Apologies if this should be posted somewhere else.
I have had this TV for about 7 years and have never had this pop up before. About a month ago, I bought a router that uses OpenWRT. With that, I setup up Adguard and specifically one of the lists that is supposed to block devices from phoning home.
Am I nuts thinking that this pop up is due to the TV not being able to offload what has been recorded? How would I check that?
My 2 new LGs are isolated. I just need dumb tvs.
Thank god for this TV mess. I finally rooted my TV, it took all of five minutes.
The native Plex (PlxNative) someone cooked up is buttery-smooth. Almost shed a tear my media centre doesn’t feel like a 10yo android tablet.Any docs? What is the brand of yours?
I just disconnected my samsung tv from my wifi yesterday because it had a popup it was doing a software update. It was already substantially laggier than when I bought it. Whenever I use it I’m either playing a game or using the pi I have plugged into it so I just want it to switch inputs quickly. Only reason I hadn’t killed it yet in my transition to FOSS is because my wife uses it for netflix. Maybe we’ll use this as a good break point to get her off the netflix subscription completely. I die a little inside when I see it on my credit card statement.
I stopped connecting my TVs to the internet as soon as manufacturers started using android to operate them.
Why?
Because I figured they would doing what they are doing. And maybe back then they weren’t so bad quite yet, but I need to be adjusting my opsec before I’m compromised, not after.
Evaluate the potential not the proven.
Just not connecting them probably isn’t enough. They’ll check for open wifi to call home on.
People walk by on the sidewalk close enough for my TV to phone home. I need to root it or crack it open and physically burn the comms to cut it off.
Shit is crazy
HEC would like a word
Yes well we must move ever forward in our security posture and not let the idea of perfection stop us from becoming better.
I have heard of HEC attacks but I think we’re a ways off from it being a realized threat in our homes.
There are too many more cost effective and convenient options at large to collect data more efficiently and effectively.
Having said that, shielded HDMI seems like an answer to it.
I unbeknownst to me had a receiver and tv that supported this protocol. And the receiver had an ethernet connection. Imagine my surprise when one day the TV popped up that it had a software update when it wasn’t on wifi.
Yeah, sneaky. I once was less concerned about my receiver, but eventually I relegated it to the same status of mistrust and unplugged it from the network.
I don’t use built-in streaming music services on it anyway.
Sam was here and took your RAM
I sort of love the idea of Sam living on past his eventual death as some sort of computer problem cryptid.
Beware The Saltman, he’ll creep into your home and feast on your RAM. He’ll corrupt your hard drive. He’ll melt your GPU.
We’re overdue for some child scarring Grimms’ Fairy Tales for the modern era, this can be the first.
I like it. The Saltman is like Slenderman for Gen Alpha. They’ll sit around the fire barrel telling horror stories how The Saltman came out of the woods at night and snatched their electronics.
I endorse this.
Perhaps he’ll take it with a scam
Well that’s most probably what happened.
GamersNexus’ report showed that their LG TV would hold onto logs and recordings until it could reach the server to send them.
If you block it from reaching the server, I guess they never delete.
It probably ran out of space because the logs were getting spammed with “server unreachable” messages (because it could not send privacy-invading tracking data).
That’d be the ultimate irony, if it’s not indefinitely holding the data but just the logs from not being able to send the most recent data. Still bad either way, of course.
Kind of wild it has “factory reset” and still keeps your network settings. What else does it keep?
Thatis the setting they need configured to exfiltrate your personal data.
Yeah you’re right but I think OP was asking what else. If they’re keeping the network settings what other logs and data persist through a possibly intentionally mislabelled “factory reset”?
Factory reset it then don’t connect it to the Internet at all. It looks like you have a computer connected to it, just use that. KDE even has a big screen interface.
“except for network settings”. You can’t delete your Wi-Fi details, even with a factory reset. I tried to add a second network (hotspot) then disable that network, but it just reconnected to the old one.
I gave up and added a MAC address block on my router.
you can’t just change the WiFi ssid and password?
Not on the TV. It won’t accept one that doesn’t work, and remembers and reverts to any old one if it can’t connect to the new one.
I could change the router SSID or password, but I have far too many devices, and a MAC address block was the quick option.
If its android be careful. Found out the hard way trying to fixed-ip a tablet on my 3D printer that they can report a false macID and it changes
So here’s an idea.
When you first get it, connect it to a working guest network that you just made.
Then shutdown the guest network and make sure there are no open Wi-Fi networks in your area.Alternative: set up a dummy wifi network, then coonect your TV to it, then configure that network such that it’s not connected to the Internet.
Great advice which is completely inapplicable to the person you are giving it to, considering they already set their TV up ages ago.
And the advice to anyone about to get a new Samsung or LG TV is “Don’t.”
get a new Samsung or LG TV is “Don’t.”
I have seen the answer to that…
The person absolutely wants 4K 50" for some reason and monitors that come for that much are industrial ones that cost 5x as much.
I am more than happy with 27" and don’t even require 4K, so MSI, ViewSonic etc work well.Dumb video projectors are a thing.
a Mac address block works but may not work on newer devices. next time you may have to bite the bullet.
No, you’re not nuts to think that. For starters, you could try to clear the cache to free up some space:
I want to see if someone has a suggestion to verify. If I can’t then I’m going to clear the cache and then see if it happens again.
It’d be nice to just be able to have a direct look at the filesystem. I did look briefly around for options, but it doesn’t appear to be trivial.
I kind of figured. I appreciate you looking, thank you.
About a month ago, I bought a router that uses OpenWRT. With that, I setup up Adguard and specifically one of the lists that is supposed to block devices from phoning home.
How would I check that?
AdGuard used DNS to enforce its blocklists, you can setup your own DNS sinkhole server on your network relatively easily, point your devices to it, and view what servers your devices on your network are connecting to.
This may work today, but it take very little effort for the TV manufacturers to default to DNS over HTTPS to bypass these DNS based filtering. I’d recommend keeping TV’s off the network completely. I wish the DRM mafia weren’t keeping open competitors away. There’s no reason we should have privacy respecting TV boxes, except that the power is in the streaming platform companies hands, and they don’t want to enable anything even slightly open.
Block all other DNS by port and IP both from everything by pi-hole. Even if they hardcode 1.1.1.1 or Quad9 or Google or whatever, it would be exceedingly difficult to reach an IP address that is forbidden on the network at the router level. HTTPS will just fail (and likely fall back to network DNS settings as it should).
Owning (owning) your router/firewall makes this harder for them to bypass. Block all DNS outbound, allow only from Pihole (or other private DNS server), redirect all DNS to Pihole. The machines you don’t/can’t own will think they’re reaching out to external DNS but the replies come from Pihole. I haven’t dug too far into whether this works if they force DNS over HTTPS. Is that not 853/tls?! My convoluted and possibly placebo setup.
I suppose there are plenty of ways around this. My config is port based, so if they change ports or run a tunnel through something my Pihole doesn’t block… Sigh. Yeah, just don’t connect these crap boxes up to the network in the first place.
Yup. And it’s worth noting that my two smart TVs are the noisiest devices on my network, by far. Like it’s not even close. In a heavy day of doing nothing but doomscrolling and casual browsing, my phone may get 1700-2000 blocked requests. My smart TVs typically hit 5500-6000 blocked requests each.
Which, when you do the math, comes out to a failed request every ~15 seconds. Which means they’re probably attempting to reach the server, getting blocked, timing out after ~15 seconds, and then retrying. If they were logging each failed attempt as an error and never purging their old logs, I can see how it would slowly but surely fill their storage space.
Removed by mod
It seems unlikely that suing LG for the actions of Samsung would be a successful endeavor.
Here’s a tip:
It’s highly unlikely that you’ll successfully be able to afford to sue LG. And so that only leaves the other option…Also, this is a Samsung TV…
