General Gaming News and Discussion

Control said:

I have one of their shitty tvs, and I hooked it up last week for the first time in god knows how long. I got a "agree to our new TOS or you can never use your TV again" popup. So they'll never get another cent from me, but to make it even worse, it was impossible to push the agree button without the remote which I couldn't find since I never use the stupid thing anyway. This should be in the rustled thread. Fuck those guys.

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If you find the remote, do a factory reset and never connect it to the internet. It should roll the firmware back and never get one of those popups again.

Re: rokutv ads

how else do you people think those TVs are like 50$

but yea LG OLEDs are where it’s at

Yeah, totally agree, it's just fine that giant corporations are pushing their advertising into every aspect of our lives because half the time I barely notice it. And when I do notice it, well, it isn't terribly intrusive. Once it gets to terribly intrusive then boy, err I mean non-gender conforming expression, we've got a problem!

Uhuuuh. Thanks for participating in our society, it's going great.

Can't wait until the government threats corporations to start pushing ads for their latest outreach campaigns. Ooooh, your video game is paused? Get vaccinated, bigot! Have we let you know you should stop asian hate?

Great idea: movies can designate specific "slow" points like during a nature/travel montage where adds could be inserted. It's a slow part, probably boring anyway, so not terribly intrusive!

Burns said:

If you find the remote, do a factory reset and never connect it to the internet. It should roll the firmware back and never get one of those popups again.

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Problem is, the Roku software isn't separated from the TV firmware. So by rolling back you could lose some pretty important fixes and end up with stuff like broken Dolby Vision support or other key features missing, depending on the brand/model of TV.

Best thing to do is get a pi-hole and block all their phone-home IPs.

Vorph said:

Problem is, the Roku software isn't separated from the TV firmware. So by rolling back you could lose some pretty important fixes and end up with stuff like broken Dolby Vision support or other key features missing, depending on the brand/model of TV.

Best thing to do is get a pi-hole and block all their phone-home IPs.

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I've not followed HDR, HDR10, or Dolby Vision (I'm not about to replace a $800 receiver for it) but I thought it needed hardware support, not just some new firmware. I can't think of a single other function on any TV that I have seen that I need. Firestick, Chromecast, or Shield does all the work and the TV just shows the picture.

I had a Pi-hole some years ago and I wouldn't call it easy to set up for an average person and certainly not as easy as just doing a factory reset. In another thread, I've read that it might work better now days, but when I stopped using it, it wasn't blocking shit for streaming apps either, so that's no guarantee either.

Burns said:

I've not followed HDR, HDR10, or Dolby Vision (I'm not about to replace a $800 receiver for it) but I thought it needed hardware support, not just some new firmware. I can't think of a single other function on any TV that I have seen that I need. Firestick, Chromecast, or Shield does all the work and the TV just shows the picture.

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Dolby Vision requires a chipset, but there's often bugs and issues with supporting new hardware. Biggest one being that many TVs with Dolby Vision didn't support Xbox's "unique" implementation of it, especially in games. Take away all the firmware updates from those TVs and you'll lose out on the hardware fixes too.

Burns said:

I had a Pi-hole some years ago and I wouldn't call it easy to set up for an average person and certainly not as easy as just doing a factory reset. In another thread, I've read that it might work better now days, but when I stopped using it, it wasn't blocking shit for streaming apps either, so that's no guarantee either.

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It does require a bit of networking knowledge, and you need at least a Raspberry Pi or something similar and a router that isn't the locked-down junk that the cable company gives you. I probably wouldn't recommend it to someone who's just annoyed with their Roku, but I assume the sort of people who are concerned about Roku's new EULAs and ever-increasing ad intrusions would also want something to stop Windows 10/11 telemetry, ad blocking that doesn't suck ass the moment you move from a PC to phone or tablet, etc. If you're just worried about a single TV then yeah, rolling back might work, and if it does break something important then just update the firmware again and disconnect the internet. You might have to put up with a rather irritating flashing light if you don't connect a Roku TV to the network though, depending the brand of TV.

TBT-TheBigToe said:

“Remember when we destroyed the cable television industry by making it expensive, inconvenient, and had too many idiotic advertisements? Let’s do that again with streaming!”

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Honestly, it's worse than that. You can buy a TV and have it effectively bricked if you don't capitulate to their demands. With cable or streaming there never was an expectation of ownership of the content but there certainly is for buying appliances like a TV. Forced agreements to use something you paid for in full that were not part of the original purchase agreement is essentially theft in my view.

I dont even have a TV because of how invasive they have become. I just want a TV, not another listening device.

I have a LG C1 and it downloaded an update the other day unbeknownst to me. Turned the TV off, turned it back on the next day and it had installed a completely new UI and "features" it didn't have before and now my home page is riddled with ads and sports shit I don't give a fuck about. There isn't even a button for my PS5 anymore I have to dig two or three screens in to change input. Shit sucks.

Update via a flash drive since every TV has USB slots these days. Depending on the company you can usually pull different versions and pick the one before it went off the deep end.

My favorite recent invasive data collection stories have been where people's cars collect data on their driving habits that the car companies make tons of money selling the data, including to insurance companies that use it to increase people's rates.

There's a great PKD short story about invasive advertising that is hilarious and tragic in typical PKD fashion.

DickTrickle said:

Honestly, it's worse than that. You can buy a TV and have it effectively bricked if you don't capitulate to their demands. With cable or streaming there never was an expectation of ownership of the content but there certainly is for buying appliances like a TV. Forced agreements to use something you paid for in full that were not part of the original purchase agreement is essentially theft in my view.

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Can't wait until my refrigerator and car can be similarly bricked.

Ukerric said:

This is essentially why I am never, ever, buying a smart TV. If I have to click "yes" on an EULA on my TV, back in the packing and the store it goes.

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Recommendations on a good OLED or similar picture quality that doesn't have smart or spy features?

Again, you don't need to connect smart items to the internet or even to your network (if you don't want to set up a VLAN)? So the spy features don't matter. I have "smart" garage door openers and light switches but it doesn't matter because they aren't connected to the router.

For non-streaming smart items, if you want to go through the trouble of having some local app functionality while being certain that it can't spy on you, then you need to jump through some hoops. Those hoops are:

• get an old Android phone w/o a sim card
• find and flash a custom slim/lite ROM for it on XDA Developers
• download APKs from the play store to your computer
• sideload those APKs onto the phone via USB
• set up a VLAN on your router and block all internet access
• connect phone and smart items to that VLAN
• now that phone can control those smart items

A little less certain way or, at least, a different kind of work (you have to monitor your traffic to make sure it's all blocked) would be to set up a DNS blocker like Vorph said above (pi-hole).

Then a third, less secure option is that you can pair a DNS blocker with a VLAN and firewall rules to allow your computers/phones/tablets to access the separate VLAN and have local app access on all devices, but if you don't catch all the traffic with the DNS blocker, the app itself will be spying on the phone data too.

...or you can just not have app functionality and not connect them at all.