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.
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.”
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.
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.
Yeah, it is terrible. They have settings to modify resolution/refresh/latency mode, but those settings are always overridden if the TV's auto detection thinks it knows better.
About a third of the time it will insist my Xbox is a 1440p/60Hz input, and I can do nothing about it except reboot all the things.
Ugh, it's so utterly terrible. I really wonder, what kind of engineers are building/designing these things? Do they not even use their own products, or if they do they never plug external devices in?
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.
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.
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).
What a time to be alive. This should be disclosed on the front page of the manual and not hidden in the smallprint. And it should come with instructions on how to disable it with a physical switch.
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).
doubtful. I'm sure it will refuse to work if it can't talk to home base, and that home base will have some sort of certificate pinning so only their servers can authorize it do make the coffee.
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.
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.
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.
I've long wondered about what wifi/cellular looks like on an infinite timescale... it does strike me as unlikely too we will maintain two separate wireless standards forever for IP data. I think embedded cellular or equivelent global wireless access will one day just be as taken for granted as embedded wifi in a lot of devices. Technologies like eSims are all steps in this direction.
I've seen others in this thread argue embedded cellular isnt worth the cost, but this misses the critical point - if it costs almost nothing (we are close to this point already) and is already built into every off the shelf SoC, of course manufacturers will use it. We are talking pennies per unit at scale here in future.
The auto industry has already done this - Ford for example have embedded cellular analytics you can't turn off (or at least its non-obvious to me as an owner) on every single new Ford and has done so for several years now, and you don't pay a penny as the end user, even on their most basic entry level cars.
It wouldn't last five minutes on my car without being disabled. Easy to do, use a portable spectrum analyzer, find the source of the RF and then nuke the antenna.
Same goes for any other appliance that radiates RF signals (IoT, etc.).
You don't stop internet access or do anything to alter the electronics. By blocking the car from transmitting and receiving cell signals it's effectively the same as the car being out of cell range.
If cell access is essential, what happens in a place without cell access, much of Alaska perhaps?
I hate to think of all the lawsuits resulting from drivers who drive into locations where cells are out of range and get stranded.
Similarly, what happens when the cell phone system breaks down? And does that mean I can't buy a car if I live in an area with intermittent, weak or no cell or internet service? Hate to think what the manufacturer's sales department would think of that.
On the matter of reverse engineering, it seems to me we're just on the cusp of that. Hackers as still getting organized and aftermarket manufacturers have still to tool up for complete computer replacement kits. Reckon we're only at the very beginning of whole new industry.
Oh, I nearly forgot, the Right to Repair movement has only just begun to get organized. If manufacturers try to stop us altering something we've paid goid money for then they'll be in for a long political fight.
As I said above, just nuke the antennas (a box cutter through the antenna leads is usually enough. If you're really paranoid, short the lead out at or near the equipment end (as near as to the feed IC as is possible).
I do this on old smartphones that I have no intention of ever using as a phone again (say for testing APS etc.). It's dead easy, a razor blade through the circuit board tracks that connect to the antenna(s) and it's all over—no phone, with or without SIM (i.e.: no emergency service) and no WiFi or Bluetooth.
"…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).
It’s not that simple. The Faraday cage I got from Costco seems to phone home to a server in China. Obviously I returned it and used the money to buy a whole lot of tinfoil.
Anyone who says that "blocking" wifi is easy is someone who hasn't tried. Even very expensive professionally built cages don't "block", they attenuate. And modern wifi equipment is surprisingly good at working just fine with weak signals.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
edit: Appears to be an urban legend, with not much substance to back it up!