> But big tech cannot be regulated at all.

It cannot be regulated because we let dollar/capital rise above political authority.

> “A plank of wood must not be carried along a pavement. It can only be moved if it is being unloaded from a vehicle or taken into a building.”

Is that a good law or is it a barnacle? Is it enforced in the UK?

There is a counter incentive, the money the companies pay the politicians.

If your building or other construction is unsafe for the public, the local authority has the right to make it safe, if necessary by demolishing it; if you are insufficiently responsive to a notice that you must make it safe. Maybe tech companies need that kind of incentive before they will care enough not to subject their customers to this kind of abuse.

The problem with regulating big tech is the unplacable internet. Who can regulate the internet? Who gets to make rules for the global network?

Politicians are keenly aware that regulation has to be administered, and administration costs money. The internet subsists on low overhead, and per jurisdiction administration would significantly change almost everything about the current internet. The public wont allow that.

If the public actually starts demanding regulation, we will see a fracturing of the internet into national networks. It will become impossible (or at least uneconomical) to run reddit, youtube, or facebook as global networks. They might continue to exists, but they will be sectioned off.

In the interests of accuracy, the law (the Metropolitan Police Act 1839) actually states

""" 54 Prohibition of nuisances by persons in the thoroughfares.

Every person shall be liable to a penalty not more than level 2 on the standard scale, who, within the limits of the metropolitan police district, shall in any thoroughfare or public place, commit any of the following offences; (that is to say,)

...

8. Every person who shall roll or carry any cask, tub, hoop, or wheel, or any ladder, plank, pole, showboard, or placard, upon any footway, except for the purpose of loading or unloading any cart or carriage, or of crossing the footway:

... """ https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Vict/2-3/47/section/54

The plank of wood is one element in a much broader statute, rather than an example of hyper-specificity. And it might have been strictly applied at the time, but that doesn't mean you're definitely going to get into trouble nowadays.

In a similar vein, the UK *does* have laws that affect big tech. UK GDPR places requirements on processing of personal data:

""" Personal data shall be:

(a)processed lawfully, fairly and in a transparent manner in relation to the data subject (‘lawfulness, fairness and transparency’); """ https://www.legislation.gov.uk/eur/2016/679/article/5

Whether that's properly enforced is (as with the plank) a completely different matter.

In the UK, at least, we don't need new regulations, we need to more effectively apply the regulations we already have in place. But there is also a balance to be made between enforcement through fines and enforcement through changing behaviour: it's much better to work with companies to bring them into compliance than it is to just fine them and without actually changing anything.

Devils advocate ish reason:

People understand what a plank of wood is and how it works.

People, including the vast majority of politicians, don’t understand our technology at all. It’s magic. Why does a light come on when they flip the switch? Magic. Computers are deep black magic.

How can they write effective regulation? Or tell the difference between proposals that are good or bad written by others?

If politicians regulated big tech more we’d probably end up with a ton of regulatory capture that legislated monopolies for big tech and shut out open source and startups, because who has the money to influence the ignorant lawmakers at scale?

We are now in a world where small groups of high priests understand certain things, and few others. We’ve been there for a while but it’s gotten far more opaque in the last 25 years or so.

Even something like a nuclear reactor or an aircraft is much easier to explain. The last episode of the Chernobyl series did a great job explaining what was wrong with that reactor design to a layperson. But computing… and networks… people who do understand it have forgotten just how ludicrously arcane and inscrutable it is to most.

A big difference too is that by the Church-Turing theorem there is (as a side effect of it) a provably infinite number of ways to perform any computation. Which means you can’t just legislate “don’t do that.” Physical machines are not like that.

Any rule is as good as its enforcement.

The plank rule just exists, not enforced, so nobody observes it.

Same will happen with the high-tech regulation. In fact, it is already happening left and right where it does exist.

If people can hustle for a little side money, corporations can do it as well. Why not?

Corporations are considered persons and they need to pay shareholders.

Seriously, it’s pure greed and people who love money enable this, because they think they are immune to this, or harmless.

Without an account, they don't even allow installs from galaxy store. So their default apps and their security updates are probably contingent on having an account now.

Not much different from playstore but that is also a problem.

All the ad tracking in smart TVs has driven prices down. Tracking and ad data has turned a customer from a one time purchaser to a revenue stream for as long as the device is in use.

If you want a high quality TV for the best price your best bet is either disable/opt out of all the tracking data, or even better just never hook it up to the internet at all and plug an AppleTV or Chromecast on it.

If you look for a Samsung TV without “smart” features you pretty much have to find them under “commercial displays” and you’ll pay a premium for it.

Because for most people to get any utility out of it, they need to plug in a smart device.

It doesn't matter whether you run android TV from the TV itself or an external device.

All the popular streaming services throttle or block open devices.

There's no regulation on it, because regulators want locked-down hardware that can only take actions approved by them.

People want 4k, HDR, 60+ inches.

What keywords did you use? Dumb TV gives zero hits.

because 40 inches is tiny these days (sorry boys).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45740675

I'm not the only one who made note of that behavior, but if i recall sometime before breaking my phone in the last couple months the behaviour ceased. probably after a factory rom update, but at this point i can no longer confirm or deny. but! i did and do have a backup of the potentially offending apk.

>how the stock market seemed so "predictable" to some people in early morning trading for a while

Has this been quantified? Otherwise it's easy to fall for confirmation bias, eg. "facebook is secretly listening to you"

Yesterday's post (about rooting a samsung) was a $3,000 TV. I don't think it's about affordability.

This is the answer. Lots of people (myself included) are happy to buy a big, cheap TV, but it's cheap because the manufacturer gets money by paid app placement, ads (sometimes), and selling information about you.

A senior friend has bad vision, so I recommended an inexpensive but enormous TV that they can use as a display, and never let it connect to the network. Unfortunately, every few months the display tries to coax them into connecting to WiFi, and it confuses the heck out of them. But, that's the game.

https://ryf.fsf.org

In my experience, it's more likely a whole team of supposedly brilliant engineers were paid good money to work on this feature. Sad as that is.

This is why TVs are always so laggy, they have 400 ad and tracking scripts running the whole time.

There was just a post yesterday about how to root your samsung. I rooted my samsung and removed ads, mics, and my agent is looking into this one as we speak [codex].

Happy to post to github if you'd like.

There needs to be a class action against these companies. People should straight up go to jail for how invasive these TVs are.

Unplug it.

Selling it off might be a good solution

Do a search on X on the topic, the news about Samsung was broken on there by a guy who had rooted his Samsung TV using AI tools and he and others created guides for neutering the stuff out of it

Not buy smart TVs and especially Samsung smart devices in general?

From what I heard these are especially awful, even by low IoT standards.

Hey at least you know it's not Claude

...... or do you???

The mechanism you are thinking of - optimizing brightness and dynamic contrast, happens in TCON in low level hardware at fraction of a fraction of power

Just yesterday I hacked my Samsung Frame tv. The AI (codex) used an off-the-shelf root with Developer Console access (built in). Though root doesn't give you the signing keys to blow everything away and still boot (is my best understanding), but as a workaround you can still change anything you want after boot automatically.

I had it do:

- Stripping ads

- Disabling mics

- Turning off updates

- Leaving root SSH in place (protected) for future access

The key to getting codex to do this was that this is legal under DMCA, but after a certain point I had to get a new session to change all the "hacking" words into synonyms to not trigger false security alarms. Wouldn't be surprised or bothered if my chatgpt account gets banned though. I can write a blog post and publish the repo if you want

Time to invest a few tokens into an unneuthered model

I agree with this. At this point, AI has gotten smart enough that most smart TVs can be hacked (I just did it with my LG), and TV manufacturers haven't caught up yet.

Dont buy a tv? I havent had a TV for 20 years.

The pseudo popup ads in this page is extremely excessive it’s outright unusable