it won't be getting that update any time soon!

My TV is probably going to kick the bucket in a year or two at most. Filtering "non smart TVs" on a site like BestBuy shows only commercial display options at this point.

Are there any well maintained projects out there that are able to replace the firmware on newer smart TVs to get rid of these features? I really just want a dumb display with an input for a Chromecast with CEC support (or similar device if Google decides to enshittify that platform with screensaver ads too).

LOL, they are basically billboards that you purchase to display ads at home!

Is there an OLED tv on the market now that doesn’t just exist to sell ads?

well this sucks. i'm on my 4th LG TV because I can't stand the quality from other brands; but when the choice is ads vs picture quality, i'll take the inferior quality every single time. fuck ads.