A day or so of setup (if you're completely new) and you'll need a usenet sub (recommended) or torrent site (or sites, quality may vary on open trackers) but the *arr stack can be automated[1] to make sure you have the best quality versions of each episode/movie fairly easily.

1. https://trash-guides.info/

because 99% of the time these people are comparing a macbook trackpad to a $300 Acer trackpad on their parents machine they have to fix twice a year.

Or use a filesystem with dedupe like ZFS.

Are these the same lessons they should have learned from bombing Afghan weddings or Iraqi funerals?

Hapsburgs: Recursive self improvement by inbreeding

Can they just buy Atlassian.

And Adobe?

No hold on... Adobe is probably already secretly owned by BS given their business practices.

FATALITY - in Mortal Kombat voice

I hope not. That would be a tradedy for DX, which was bought by Atlassian last year.

Could you link to these reports, the ones with evidence?

If something is technically possible, one should act as though it is already happening and hope to be wrong rather than refusing to consider the issue until sufficient “proof” is given, by which it will be too late. Doubly so when advertisers are involved, who as a group are economically-incentivized to not care about consent.

This would be trivial to test and detect. Just like every claim that TVs will connect to open WiFi networks if you don't connect them to a network. Yet after years of these claims and being extremely trivial to test not a single shred of evidence has ever been provided.

How would you test this?

How do you think? By broadcasting an open WiFi network and seeing if it connects and requests a DHCP Lease.

If they form a mesh and route traffic via one TV that acts as an exit node you can check the packet TTLs.

Isn't messing with TTLs a pretty obvious thing to do when communicating covertly? And wouldn't that kind of packet inspection only catch cases of TVs literally acting as packet-level routers, but not catch application-layer shenanigans like aggregating statistics in the exit node so that all the data going over your own network appears to be originating from the same device?

It's still implausible, but thoroughly verifying that your TV isn't spying on you isn't trivial.

There's no requirement that the mesh be IP-based or function as a layer-3 router...

Even if it were IP-bsaed, it would be extremely straightforward for one box to send a UDP message to another, and receive and retransmit at the application layer. No TTL nonsense, No multiple IPs showing up communicating upstream.

But if my TV is doing this, then by definition it's not acting as an exit node so how do I test it?

Put a WiFi NIC in monitor mode and see if the TV is connected to another AP based on the 802.11 packets.

Or if this theoretical implementation by a manufacturer is using a custom protocol/frequency (very unlikely for a variety of reasons), you'd begin by probing with an SDR.

Which part of that qualifies as trivial?

I only semi-agree with GP; it's trivial for someone who works in Tech to pull it off, but that's really all you need to blow the lid on the whole operation given manufacturers would likely have implemented the same behavior across all TVs of the same model/product segment.

This seems paranoid. There are many things which are technically possible, but there is no evidence of some super-advertiser doing. It's not even clear to me that much of the 'fingerprinting' (past basic re-targeting) actually works.

> This seems paranoid. There are many things which are technically possible, but [...]

Isn't this what people said pre-Snowden? Not that NSA spying is the same as corporate "surveillance capitalism", but if companies can make more money off it and the technology exists, it seems prudent to assume companies are trying it.

There was evidence of the NSA intercepting international communications before Snowden, but for some reason that didn't seem to make much of a lasting impression: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A

It's also significant to note that while the government is quite bad at keeping 'problematic' behavior secret, companies are much worse at it.

Analogously, there's evidence that companies will make extensive use of available techniques (browser fingerprinting, cookies, etc.) to track and surveil users without their knowledge and often against their will. The exposure of that arguably also hasn't triggered an effective backlash against those companies. So, as with the pre-Snowden evidence for domestic communication interception by the NSA, I think there's ample evidence of the willingness of companies to exploit whatever technologies they can in order to surveil users.

The way this is typically handled is through compartmentalization, where no one working has enough of a global view to be able to claim that the behaviour is problematic.

There's a lot that's problematic that we suspect that is going on but don't have firm proof, because the organization actually is pretty good at keeping it secret enough. There's some exceptions where things do get leaked/revealed, but how would you know if this was 99% of wrongdoing, or 0.99% of it?

Here is maybe what he was remembering from HN:

> Our Samsung fridge’s manual says it’ll automatically and silently mesh network with any Samsung TVs in range, use AI and hidden cameras to recognize what’s in the fridge and when we use it, then have the TV inject targeted ads into programming based on its findings. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45742208

Wild. Still, paraphrased like that it triggers my "sure, that totally happened" detectors.

That is an article saying that mesh networking frameworks exist. It does not support the GP claim of smart TVs creating mesh networks across different owners.

Many 75" monitors on the market?

Takes real balls to go with AWS huh?

I mean wasn't it just few months back when Socrates was asked to drink poison chalice when he was promoting multi-cloud strategy by using Kubernetes based deployment for his education platform.

Its always speculation that would be trivial to actually test.

1. Do not connect to network 2. Create unauthenticated WiFi network 3. Monitor WiFi network

Strange no one has ever done this simple af test to backup their claims

If TV manufacturers wanted to be underhanded then they could actually make this much harder to detect by delaying the connection to new unauthenticated networks for e.g. months or only after seeing another device connect and then using that device's MAC when it is not around.

Still super easily detectable even if they clone a MAC.

I have an unprotected guest network with a captive portal and an LG C1. I have never seen the LG pop up in the logs for the guest network.