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The difference was that Orwell’s TVs could not be turned off, whereas today people won’t turn them off.
Yeah we didn’t learn shit from that book.
That being said, it’s easily one of the more important books I’ve ever read.
Also, the MapQuest app just added a surveillance layer. I swapped a month or so ago when Google bowed to their pedo god over the whole Lake Ontario thing. It’s honestly a great app and gets me from point A to point B just as well as Google Maps. Anyway, I checked the surveillance layer yesterday and we are literally surrounded by surveillance cameras. It’s terrifying.
We are living in the age where dystopia is being built up and all we can do is write witty comments online about it.
Its an interesting life experience and our generation will be the last young ones who didn’t grow up in dystopia. 20 years from now, the west will be exactly how we think it will be.
It’s rare, but sometimes I do wonder with some patients.
It’s obviously somewhat unarguable if it’s just the more ideological “they’re listening to all of us and generally invading our privacy.” Usually then I’m just like, “TRUTH, but also please either put the pants back on or go to your room.”
But then there’ll be a woman who says the voices telling her to wash her hands until she bleeds are a symptom of the black magic her ex is using to track her. And I’m like: girl, u crazy about the black magic thing. All they need is a fuckin’ AirTag, and he probably is tracking you. So then you call the cops to take down the report, and they’re like, “We can’t arrest the dude for black magic.” And it’s like, no shit, she’s bonkers. But could you at least double-check that the dude isn’t stalking her?
There are so many patients who tell me super fractured stories. They’re impossible to untangle in a way that could even approach a formal pursuit of justice. But based on the details they’re able to express coherently, I genuinely wonder if the story is true.
They have ears, and eyes, and noses, and skin, and tongues. They can absolutely perceive everything you do, and tell it to the enemies of the people. It’s frightening the moment we’re living.
Um, actually, in 1984 the government spies on you through your TV, but in real life, corporations spy on you through your TV and the government intercepts the internet traffic and/or asks the corporations for the data, so it’s obviously completely different.
They don’t intercept anything honestly. They either buy it or receive it through PRISM. Saying they intercept it really isn’t the right word when Internet companies literally allow them into their interconnect locations (IXP) to install NSA hardware. I suppose technically you could still call it intercept, but it is more like they just listen to all traffic without any actual clandestine action.
tomato tomato
We have known ever since snowden, but people kinda just pretended that never happened.
Still is in my house. TVs are separate from streaming devices. No remote or speaker has a mic in it. Phones and laptops have mic and video permissions off if not in use.
Do I expect someone is listening? Yes but they are at the nation state level and ain’t willing to risk their tools for less than national level threats.
My smart TV is so old that LG no longer supports the software. So it’s now a dumb tv and I’m not getting a new one until I can just buy a TV that is dumb.
If they’re smart TVs it’s still listening and will pick up and send using any nearby wifi with no password.
Nope no smart TV. They still sell them, just now they are sized limited. Next one I buy will probably be a oversized monitor as I have a seperat sound system.
The danger is that these things can be done automated by now. It’s not just governments doing this. It is the private sector, and they sell all of that to the highest bidder. The only way out is either to stop them connecting to the internet or install a free software operating system you control.
And even then the firmware (or a hidden RTOS) can still be able to record and send everything.
We need to seriously fund more things like free, libre and open source (and libre and open hardware) TVs, TV-boxes, TV-sticks, phones, tablets and so on.
FYI for those who just bought the newest AppleTV gen4, it has 3 built-in microphones
Your router is GPS geotagged and recording/reporting all your audio/video/Facebook/Reddit/etc search activity, so good luck with that.
Even I’m not totally immune.
Would love to know how considering I bought the hardware and maintain it. The Geo tag is a county over due to the IP of the ISP which you can only relocate it with a VPN.
My router is Opnscence & pihole VMs running on a proxmox host with unbound/DHCP, VLAN segmentation and DHCP snooping on managed switches . YMMV
DNS resolution, split DHCP/DNS roles, and segmented services FTW.
Cost? 1 discarded enterprise miniPC, 1 extra NIC and a managed switch. (Cheaper than some commercial routers if you’re creative.)
Your router is GPS geotagged
Not if you turn the wifi off.
and recording/reporting all your audio/video/Facebook/Reddit/etc search activity
Recording all my VPN activity, maybe. But all it’s going to see is a lot of encrypted traffic to and from my VPN server.
Oh, when they install your internet router, they register your address and GPS. So go ahead and turn your WiFi off, they still know where you are.
Fun question…
What OS am I posting from?
What browser? Where from?
Not saying you can’t sort it out, perhaps you can.
Just curious…
It’s really that bad. Just ordered a smart TV knowingly that it’s going to spy on me. I will never connect it to the internet and just to be sure, I will try to disable the microphones physically. At this point I believe that it will still try to connect to open wifi’s in my neighbourhood. Can’t be paranoid enough these days.
It can also connect to other devices that do have WiFi connection via Bluetooth, best thing you can do is remove the antenna (writing this down, it makes sense the remote control that has Bluetooth and a mic will do it too)
A speaker also can be used as a microphone btw lol.
Probablytrue, even if not the best quality. Anyway, perfect shouldn’t be the enemy of good.Not probably true. Speakers absolutely can be used as microphones. They’re essentially the same hardware just with bigger membranes and magnets.
Edited it. Heard of it, wasn’t sure.
They were called “screens”. I don’t have a smart tv…i have a kick ass dumb tv that works just fine.
I have a cheap “smart TV” that never has been and never will be connected to the internet.
If it’s an LG, be aware that it will try to use any free wifi or even use bluetooth…
Get a pi-hole
DNS over HTTPS kinda makes that moot. Plus proprietary apps can roll their own DNS-like protocol, and chuck data down whatever port they want.
Get Wireshark
I’ve mac banned my TV from the wifi
Amazon shipped out thousands of Kindle’s with prepaid Sim cards in them back in 2012
We’ve now moved on to eSim, once phone companies wondered “why do we even need a piece of outside hardware to connect to a phone tower”, so good luck sleeping at night.
We’re about to go full circle with 5G enabled televisions
I created a satellite box for my mum using a Raspberry Pi with Debian and a USB stick for the LNB feed. It works fine. Great even, better than the shitty satbox massive phonebook sized device she had. And I can control it.
I don’t see why we can’t build our own TVs. Get a large MIPI/DSI 1080p screen (15.6" is the biggest I’ve seen), mount it on a piece of plywood, mount a raspberry pi or other SBC onto it and connect it via the MIPI ribbon. For apps, install Kodi, and for LiveTV install a streaming server. That’s it
It is insane that the way I use my TV is to immediately isolate it from the Internet, set up a mini PC running Kodi, and never let the TV make a connection to anything else.
Just wait until the next gen of TVs are “AI ready” running local quantized proprietary LLMs designed to steal your data. Maybe they can fight with my local open weight model running on an old laptop.
Looking forward to the battle.
I feel like an open source machine learning project that blocks ads in real time might work well since ads seem to be pretty formulaic as compared to usual content.
You overestimate the usual content I watch.
