// HACKER NEWS — CYBERSECURITY
Stopping the smart TV from being used against you
Amid the overall electronics boom thanks to A.I., one piece of electronics is almost unchanged financially. That is the digital display or flat-panel monitor. With good reason! The entire entertainment and streaming industry wants one of these devices in your living room. Not only wanting access to your wallet; companies are willing to violate customer trust to squeeze a few extra pennies out of the devices they sold you. To these companies, you technically never really owned the device, but instead purchased permission from these companies to have it exist in your household. Like a true tech-valley rapist, they will break into your home, listen to everything you do via the microphone, track every movement that you make thanks to their backdoored OS, and most importantly, spread malware onto devices they don't even own.
Whoah S! Mal-ware? Isn't that a little harsh? - Anonymous
Malware, by definition, is software you never asked for and was installed without your permission. At least in LG's case. Using Legal Ninjitsu to state that by agreeing to install their monitor 'driver,' you also agree to install every other bloatware application that they choose should come with it as well. Like advertising, it takes a shit all over your desktop to churn profits for LG.
It didn't take a whole lot of searching on Amazon to find what appears to be a good deal on a 75-inch TV. We figured we'd go with 75 inches because, like every American household, it's a good idea to go big when purchasing a TV for your bathroom. Ahh, nothing like being on the shitter while catching eye strain from the TV that practically covers an entire side of the wall.
Sure enough, LG comes out on top with their (bullshit) AI upscaling and "Wow Orchestra," whatever that means. But $10 more than the Toshiba... WHY NOT RIGHT?!?
So you get this bad-boy home, hook it up to your laptop with Windows 11 so you can get Netflix going on..
Oh, there's a driver update for the LG television. Makes sense, right? It's a fairly recent television, and the drivers will help us take advantage of all of the TV's features. Of course, I'd like Microsoft to download it.
Then after a while, you notice more and more applications appear on your desktop. Like a copy of McAfee antivirus that you never asked for. Now, if this were an elderly couple or someone who doesn't know anything about computers. They wouldn't even know their system is being turned against them by LG. Some would think their system was hacked by someone else. But actually, no. Because Microsoft is being ambivalent by letting LG's supposed 'driver' install itself and, via LG's proxy, install even more applications.
This all happens the moment you plug that HDMI (or DisplayPort for people who purchased an LG computer monitor) right into an internet-enabled laptop through a protocol called EDID, also known as "Extended Display Identification Data," which by itself is totally harmless!
It simply tells your operating system what kind of monitor is connected, what its capabilities are, it's serial number. That's it!