This is incredible work.. And makes the technology absolutely viable.
However... In a world where privacy is constantly being eroded intentionally by governments and private companies, I think this will NEVER, ever reach any consumer grade hardware. My cynic could envision the technology export ban worldwide in the vein of RSA [0] .
Why would any company offer the customers real out of the box e2e encryption possibilities built into their devices.
DRM was mentioned by another user. This will not be used to enable privacy for the masses.
Arguably this is less useful for consumer hardware in the first place. This is mostly useful when I don’t trust the service provider with my data but still need to use their services (casting my vote, encrypted inference, and so forth)
True, in the case of casting a vote though for example, I would see it being used within the voting machines itself before sending off to be counted. Good application.
But getting them available for customers for example say even a PCIe card or something and then that automatically encrypting everything you ever run today over an encrypted connection would be a dream.
> In a world where privacy is constantly being eroded intentionally by governments and private companies, I think this will NEVER, ever reach any consumer grade hardware.
Why not when government can just force companies to backdoor their hardware for them. That way users are secure most of the time except from the government (until the backdoor in intel's chips gets discovered anyway), and users have a false sense of security/privacy so people are more likely to share their secrets with corporations and the government gets to spy on people communicating more openly with each other.
Ughh.. I recently turned on my 1000EUR+ LG Oled TV to find that it had automatically installed a Copilot app.. And keeps doing it every few days.
Is there any smart TV that I can actually just use a TV how I want? Or am I reduced to buying an Apple TV device and unplugging the TV from the internet entirely ?
Right, never give a TV internet access now. That's where we are.
This means they can't surveil, brick, or change your hardware after you bought it.
So yes, then add whatever dongles to provide content. If the dongle turns bad (evil), chuck it and get a different kind. You preserve your privacy, hardware ownership rights, and freedom to choose.
> This means they can't surveil, brick, or change your hardware after you bought it.
They can however continuously display 'NO NETWORK' popups until you give the device the access it wants. Of course, only after it's been active a while and the return window is closed.
I'll believe it when I see it. The numbers simply don't pencil out. Streaming ads over cellular networks is going to be insanely expensive at rates that IOT/esim providers are currently offering. Not to mention that most people would connect to wifi anyways so they can watch neflix or whatever without a second device. If a 5G module costs $25 but only 10% of people actually never connect to wifi, you're basically paying $250 just to get that incremental customer connected.
Not for ads, but maybe the numbers work out if you're selling intel. How much is a household's watching habits worth on the market? How about keyword mentions in the room?
Protection of one's attention is our generation's luxury product.
Whether it's the TV hardware or the streaming service in your house, your standard of living is now judged by whether you pay extra for the ad-free tier.
Apple tends to skew luxury purchase, so it makes sense it hasn't been riddled with adware yet. The Apple logo is a status symbol that you're not being bombarded with ads in every corner of underutilized screen real-estate.
If a car is equipped with 'eCall' from the factory in the EU a missing modem is seen as a safety defect and fails the yearly inspection which is required for road use.
One workaround is to buy a computer monitor and use that instead. Most of those are still pretty dumb HDMI or USB terminals that you can plug any signal source into. They don't come in huge sizes like TVs (although search "digital signage" for some options), and you'll need a dedicated sound speaker system, but this route could be an option.
> Is there any smart TV that I can actually just use a TV how I want?
I’ve heard that large computer monitors and TVs intended to be used as displays can be used without connecting them to a network.
> Or am I reduced to buying an Apple TV device and unplugging the TV from the internet entirely ?
An Apple TV is a good choice even otherwise. I’ve never seen a smoother and quicker interface on a native Smart TV (granted that I’ve only seen Android and webOS). I use my Apple TV as the only network connected device while my TV is not connected to any network ever. Once in a while, I update the TV’s firmware by downloading it to a thumb drive and plugging that into the USB port of the TV.
Better yet, use a Linux HTPC. The Apple TV box is comically restricted. For example, because there is no web browser, there is no straightforward way to watch YouTube ad-free on it.
The default Google launcher is a disgusting mess. But since it is an Android, you do not have to use it and can use one of the many ad free ones. I use Projectivy
I don't have a reference, but I remember reading that some Samsung TVs require internet access to get past initial setup and allow access to HDMI. So we might already be here..
No such device exists, though. All smart TVs are as user hostile as manufacturers believe they can get away with. If they could make them worse for the user, they would. They're just pushing the boundaries as far as they can.
What happens when they move from default dns to ech with pinned dns servers? I was reading about ech a bit yesterday so I could keep up with apps trying to circumvent dns filtering on my kids' devices.
Usually I require a root cert so devices can have their traffic inspected or be isolated into an unsafe network where most nonessential traffic is blocked by default. I suppose letting an iot device connect will become more risky in the future when I can't control the dns resolver or can't confidently block requests through dns alone.
IF its an android, connect to it via ADB and disable all the BS apps, even launcher. I am using projectivity launcher on mine, even has child lock which we really need. No ads or popups etc at all. YouTube is all we watch on this TV anyway, and retro gaming and movies.
I also have Nvidia Shield connected to it, that one is setup the same way.
It is totally bonkers. For long time the low tech recommendation (without setting rules on router/firewall) was to never connect TV to network, and use cheap TV box, to use streaming services.
And then community's favorite - TiVo - started to show their own ads. Everything based on Android TV is also hit or miss. And might get enshitified with an update at any time. I think NVidia Shield is the only device other than AppleTV that works as expected. Only it didn't have an hardware upgrade in 5+ years.
It's unfortunate that the 2020s era Apple is so big/rich, in a way. Old Apple used to dabble in all sorts of niches, but now they need to sell 10M units/year to move the needle. So they'll never just make a TV now.
I bought a Sony Android TV a few years back which has yet to be enshitified - doesn't shove ads or shovelware down my throat, acts like a TV. It's a model made for the Japanese market though and they may have incentives to play nice with domestic customers.
From what I've read of Codeberg it's user base is a tad tetchy and has a tendency to make mountains out of molehills. It was more of a comment on Codeberg than the project itself.
Codeberg has always been like this for what its worth. One of the most starred projects on Codeberg is a wayland terminal called foot (Which I used to/use btw, highly recommended terminal) :]
> It was more of a comment on Codeberg than the project itself.
This is more so an observation of Centralization. Let me explain.
Centralized platforms like Reddit/Twitter/Github usually exist. Fediverse solutions like Lemmy/Mastodon/Codeberg (Codeberg is adding fediverse support) to some degree exist to counter the centralization.
You use mastodon because you don't want twitter/reddit. You don't want twitter/reddit because you don't ideologically support it or the idea of proprietory commercial solutions in general.
The latter community of fediverse is also more likely to care about Privacy in the sense that they sacrificed some comfort to support open source project by actually using it.
And when you think about it, This all boils down to ideology. We want open standards of internet, not Centralized behemoths. This Ideology is similar to anti AI resistance and for good reason because guess what or who again are training AI models on the corpus of text available on centralized media.
If not for Ideological reasons, then you had no reason to use codeberg for a long time. Now you do, because Github has turned to shit. But the reason I had made an account on Codeberg some 2 year ago was because of my ideology of not wanting a Github account in general and support open standards in general until I caved in to Github someday to make some issues and star some projects.
I am thinking of going back to codeberg seeing the enshittenification of github... Codeberg winning is a net positive for society in general given its open source/non-profit nature.
Reminder to donate to Codeberg as it actually runs on donations :]
Codeberg has my favorite UI of the bunch as well. As a regular user rather than a programmer, I really appreciate how easy it is to find both Issues (I am a frequent bug reporter) and Releases near the top of the page. GitHub hides Releases on the side or bottom (mobile), and GitLab's UI is such a mess I don't even know where to start. I've often edited my URL to get to Issues or Releases on some git forges because it's easier than dealing with their UI.
Yes, the location of the repo really doesn't mean much to me at all, complaining about it being hosted somewhere because of principle is certainly petty.
The fact that these tools are 'active' centric, i.e : You must perform an action to validate you're NOT a child, these will never protect children. A predator simply needs not to verify anything and appear benign and ironically more anonymous than law abiding people.
I'm not saying the inverse is the answer either, just that if anyone without an agenda of surveillance looked at this for a second, the penny would have dropped. So I can only assume that this was the purpose the whole time.
The best way to protect children is to educate them to protect themselves, but that argument generally falls on deaf ears, doubly so when there's an opportunity to use "but the children" as a political cudgel.
While I think you and I would agree if I argued it was more about culture than firearms per-capita, it's pretty hard to say children aren't suffering some pretty real harms from said firearms (to say nothing of adult suicide statistics when firearms are kept in the house)
Reducing the number of guns doesn't solve the root issue (which I think we'd also agree on), but it should minimize the harms while being dramatically easier than changing the American ethos. Hell, America could likely get 80% of the results (no school shootings) with 20% of the effort (additional restrictions on firearms, more akin to Canada)
I further think the second amendment is causing Americans more harm than it's worth, though that's a seperate discussion; some examples include suicide statistics, accidental discharge, a lack of protection even when carried legally (such as in Alex Pretti's murder) and the fact that, when firearms could be anywhere, police must treat every interaction as potentially fatal - with all the force that requires
whats incredible to me are how many useful idiots out there STILL fall for it.
___ said hamas beaheaded 40 babies and that turned out to be a complete fabrication. That fake info was used in part to justify killing thousands of kids in ____
meanwhile the recent strike on Iran resulted in 80 little girls getting killed (with plenty of evidence) and its swept under the rug while we get blasted about the 7 soldiers that died.
More useful idiots are born every day, most of them never are educated and do not see their past blunders as anything wrong happening, they are completely blind to the real implication of their actions.
I know some idiots that read newspapers and technical papers and yet would rather have company like discord providing safety for their new born daughter but would vote for small govt republicans (or democrats, i don't care, it's just a label that is applicable now. they are mostly all the same) and do nothing about calling out the actual child predators and taking proper action against them. It is bonkers
Exactly my point.. And all the industry experts who they must have consulted in to write the laws are coincidently invested in personal data harvesting. Who could have foreseen this happening.
A much better approach would be to hold platforms responsible if they allow a stranger that does not have explicit parental consent to communicate with or get information about a minor.
This would block the most common classes of abuse on platforms like Roblox, Fortnight, Lego (kids) Fortnight, YouTube Kids, Minecraft, and "educational" social networks / games.
Note that it doesn't require any centralized surveillance at all. Parents just need to control the kids' ability to create random accounts, by (for example) turning on parental controls as they already exist on most tablets/phones, and blocking app installation / email applications (or other 2FA vectors).
When the parent allows an account to be created, they just tick the "kid mode" box. This even works with shared devices that don't support multiple accounts (so, iPads and iPhones).
Not really anymore, their silicon is impressive but most users I would guess don't use it in any meaningful sense. If hardware is your main goal as a customer, you're building a machine with better hardware.
Hah can you imagine a world where OpenAi says to all the people who have dumped billions in : "well we lost guys, sorry about that, were just gonna help Google now".
I get the feeling honestly it seems more expensive and more effort to backdoor it..
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