14 ms·

Hasn't some models (thinking Samsung) been shown to connect to any WiFi network they can? edit: Appears to be an urban legend, with not much substance to back

Hasn't some models (thinking Samsung) been shown to connect to any WiFi network they can? edit: Appears to be an urban legend, with not much substance to back it up!

codetrotter 3y ago
Sure but if everyone has WPA2 encryption enabled on their network, such as is the case in my neighbourhood, then there is no network for the TV to connect to anyways.
- midasuni 3y ago
  Amazon whisper net etc from ring doorbells and other privacy violating things come to mind as possible connections. Mostly theoretical though.
- prmoustache 3y ago
  Couldn't a device looking for wifi just connect wherever you or your neighbours hit the wps button on their wifi router?
  - codetrotter 3y ago
    Don’t know. I never use the WPS button, nor have I ever seen anyone else use it either. But I think you are right this could potentially let the device connect itself :(
KerrAvon 3y ago
But that would require an accessible WiFi network. I'm sure someday it'll be impossible because they'll embed 5G chips and do it over cell without involving your consent, but that day isn't here yet.
- ghayes 3y ago
  Simple, just put it in a Faraday cage.
  - modriano 3y ago
    The mesh would have to be so fine that you wouldn't be able to see the screen (unless you were inside the "cage").
    - lancesells 3y ago
      Simple, go wired and encase the house in a faraday cage.
      - eropple 3y ago
        Really, anyone who's lived in a sufficiently old house knows you can run your own Wi-Fi in a Faraday cage. Just probably not between rooms.
        lostlogin 3y ago
        Underfloor foil insulation works pretty well as a cage. It also adds a nice electrocution risk when installing and is banned in my area for this reason.
        eropple 3y ago
        Metal lath under the plaster. Ripping that out was a mess.
      - xattt 3y ago
        Houses finished with stucco tend to do this as a side effect, since stucco is applied onto a fine metal grid screwed to framing.
    - tzs 3y ago
      Google is telling me that the mesh for a Faraday cage that would block WiFi could have hole sizes up to about 5 mm. Suppose you made your faraday cage (or at least the part that goes in front of the screen) out of 40 gauge wire (0.07874 mm diameter) with the wires spaced 2.25 mm apart. On a 70" 4K TV a pixel is about 0.4 mm x 0.4 mm. If the mesh were close to the screen I think about 30% of the pixels would have wire in front of them. Of those 30%, 1/6 would both a horizontal and a vertical wire in front (let's not go crazy and talk about orienting the mesh diagonally or anything like that), and 5/6 would only have one wire in front of them. So that's 70% of pixels not interfered with, 25% having one wire in front of them, and 5% having two wires. The 25% with one wire crossing would have about 20% of the pixel occluded by the wire. The 5% with two wires crossing them would have about 36% occluded. My guess is that the screen could be seen pretty well through that.
- giobox 3y ago
  I've seen rumblings that day may be very soon, too. Once devices in the home have embedded prepaid 5G out with your control, all sorts of home networking/firewall challenges are going to arise. We are entering a world in which it will cost very, very little to embed 5G into almost anything with say 1GB of prepaid eSim data for analytics collection, regardless of whether device resides on your LAN or not.
  - ed25519FUUU 3y ago
    There’s only a fractional amount of people using smart TVs without WiFi. I’m very dubious it’s worth the cost to imbed GSM cards in each TV to reach the fraction that doesn’t allow the TV on WiFi.
    - midasuni 3y ago
      Large portion of those who currently don’t connect will faraday cage their connection to remove the ability too. Then of course there’s a lack of 5G. I certainly don’t have any where I live. Just about have 1 bar of 4g near the window.
    - rhn_mk1 3y ago
      If that happens, it's going to be to reach those who can't set up wifi manually. It's better user experience not to have to, leading to fewer returns.
    - YurgenJurgensen 3y ago
      It would simplify setup for non-technical consumers. I'm sure people complain about having to input a WiFi password with a TV remote. WiFi/Cellular convergence as a concept also doesn't seem like the most unlikely future.
      - gruez 3y ago
        > It would simplify setup for non-technical consumers. I'm sure people complain about having to input a WiFi password with a TV remote. So they'll add a $50 LTE/5G modem to the BOM just to save the trouble of entering a password using arrow keys, a process that takes maybe 2-3 minutes?
- AlexAltea 3y ago
  This already happens with Nespresso coffee machines (they have an SIM that connects to the Internet, whether you want it or not). That day is already yesterday.
  - robocat 3y ago
    A SIM? Reference?
  - shrike 3y ago
    Wow, they sure do. Page 29 of the user guide for the Nespresso Zenius says - This coffee machine is equipped with M2M (Machine to Machine) techology which may be activated in due time with your agreement. Thanks to a SIM card already integrated in the machine, such network connections will offer new services (subject to further terms and conditions) to its customers and improve the after sales process by automatically communicating machine troubleshooting / diagnostics to our Customer Relationship Centre (depending on country requirements and specificities). https://www.nespresso.com/shared_res/manuals/zenius/www_Zenius_Z2B_Nespresso(EN).pdf https://www.nespresso.com/shared_res/manuals/zenius/www_Zeni...
    - oblio 3y ago
      I imagine that can be disabled physically?
      - YurgenJurgensen 3y ago
        I also imagine that naïve attempts to disable it would be interpreted as a way of defeating some kind of always-online DRM on the coffee pods. And if coffee pods don't come with always-online DRM yet, I'm honestly surprised at Nespresso's lack of dedication to this dystopia.
        hilbert42 3y ago
        If that's the case then it cannot be used in any place/location where there is no signal. If so, then there would be hell to pay the first time if happened. If it works sans connection, then do what I've said elsewwhere and that's to cut or short out the antenna lead. Removing the SIM may be deemed provocative by the manufacturer, if there's no signal reception then that's a different matter (the user can't be blamed).
- philsnow 3y ago
  I think the most likely next steps is integrating with Amazon Sidewalk instead of 5G. I don't know what the relative availability of 5G signal vs Sidewalk signal is, but I'm pretty sure Amazon has a dashboard tracking the latter.
- girvo 3y ago
  It’ll be 4G, because NB-IoT is already here and pretty excellent for data collection.
- hilbert42 3y ago
  "…they'll embed 5G chips and do it over cell without involving your consent," There'd be hell to pay if they ever did that. Moreover, it'd be impossible to keep the fact quiet if deployed at any reasonable scale. A much bigger looming threat is the possible closure of terrestrial Free-to-Air TV broadcasting (it was an early agenda item to be discussed at the 2028 WARC/WRC (World Administrative Radio Conference) but was dropped early on. That it ever got there in the first instance is a very big worry, it shows that people in high places have been or are considering such a move).
- vhcr 3y ago
  It doesn't sounds so crazy to shield a house from electromagnetic radiation (Faraday cage).
Macha 3y ago
No, this appears to be a HN urban legend. It's always asked in these threads and the closest thing that anyone has been able to provide is one person asking one time on the samsung forums why there tv was connected to the neighbour's wifi (openly in the TV's own menu). So either there's a giant conspiracy which literally nobody else in the world has noticed or attempted to reproduce, or her kids/neighbour/whoever just connected it to the first network that'd work.
- was_a_dev 3y ago
  Fair enough - I think it is most likely something I read via HN
  - Macha 3y ago
    Yeah, HN seems to be the primary community responsible for the belief that this is commonplace.
    - lostlogin 3y ago
      Maybe, but the shitty behaviour of big tech companies makes such things very easy to believe.
- Lammy 3y ago
  It's possible, and that's all that matters IMO
  - fshbbdssbbgdd 3y ago
    If “possible” is all that matters then you have to include stuff like “I’m on a special list where if I order a monitor from Amazon, they’ll send me a version with a secret chip on the inside of the case that broadcasts my secret TV viewing habits to the NSA.”
- lostlogin 3y ago
  It’s too hard on the Unifi line, but Ubiquiti Edgerouters allow some neat rules. Eg if on port 53 and not coming from the Pihole, send back to Pihole. The Samsung was very chatty, but didn’t connect to an unsecured wifi network I had setup for testing. It’s gone now and an equally chatty Sony is in its place - with not network access.
lelandfe 3y ago
I looked into this last year and couldn’t find much. I found a few forum posts of people claiming their TV connected to a public WiFi but none of them seemed particularly reputable.
lr1970 3y ago
There is Amazon SideWalk [0] that could potentially allow devices join mesh WiFi behind your back. [0] https://www.amazon.com/Amazon-Sidewalk/ https://www.amazon.com/Amazon-Sidewalk/
- freedomben 3y ago
  Yep, make no mistake this is absolutely going to happen.
- nickthenerd 3y ago
  Yes. I was looking for this comment before saying the same. This is the biggest selling point of Sidewalk to appliance/product companies. All the usage data, ad data, analytics, even remote control of devices can now happen even if your devices are completely disconnected from your home WiFi. If your neighbor has an Amazon Echo... now its basically connected to the internet. Even if you don't have neighbors, there could be a LoRa gateway a mile away on a cell tower, and its now connected.
  - nmeagent 3y ago
    Well, we still have physical access at least. Let's see these weasel devices try to connect without a functioning antenna.
- rootusrootus 3y ago
  The existence of Sidewalk is what prompted me to remove all Amazon devices from my home. I hope the range on that network is less than the distance to my neighbors house (but they're old folks, definitely don't have an Echo).
iijj 3y ago
I have a 3 month old Samsung TV with recent firmware. I am trying to use it as a dumb offline TV connected to an Apple TV (which is, of course, online). Short version is it does not automatically connect to networks without user input, but it prompts people all the time and inevitably ended up back on the network. It won't forget network passwords without a full reset. So if you connect to download firmware then disable the connection, it is one click away from someone re-enabling it. If there's an unsecured network available, you're only 2-3 clicks away from joining that. With other people in the house using it, the only way to reliably keep it off the internet is to connect it to a network, allow it to verify the connection works, then block it from making any more outgoing connections at the router level. It seems to be ok with this situation and doesn't complain too much. My original plan was to setup HDMI CEC and lock away the Samsung Remote to prevent people from getting into trouble. But when the TV is turned on vi HDMI CEC, half the time it wants to immediately run the OLED refresh cycle, and will automatically shut off and start doing that unless you actively prevent it from doing so with the remote. This is annoying because they have a setting to run the OLED refresh at night when not in use. It's almost like they sabotaged this use case on purpose to force people to interact with the Samsung UI. I should have bought a projector, assuming one can still get projectors that aren't similarly infected.
- freedomben 3y ago
  My Samsung tries to be smart too and ends up wrecking everything. I have a Steam Deck and a Linux laptop that I want to connect via HDMI, but the TV tries to do some sort of detection thing but doesn't wait long enough and does some sort of power cycle on it. The net result is that the laptop will switch from HDMI on to HDMI off and back every few seconds, and the TV will never connect. It's aggravating because it's such a stupid simple bug, but I have zero control over the TV.
  - exmicrosoldier 3y ago
    My Sony smart tv was great for 3 years because I never connected it to the internet, but ever since I did, it hangs, takes 2 minutes to allow switching inputs, and in general just sucks. I will not make the mistake of ever connecting one of these to the internet again, and if I have to buy a Giant monitor for 2k, so be it. I'm 90% sure that the flash drive on the TV wore out and they want me to replace what is otherwise great working hardware for features I don't even want anymore.

Hasn't some models (thinking Samsung) been shown to connect to any WiFi network they can? edit: Appears to be an urban legend, with not much substance to back it up!

codetrotter 3y ago

Sure but if everyone has WPA2 encryption enabled on their network, such as is the case in my neighbourhood, then there is no network for the TV to connect to anyways.

midasuni 3y ago
Amazon whisper net etc from ring doorbells and other privacy violating things come to mind as possible connections. Mostly theoretical though.
prmoustache 3y ago
Couldn't a device looking for wifi just connect wherever you or your neighbours hit the wps button on their wifi router?
- codetrotter 3y ago
  Don’t know. I never use the WPS button, nor have I ever seen anyone else use it either. But I think you are right this could potentially let the device connect itself :(

KerrAvon 3y ago

But that would require an accessible WiFi network. I'm sure someday it'll be impossible because they'll embed 5G chips and do it over cell without involving your consent, but that day isn't here yet.

ghayes 3y ago
Simple, just put it in a Faraday cage.
- modriano 3y ago
  The mesh would have to be so fine that you wouldn't be able to see the screen (unless you were inside the "cage").
  - lancesells 3y ago
    Simple, go wired and encase the house in a faraday cage.
    - eropple 3y ago
      Really, anyone who's lived in a sufficiently old house knows you can run your own Wi-Fi in a Faraday cage. Just probably not between rooms.
      - lostlogin 3y ago
        Underfloor foil insulation works pretty well as a cage. It also adds a nice electrocution risk when installing and is banned in my area for this reason.
        eropple 3y ago
        Metal lath under the plaster. Ripping that out was a mess.
    - xattt 3y ago
      Houses finished with stucco tend to do this as a side effect, since stucco is applied onto a fine metal grid screwed to framing.
  - tzs 3y ago
    Google is telling me that the mesh for a Faraday cage that would block WiFi could have hole sizes up to about 5 mm. Suppose you made your faraday cage (or at least the part that goes in front of the screen) out of 40 gauge wire (0.07874 mm diameter) with the wires spaced 2.25 mm apart. On a 70" 4K TV a pixel is about 0.4 mm x 0.4 mm. If the mesh were close to the screen I think about 30% of the pixels would have wire in front of them. Of those 30%, 1/6 would both a horizontal and a vertical wire in front (let's not go crazy and talk about orienting the mesh diagonally or anything like that), and 5/6 would only have one wire in front of them. So that's 70% of pixels not interfered with, 25% having one wire in front of them, and 5% having two wires. The 25% with one wire crossing would have about 20% of the pixel occluded by the wire. The 5% with two wires crossing them would have about 36% occluded. My guess is that the screen could be seen pretty well through that.
giobox 3y ago
I've seen rumblings that day may be very soon, too. Once devices in the home have embedded prepaid 5G out with your control, all sorts of home networking/firewall challenges are going to arise. We are entering a world in which it will cost very, very little to embed 5G into almost anything with say 1GB of prepaid eSim data for analytics collection, regardless of whether device resides on your LAN or not.
- ed25519FUUU 3y ago
  There’s only a fractional amount of people using smart TVs without WiFi. I’m very dubious it’s worth the cost to imbed GSM cards in each TV to reach the fraction that doesn’t allow the TV on WiFi.
  - midasuni 3y ago
    Large portion of those who currently don’t connect will faraday cage their connection to remove the ability too. Then of course there’s a lack of 5G. I certainly don’t have any where I live. Just about have 1 bar of 4g near the window.
  - rhn_mk1 3y ago
    If that happens, it's going to be to reach those who can't set up wifi manually. It's better user experience not to have to, leading to fewer returns.
  - YurgenJurgensen 3y ago
    It would simplify setup for non-technical consumers. I'm sure people complain about having to input a WiFi password with a TV remote. WiFi/Cellular convergence as a concept also doesn't seem like the most unlikely future.
    - gruez 3y ago
      > It would simplify setup for non-technical consumers. I'm sure people complain about having to input a WiFi password with a TV remote. So they'll add a $50 LTE/5G modem to the BOM just to save the trouble of entering a password using arrow keys, a process that takes maybe 2-3 minutes?
AlexAltea 3y ago
This already happens with Nespresso coffee machines (they have an SIM that connects to the Internet, whether you want it or not). That day is already yesterday.
- robocat 3y ago
  A SIM? Reference?
- shrike 3y ago
  Wow, they sure do. Page 29 of the user guide for the Nespresso Zenius says - This coffee machine is equipped with M2M (Machine to Machine) techology which may be activated in due time with your agreement. Thanks to a SIM card already integrated in the machine, such network connections will offer new services (subject to further terms and conditions) to its customers and improve the after sales process by automatically communicating machine troubleshooting / diagnostics to our Customer Relationship Centre (depending on country requirements and specificities). https://www.nespresso.com/shared_res/manuals/zenius/www_Zenius_Z2B_Nespresso(EN).pdf https://www.nespresso.com/shared_res/manuals/zenius/www_Zeni...
  - oblio 3y ago
    I imagine that can be disabled physically?
    - YurgenJurgensen 3y ago
      I also imagine that naïve attempts to disable it would be interpreted as a way of defeating some kind of always-online DRM on the coffee pods. And if coffee pods don't come with always-online DRM yet, I'm honestly surprised at Nespresso's lack of dedication to this dystopia.
      - hilbert42 3y ago
        If that's the case then it cannot be used in any place/location where there is no signal. If so, then there would be hell to pay the first time if happened. If it works sans connection, then do what I've said elsewwhere and that's to cut or short out the antenna lead. Removing the SIM may be deemed provocative by the manufacturer, if there's no signal reception then that's a different matter (the user can't be blamed).
philsnow 3y ago
I think the most likely next steps is integrating with Amazon Sidewalk instead of 5G. I don't know what the relative availability of 5G signal vs Sidewalk signal is, but I'm pretty sure Amazon has a dashboard tracking the latter.
girvo 3y ago
It’ll be 4G, because NB-IoT is already here and pretty excellent for data collection.
hilbert42 3y ago
"…they'll embed 5G chips and do it over cell without involving your consent," There'd be hell to pay if they ever did that. Moreover, it'd be impossible to keep the fact quiet if deployed at any reasonable scale. A much bigger looming threat is the possible closure of terrestrial Free-to-Air TV broadcasting (it was an early agenda item to be discussed at the 2028 WARC/WRC (World Administrative Radio Conference) but was dropped early on. That it ever got there in the first instance is a very big worry, it shows that people in high places have been or are considering such a move).
vhcr 3y ago
It doesn't sounds so crazy to shield a house from electromagnetic radiation (Faraday cage).

Macha 3y ago

No, this appears to be a HN urban legend. It's always asked in these threads and the closest thing that anyone has been able to provide is one person asking one time on the samsung forums why there tv was connected to the neighbour's wifi (openly in the TV's own menu). So either there's a giant conspiracy which literally nobody else in the world has noticed or attempted to reproduce, or her kids/neighbour/whoever just connected it to the first network that'd work.

was_a_dev 3y ago
Fair enough - I think it is most likely something I read via HN
- Macha 3y ago
  Yeah, HN seems to be the primary community responsible for the belief that this is commonplace.
  - lostlogin 3y ago
    Maybe, but the shitty behaviour of big tech companies makes such things very easy to believe.
Lammy 3y ago
It's possible, and that's all that matters IMO
- fshbbdssbbgdd 3y ago
  If “possible” is all that matters then you have to include stuff like “I’m on a special list where if I order a monitor from Amazon, they’ll send me a version with a secret chip on the inside of the case that broadcasts my secret TV viewing habits to the NSA.”
lostlogin 3y ago
It’s too hard on the Unifi line, but Ubiquiti Edgerouters allow some neat rules. Eg if on port 53 and not coming from the Pihole, send back to Pihole. The Samsung was very chatty, but didn’t connect to an unsecured wifi network I had setup for testing. It’s gone now and an equally chatty Sony is in its place - with not network access.

lelandfe 3y ago

I looked into this last year and couldn’t find much. I found a few forum posts of people claiming their TV connected to a public WiFi but none of them seemed particularly reputable.

lr1970 3y ago

There is Amazon SideWalk [0] that could potentially allow devices join mesh WiFi behind your back. [0] https://www.amazon.com/Amazon-Sidewalk/ https://www.amazon.com/Amazon-Sidewalk/

freedomben 3y ago
Yep, make no mistake this is absolutely going to happen.
nickthenerd 3y ago
Yes. I was looking for this comment before saying the same. This is the biggest selling point of Sidewalk to appliance/product companies. All the usage data, ad data, analytics, even remote control of devices can now happen even if your devices are completely disconnected from your home WiFi. If your neighbor has an Amazon Echo... now its basically connected to the internet. Even if you don't have neighbors, there could be a LoRa gateway a mile away on a cell tower, and its now connected.
- nmeagent 3y ago
  Well, we still have physical access at least. Let's see these weasel devices try to connect without a functioning antenna.
rootusrootus 3y ago
The existence of Sidewalk is what prompted me to remove all Amazon devices from my home. I hope the range on that network is less than the distance to my neighbors house (but they're old folks, definitely don't have an Echo).

iijj 3y ago

I have a 3 month old Samsung TV with recent firmware. I am trying to use it as a dumb offline TV connected to an Apple TV (which is, of course, online). Short version is it does not automatically connect to networks without user input, but it prompts people all the time and inevitably ended up back on the network. It won't forget network passwords without a full reset. So if you connect to download firmware then disable the connection, it is one click away from someone re-enabling it. If there's an unsecured network available, you're only 2-3 clicks away from joining that. With other people in the house using it, the only way to reliably keep it off the internet is to connect it to a network, allow it to verify the connection works, then block it from making any more outgoing connections at the router level. It seems to be ok with this situation and doesn't complain too much. My original plan was to setup HDMI CEC and lock away the Samsung Remote to prevent people from getting into trouble. But when the TV is turned on vi HDMI CEC, half the time it wants to immediately run the OLED refresh cycle, and will automatically shut off and start doing that unless you actively prevent it from doing so with the remote. This is annoying because they have a setting to run the OLED refresh at night when not in use. It's almost like they sabotaged this use case on purpose to force people to interact with the Samsung UI. I should have bought a projector, assuming one can still get projectors that aren't similarly infected.

freedomben 3y ago
My Samsung tries to be smart too and ends up wrecking everything. I have a Steam Deck and a Linux laptop that I want to connect via HDMI, but the TV tries to do some sort of detection thing but doesn't wait long enough and does some sort of power cycle on it. The net result is that the laptop will switch from HDMI on to HDMI off and back every few seconds, and the TV will never connect. It's aggravating because it's such a stupid simple bug, but I have zero control over the TV.
- exmicrosoldier 3y ago
  My Sony smart tv was great for 3 years because I never connected it to the internet, but ever since I did, it hangs, takes 2 minutes to allow switching inputs, and in general just sucks. I will not make the mistake of ever connecting one of these to the internet again, and if I have to buy a Giant monitor for 2k, so be it. I'm 90% sure that the flash drive on the TV wore out and they want me to replace what is otherwise great working hardware for features I don't even want anymore.