I just finished setting up a custom router with dns ad blocking. Next comes a media player so I can purge this smart TV filth from my household.
Huge shout out to Louis Rossmann and the FUTO communuty contributors, check out the wiki on self-hosted software if you haven’t already.
I made my Smart TV into a dumb TV by never activating the smart TV functions. And then I plugged a relatively cheap computer into it. So I don’t have this kind of problem.
Your grandma does.
I installed her TV and internet last week. She barely understands the concept of switching TV inputs, and her Roku smart TV doesn’t let you rename inputs from HDMI1 to [ISP NAME] unless the thing is connected to the internet. It also defaults out of the box to show the smart TV bullshit every single time you turn it on, instead of just showing the last used input before the TV turned off. So she’s completely baffled how to watch simple television channels unless I spend 10 minutes reconfiguring this garbage so it’s usable.
Go visit your grandma, everyone. And reconfigure her smart TV. I’m joking but I’m not. I can only visit so many grandmas per day.
Which only works for now. They’ve already gotten you to be ok with the upcharge price for the “smart” hardware. Soon they’re going to require online activation for “reasons”. So choosing to not connect it won’t work. And they’ll do regular ad connection checks and if it fails to update ads after so much time the TV will prompt an error to please correct the network.
Hate it all you want, it’s going to happen.
It doesn’t need to happen if we actually do something about this hate.
I have a very old 4K Toshiba TV with a built in “smart browser” that, due to me never plugging into the Internet, has a home page with news about how well Obama’s doing in the polls for being a relatively unknown junior senator.
That is the way