No one want's your shitty software, it's not a competitive edge. No one has ever been impressed by the software their TV comes with, and for every person that found your software easy to use, there is a thousand who are still trying to figure out what that one button does on their remote. You wanna know what people are care about? Picture quality. That's it. That's always been the key. I don't know why you constantly fail to understand that.

Why can't you just make a dumb screen? You know desktop monitors? Like that. No sound, minimal software, but if you really want to get fancy, maybe a nice small remote to turn it on and off. Everything else, from sound to color profiles can, and have already for years now, be handled by external devices smarter than you.

If you make this, and you focus on picture quality instead of figuring out ways to confuse and exploit the customer, I promise you, I absolutely promise you, every AV nerd I know will buy one. And they will love it. And they will recommend it, and share it, and buy them for their loved ones. And blog about it. Tweet about it. Podcast, vlog and sing about it.

And you'll disrupt the old model. You will be the company that brings about the next revolution in television. You've been looking to do that for so long haven't you? And while you always secretly knew it wasn't IPTV or 3D that was going to start the next revolution, what you didn't know is how easy it would be to disrupt the current incumbents.

The customer is waiting, cash in hand.

"The advice we have been given is that unfortunately as you accepted the Terms and Conditions on your TV, your concerns would be best directed to the retailer. We understand you feel you should have been made aware of these T's and C's at the point of sale, and for obvious reasons LG are unable to pass comment on their actions."

Real nice product doesn't advertise such smart shit stuff, and only focus on the feature what you actually need and use. Even such computing features made you happy, they know that's not a feature to be advertised.

Just don't buy any SMART stuff. Whatever they ADVERTISE, they're saying on advertisement are all bullshit.

Only seems to be transmitting back when using the smart tv stuff though. The request params and some of the stuff I can decipher. request? id=<some id> s=220x124 dt=03 did=<device id> pt=04 pv=T-INFOLINK2012-1003 nt=10 coc=<country> lnc=<language> ts=1384856584858 <timestamp> tz=<time zone> scr=1280x720 <screen size> dy=2012 md=12_X10PLUS mf=Samsung HTTP/1.1\\r\\n

I'd suggest doing a short cover letter, a simple-English write-up, with a detailed technical appendix.

I'd ask if LG are registered to collect data, and if their registration covers this data. And if any of this information leave the EU etc.

Thanks for the write up! It's interesting. I wonder if rooting the telly to replace this functionality is legal? I never know what the laws are about reverse engineering stuff now.

LG is instantly on my shitlist for this and the channel and media data leaks.

It was an opt out system, every TV got a unique ID, but it was anonymous - Philips didn't knew who you were. If someone watched something more than 15 mins, it was send to the DB and was profiled. After a while, the system learned your preferences - also depending on the watching hour - and started to show, per request, recommandations what to watch - which channel was the most close to your preferences. It worked like a charm.

But indeed, no personal data was collected so I don't really understand the fuss. Same for this case, LG sens anonymous data, and returns best ads for you. A little better than Google, i might say.

But it's interesting and worrying that this problem would not have been found if LG was using SSL.

My name, address, tax number, drivers license number, passport number, etc, etc.

Now they've slurped that off my drive without my permission, and transmitted it in the clear. Can I sue them for "unauthorized access" or identity theft?

What if the file name was some industry secret under NDA or other protection?

(For example Apple_iPhone_7_2015_design_spec.pdf or NSA_POTUS_PHONE_LOGS_2013_TOP_SECRET.csv )

Furthermore, there's an issue of going further down the rabbit hole with smart TVs. What about the terms and conditions of use of software that you may never even use that is still collecting data?

I have a LG dumb TV with DLNA and wired connectivity only. LAN only setup does not work. It has to have a full Internet connection.

Any suggestions? I can't seem to find any non-smart TVs that are reasonably current with at least 3 HDMI ports.

Might even have some fun with it by sending it lots of channel changes, pen drive details and the rest.

Another question is how to handle https requests?

These is very bad For LG, And Samsung. These wrongful data collection should stop.

My phone is smarter than you.

That notwithstanding, I see boxes like Apple TV and Xbox One becoming the way that people interact with their TVs, making the whole problem somewhat moot anyway.

I think it's important to point out that the URL that the data is being POSTed to doesn't in fact exist, you can see this from the HTTP 404 response

Is it possible that they do indeed collect it, but are faking 404?

Step now would be implement technology into the TVs. check

Step two would be to accept payload, however perhaps they are in waiting period to see if news like this one will come up, and then how much damage, if any, it will create. If none, then Step two: check.

What's step 3? Agreement with RIAA or Holywood to sell this data? It could help in litigation by giving more ammunition to plantiff. What is LG TOS of the TV says? Mentions anything about it?

Thank you for the post BTW. While they are tens of TV brands, its good to know which one to stay away from.

Above all remember Hanlon's Razor: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.": 1) LG's response from their CS department was composed by a minimum wage agent who got a response from their mid-level supervisor who enquired with someone in product management who badly translated that from some Korean discussions. 2) Most Koreans don't care about content piracy, it is rife in Korea, especially with their excellent bandwidth. 3) Most of these policies were probably written by someone more interested in making the best product for the least money and probably not someone from the west.

I would hope that LG might pick up on this and make a better statement, but it won't change their attitude.

Finally, personally as someone who makes a lot of set-top boxes I would happily see more dumb TVs, but the business of TVs is loss making. None of the big brands has made money in the TV business in ages, most people do it either for turn-over or brand recognition. Making basic large "monitors" is a difficult business to make a profit in because you are selling something very basic in a mature market.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/09/02/cognitive_lands_lg_a...

http://vimeo.com/22276085

Some alternative OS they can install that doesn't suck.