LG to Ban Residential Proxies from Smart TV Apps
80 points by raymii
80 points by raymii
Rare good news. I'm glad people at LG actually care enough and pushed something through. But the scale of the proxy deployment is terrifying - I expected a bad number but even the bad number was nowhere close to the 42%.
I doubt anyone at LG gives a shit about anything except bad press. Though at least they understood that it WAS bad press - when the news originally came out, I wasn't sure LG was going to understand it was a problem at all.
My Father-in-Law recently bought an LG TV, and after we got it installed, my advice to him was 'don't let it have internet access, no matter how hard it begs'.
Yeah, I bought an LG TV a few years ago, and in the last several months it started blaring ads when the TV was on but not in use (in the past it would just turn the screen off and go to sleep). I bought my first Apple TV days later and disconnected the TV from the Internet.
kinda ironic, isn't it? Gamers Nexus about LG app bundling (McAfee) during updates
noticed after posting this https://lobste.rs/c/9owhpv
LG is a big corp. I suspect people making app store policies for TVs and people writing drivers /feature apps for monitors have never talked to each other. So unless there's a strong top-down edict about the focus on privacy and security, I wouldn't connect/compare those.
Maybe engineers don't talk to each other, but it seems like Legal and Marketing went out drinking together. LG now behaves as if higher-ups there finally greenlighted spyware and put it in their quarterly KPIs.
Newest LG WebOS blocks access to built-in apps until you accept their new creepy invasive EULA. This is new. Older TVs had surveillance advertising as an optional "feature" that you didn't have to agree to.
Given this context, I wouldn't be surprised if LG is cleaning its store now only because their sales people went out to sell LG's livestock and heard from the prospects that 3rd party brokers were already selling LG's new product.
You mean to say these weren't expressly prohibited before? What are we even doing?
Someone had a review goal to get the App Store off the ground with a goal of X apps on the store by EOY '2X and they got there, by hook or by crook.
The fact that all of these app developers decided that it was okay to monetize their app by letting third parties use the users internet access is depressing.
The lesson we keep forgetting is that if you add a low-friction, platform-integrated way to install apps on devices, that low-friction path will undoubtedly be abused to deliver what's effectively malware. It happened with phone apps, browser extensions, enterprise app stores, VS Code, etc.
The same happens with Oauth-style permission prompts. If you let the bad guys to politely ask for access to someone's email, they will.
I'm not a huge believer in formal threat modeling, but when designing features like that, you absolutely need to sit down and ask yourself "okay, but how will this be abused". Because it will, there's real money to be made.
And of course, I applaud LG for acting, but at this point, barn doors and horses...
I wasn't surprised by most of the article; but this part at the bottom suggests that maybe LG wants to be the monopoly provider of crapware on their TVs:
Their $1200 monitor uses Windows Update to install adware on Windows PCs that use it with all kinds of spyware style Ts&Cs. It seems like that could really be its own article. (Sorry for the YouTube link. That's the primary source Krebs cites, though. There is a transcript for those who'd rather read, but the YT interface is such crap that I couldn't copy it out to anything readable outside YT.)
I am in the market for a new TV. The fact that LG has permitted this up until now is a good example of why I had already chosen to avoid their products.
But shopping based on security and privacy concerns is only effective if there exists a competitor who addresses those concerns. Presently there are VERY few. If anyone knows of a privacy/security conscious product in this space other than AppleTV, please let me know!
get an ugoos or something, and put CoreELEC with Kodi on it. LG and Apple TV don't compete, one is a screen and a shitty embedded os, the other one is a set top box.