| General > General Technical Chat |
| Samsung can now remotely brick your TV |
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| james_s:
--- Quote from: amyk on September 10, 2021, 12:15:56 am ---I bet the kill switch is only in the smart part. Any cheap universal scaler board will make the panel work again. --- End quote --- Probably true, but remember the demographic of the typical retail store looter, these are not going to be engineers for the most part, they are mostly petty criminals. If they were smart enough to modify a stolen TV, they'd be able to get a job and just buy a TV legally. This tactic doesn't have to be flawless, but it costs almost nothing to implement and it will deal with the low hanging fruit. Perhaps a GPS receiver that surreptitiously activates in a stolen set and broadcasts the location would be more effective, but that would probably backfire as soon as somebody knowledgeable gets inside the TV and discovers the secret tracking device and makes assumptions. Less chance of backlash by just disabling confirmed stolen devices. |
| NiHaoMike:
--- Quote from: james_s on September 10, 2021, 12:14:29 am ---I would argue that hiding ads is less ethical than blocking them. By hiding ads you are causing the advertiser to be charged for a false view. By blocking them nobody is getting charged, someone is getting content "for free" but the content was always free, in hopes that it would draw people in to see the ads. --- End quote --- The ads that are annoying enough to need blocking arguably would cause the viewer to *not* buy what's being advertised. |
| Simon:
Adverts are always going to be around but the insane amount is tiresome but often neccessary. Who would pay for facebook? how many would rather not have adds. I just don't bother to use it. Isn't anyone old enough here to remember the internet before adverts? I am, it was great, the internet was a place full of content. Then the adds came along and look an the cess pit it is now. How many sites exist just for the add revenue? tons, try googling any product and just look at the number of results for sites that claim to tell you about the top 10 of a product in 2021 or the year before if they have not made another senseless page of dribble yet with promoted links to amazon. Often these pages themselves are advertised. The add system has gone from being sensible adds to walls of crap that make up 50% of some sites. But then who does not want free stuff? no such thing as free. I was highly irritated when my brother in law made us all get signal because of the changes to whattsapp. Yet he still has facebook and gave signal no donations. It's a race to the bottom these days. |
| james_s:
--- Quote from: NiHaoMike on September 10, 2021, 12:58:09 am ---The ads that are annoying enough to need blocking arguably would cause the viewer to *not* buy what's being advertised. --- End quote --- Well that's all of them for me. I honestly cannot remember the last time I saw an ad for anything I was actually interested in buying, and I don't even remember the last ad I saw because even if I do see it (such as using youtube on my phone) I mentally tune it out because it's just noise. As I said before, I don't really buy a lot of stuff, I'm not a typical consumer at all. When I do buy something it's because I have already identified a need and go searching for a product, research and read reviews, or if it's an emergency I go to the store and see what they have in stock, look it over and make a choice. Most people buy a lot more random stuff than I do, I mostly buy used, that stuff isn't advertised. Unless you have great deals on interesting surplus items you are wasting your time advertising to me, and if you do advertise, your prices are probably higher than I'm interested in paying because advertising costs a lot of money. |
| james_s:
--- Quote from: Simon on September 10, 2021, 08:25:24 pm ---Adverts are always going to be around but the insane amount is tiresome but often neccessary. Who would pay for facebook? how many would rather not have adds. I just don't bother to use it. Isn't anyone old enough here to remember the internet before adverts? I am, it was great, the internet was a place full of content. Then the adds came along and look an the cess pit it is now. How many sites exist just for the add revenue? tons, try googling any product and just look at the number of results for sites that claim to tell you about the top 10 of a product in 2021 or the year before if they have not made another senseless page of dribble yet with promoted links to amazon. Often these pages themselves are advertised. The add system has gone from being sensible adds to walls of crap that make up 50% of some sites. But then who does not want free stuff? no such thing as free. I was highly irritated when my brother in law made us all get signal because of the changes to whattsapp. Yet he still has facebook and gave signal no donations. It's a race to the bottom these days. --- End quote --- I used the internet for the first time in 1996 and there were ads even back then, but they were non-intrusive like the banner ad in this forum. Speaking of that banner ad it is the only online ad I can recall that I have not bothered to block because it is not intrusive, it just sits there, and it is typically for test gear which is at least borderline relevant to my interests. That said, it is still wasted on me because I have zero justification for buying new test gear, there is a virtually 0% chance that it's going to result in a sale no matter how many times I see that Keysight banner. I never minded paying for things, for many years I subscribed to several electronics magazines. Unfortunately some of the better ones went out of publication, EPE was still very good but the paper copy was exorbitantly expensive in the US so I subscribed to the digital version. Then they changed to some DRM encumbered mess called Pocketmags that I was never able to even get working so I gave up and let my subscription expire. I kept getting Nuts & Volts for several years but I realized I was getting about 5 minutes of interesting reading when a new issue arrived and the projects were often of low quality hacked together "maker" stuff or just of no interest to me and I finally let it expire. The magazines just couldn't compete with the plethora of interesting projects published online for free. I used to pay for cable TV too but it started getting more and more ads despite the fact I was paying for it, and then all the channels got those stupid logos floating in the corner that never go away, and even animated ad banners with sound that pop up and obstruct what I'm trying to watch, then of course the flood of all that "reality" garbage. They broadcasters cheapened the content to the point that it was no longer worth watching and I cut the cord and never looked back. A lot of people early on decided that everything on the internet could be free and supported by ads though so everyone just developed a mentality expecting things to be free. It's going to be extremely hard to reverse this because unlike the physical world, it is almost zero effort to shop around online. If I'm in Home Depot and find something I like but I know I can buy it cheaper at Lowes I have to factor in the cost in fuel and time to drive from one store to another. If I'm online looking at something on Amazon and I see it cheaper on ebay, it costs me nothing to just hop over to ebay. If I see a teaser for an interesting sounding news article and it takes me to a paywall, I can almost always just search for the headline and find the same article or another similar article on the same topic somewhere free. |
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