5 ms·
Hope you don't have any open WiFi networks nearby. IMO it's better to put it on one of your networks and isolate it from the internet and other devices.
by amazingman 3mo ago
Hope you don't have any open WiFi networks nearby. IMO it's better to put it on one of your networks and isolate it from the internet and other devices.
- MrDrMcCoy 3mo agoIf it connects to another network, it's somebody else's problem. Unless of course, it has a built in webcam or microphone.
- stvltvs 3mo agoIt does, at least for any media played through the device. Read up on automatic content recognition. https://www.howtogeek.com/its-not-just-streaming-content-your-smart-tv-collects-data-on-everything/ https://www.howtogeek.com/its-not-just-streaming-content-you...
- account42 3mo agoIts your problem if it updates itself to show ads (and of course exfiltrate whatever it can see / hear).
- tyre 3mo agoYes. I bought a Samsung TV and there isn’t a way to set up Art Mode without the internet. So first you have to get a raspberry pi, install pi hole, then switch your router’s DNS. What a wild experience 2026 is. But I do feel like a wizard.
- entropie 3mo agoThey might hardcode DNS. It's not certain that this will work.
- slau 3mo agoThis is why I’m a bit conflicted about DoH and ODoH. Firefox and Chrome have defaulted to DoH for years if I’m not mistaken (although I’m in Europe so I believe my FF still uses regular DNS instead of DoH by default). This also means that DoH effectively sends all your queries to CloudFlare on FF. Chrome is slightly smarter and tries to map your DNS provider to a DoH implementation if known.
- tkel 3mo agoI have my router set with iptables rules to block/redirect all port 53 and you can also add known DoH to a blocklist to try and force LAN devices to use your router DNS.
- lodovic 3mo agoI have a separate lan for untrusted devices, I only use whitelisting. No public DNS for these devices.
- TeMPOraL 3mo agoThat's why I'm not a fan of DoH or certificate pinning. Those are tools of control.
- inigyou 3mo agoDoH in your resolv.conf wouldn't be a problem. When the browser ignores system settings it's a problem. Guess what though? resolv.conf doesn't have syntax to specify DoH.
- CyberDildonics 3mo agoYou can intercept normal DNS with iptables rules. The best way to deal with a TV you don't trust is what no one wants to hear. Open up the back and disconnect the wifi antenna. It is easy to open them up and everything is pretty simple and obvious once you do.
- drnick1 3mo ago> Open up the back and disconnect the wifi antenna. Upvoted. This is precisely the kind of thing I expect to read on HN.
- CyberDildonics 3mo agoIt's not even some difficult technical task like people think. The back of a TV is kind of like a PC but much simpler. There is the power board (AC to DC conversion for electronics and leds), video input board (where you plug in HDMI etc) and a t-con board, which takes a single video signal in from the input board and drives the LCD screen. Then there are a few ancillary components like speakers, maybe a roku module etc. There are easy to find and everything is modular. You can take the speakers out and use them somewhere else if you want. You can just disconnect the wifi antennae on the smart tv board and be done with it. You can also find the IR led connection that the remote sends signals to.
- Jnr 3mo agoI block known DoH servers on my lan and forward all dns requests to my dns server.
- tyre 3mo agoYou are correct! They do and it was bypassing my pihole. I was able to get around this but man they really want to stalk people.
- walrus01 3mo agoYou don't need an actual physical raspberry pi to temporarily run pihole on your LAN, you can, for instance, install a barebones debian VM inside any common hypervisor on your laptop like virtualbox or qemu, then install pihole on that basic debian x86-64 system.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- drnick1 3mo ago> So first you have to get a raspberry pi, install pi hole, then switch your router’s DNS. This does not provide any meaningful protection against data exfiltration. The TV is very possibly using public DNS or outright phoning home through stable IPs.
- RiverCrochet 3mo agoI haven't seen any open WiFi networks around me in years. I don't think it's a thing anymore; it's definitely not something a TV company can rely on.
- baby_souffle 3mo agoThey're not unheard of in cities. Hotels and shopping malls have them. Some residential ISPs will also broadcast a public access point using a slice of each customer's bandwidth allocation...
- dhosek 3mo agoWhen I had Comcast internet, I could get on those, but it required a network profile to actually connect to the internet. That said, I wouldn’t put it past TV makers and Comcast to collude on using this to allow backdoor network exfiltration.
- RiverCrochet 3mo agoTV makers would have to collude with every ISP for that to be worth depending on. Not to say it couldn't happen - but it wouldn't be a backdoor thing, it'd be very up front. All that's needed is for ISPs to create/join some SSO-like standard that lets you use ISP credentials as smart TV credentials (e.g. Your Xfinity account is automatically your Vizio account, sign on with your Xfinity account to get free streaming deals now). I feel like if TVs start doing that, they'll display a network ID and signal bars at the top of the screen like cell phones do, so the TV maker doesn't get blamed for ISP problems.
- drnick1 3mo agoAnother reason not to use ISP hardware. That's on top of a well-known backdoor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TR-069 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TR-069).
- prmoustache 3mo agoThey all have captive portal for regulatory reasons though.
- Hamuko 3mo agoI have an open guest network with a captive portal, and not once have I seen my LG TV try to connect to it.
- qlte 3mo agoThis is an urban legend. (And made way more sense 15 years ago when smart TVs were just starting to become common and open WiFi without captive portals actually still existed).