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Roku’s Ultimatum: Surrender Jury Trial Rights or Lose Access to Your TVs
(programming.dev)
Did your Roku TV decide to strong arm you into giving up your rights or lose your FULLY FUNCTIONING WORKING TV? Because mine did.
It doesn't matter if you only use it as a dumb panel for an Apple TV, Fire stick, or just to play your gaming console. You either agree or get bent.
Shit like this is why my LG C1 is restricted to LAN access only in my router (local network for automation purposes) and can't communicate with the internet.
As an IT guy: FUCK smart TVs, fuck them hard.
...with a brick. Repeatedly
I will never buy a smart TV, ever. I don't care if I'm left behind.
Are there new TVs that are not smart?
Lobotomize them after buying.
only sceptre makes dumb TVs anymore, and their quality varries wildly
That's scary. Only solution then is to buy smart and castrate it.
What I did. I have two smart TVs.
Fuckers have never once been online. You can even go the extra mile and open them up and unplug the wifi antenna (or just remove the wifi card if its slotted and not integrated into the mainboard)
I brought mine online long enough to do an initial firmware update. That was it. I may bring it online long enough to do another one, but I'm going to google first to be sure they haven't done something like Roku here without my having heard about it.
I wouldnt even do that unless there is an actual issue you are having that can only be fixed with a firmware update.
There are, but they're old or not of the best quality. Last time I had a Sceptre TV, and I had to use a sound bar because the speakers were awful. But it was as dumb as it could be, so I was happy with that.
Edit: The only reason I gave it up is because of lack of space in my new apartment. I miss that TV.
Damn, so the solution is to buy whatever I want and castrate it with no access to internet.
Unfortunately. I personally prefer not to give money to those fuckers.
Don't worry about it, they sell the TVs at a loss because they expect to get the revenue back from ads. You're costing them money when you buy one of their TVs.
Well, yeah, but eventually you'll have to. I currently have old Toshiba LCD which is super awesome. Not thin but works like a charm and came with all the schematics and bill of materials so it can be easily repaired. Needless to say I don't plan on replacing it, but panel itself has expiration date unfortunately.
No, I don't really have to. I've lived without a TV for more than a year. I miss it sometimes, but it's not like my life is falling apart because of it.
Awesome that you have a dumb TV. I'll try and get me one as soon as I have extra space.
Mine is used as extra display for gaming and watching movies. That's it. However it is more comfortable to sit on sofa when watching.
Ditto with my printer. Print over LAN: sure. Printer connect to internet: hell no, that's the first-party version of printer malware.
Especially when printers ask you to waive your class action rights just like this.
Makes sense, when they illegally push straight up malware that sets the ink flow rate to 0 should non-geuine ink cartridges be detected. This will destroy/clog the print head if attempting to print for too long.
Yes, I reverse engineered your fucked up Linux 2.4 (!) based firmware, Epson. Your printer is printing nicely offline with refillable cheap ink. Fuck you, I won.
Sorry about the rant, it had become personal at one point.
Congrats :) The idea that a few software bits are between you and getting a pile of junk working is infuriating. Did you extract and modify an image from flash or find a way in live?
I had a .bin where the change hadn't been implemented and one after. Was using file carving tools as I was just trying to figure out what was going on. Probably spent too much time, but once I found out what it was doing, I was pretty mad. I tried to just corrupt the firmware to force a fallback to a "safe" state, but eventually I had to look into reverse engineering the binary that seemed to be controlling different things, such as the genuine ink check and things like that. Many hours of trial and error staring at the xxd and gdb output, semi randomly breaking things, until I seemed to break the right thing. Was bit tricky to get around the firmware signing, but eventually got that worked out too by tricking it into not checking (very old firmwares for that printer weren't signed) and accepting the 'new' firmware, with a much higher version number, as that's also one thing it checks to prevent downgrading.
Tools used as far as I remember were
binwalk,foremost,autopsyradare2Nice, ty. I've only revenged PC firmware, not embedded, so I wouldn't think of several of those tools.
I know a model of HP inkjet from my childhood that had a service/factory mode where ink checks were disabled. After years of claiming that its carts were empty I was suddenly able to print perfect full-colour pages. RIP HP Photosmart 3110
I took the wifi chip and antenna right out of a roku TV. I don't even want it broadcasting its MAC out to the world, fuck that