ms-demeanor:

ms-demeanor:

I don’t know much about smart tvs but generally Ethernet is preferred for connected devices just because it’s *faster* but also with everything you should make sure you’re not using the default username/password and also i’m not sure what kind of encryption standard smart tvs use these days so there’s a possibility of snooping traffic?

I can think of about eight reasons I wouldn’t want a smart tv on wifi and most of them honestly just have to do with functionality – streaming is going to be MUCH slower and flakier over a wifi connection than a wired connection – and if you’re bringing a smart tv into your house in the first place i kind of feel like you’re already accepting all of the security risks that entails (tv manufacturers aren’t known for their frequent security patches or user accessibility or ease of configuration).

Because there’s some commentary in the notes let me clarify:

if you’re bringing a smart tv into your house in the first place i kind of feel like you’re already accepting all of the security risks that entails

aside from a lack of user accessibility and a high likelihood of vulnerabilities due to manufacturers not patching and using default passwords IT IS A GIVEN that your smart TV is going to collect data on you and if you purchase a smart TV and put it into your home that’s something that you’re accepting. You’re accepting that the manufacturer can collect data from you, you’re accepting that whatever service you connect to it is going to track your viewing habits, you’re accepting that this is a device that is watching you more than you are watching it.

So my position personally is “smart TVs and smart fridges and smart appliances generally are not a good thing and if you are going to have them it’s better if they’re not connected to the internet and they should be able to function without being connected to the internet.”

ASIDE from all of that if you’re going to have a smart device that streams video it’s going to be much faster over ethernet than over wifi. And, hell, maybe the initial tweet was warning about the smart TV spying on what other devices were connected to the wifi.

But also in the comments it says “it’s better to get a standard tv and hook it up to a chromecast because better the devil you know (google, etc.)” and I would like to emphatically state for the record that nearly any other option is better than bringing Google into more parts of your life.

Our “smart TV” is composed of the following:

* A dumb TV

* An eleven-year-old third-hand ThinkPad running Linux Lite

* A couple of adapters to pipe the A/V output of the laptop into the TV

* A wireless mouse

* A wireless keyboard

Non-megacorp, patchable, modular, and also when somebody’s laptop is waiting on repairs they can commandeer the TV’s prosthetic brain to use in the meantime! Three out of four family members have now used this device as a daily-driver laptop at one time or another!

(Note: our setup is on Wi-Fi, but our TV is a couple decades old and has a correspondingly low pixel count, so it’s not like we’re looking to stream very high-quality video.)

Tags:

#recs #reply via reblog #fun with loopholes #adventures in human capitalism