Yes, very good point. This thing is a massive security hole to bring into your house, and you’re relying on some sketchy marketing startup running a five year old unpatched fork of Android on some commodity hardware they pieced together from Alibaba to get everything right? Yeesh. No thanks. This thing would be running a botnet by lunch.
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The hacking and bypassing is more the kind of fun that can be had with these things in the future, when this scheme fails and people start picking these things up on eBay or from bankruptcy auctions.
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“The street finds its own uses for things”
–Gibson
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What do you mean? That never happens
Completely unrelated, here’s a cat picture.
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I wonder if the tamper protection is based on the assumption that people will try to modify the firmware, rather than just finding a broken TV of the same model and swapping the entire motherboard
Oh I’m sure the tamper protection is shoddy. The whole company is shoddy. No tamper protection is undefeatable in any case, but I doubt what’s on this TV is at all thorough or well-thought-out, considering the company and the entire business model that produced it.
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This sounds like a job for electricians’ tape.
Here’s the next question: Is a 55" 4K display with a soundbar, cameras and mics, lots of other sensors, and a second screen you can run stock Android on worth $1000? If so, get one and wipe it clean.
If you have full control over it, that hardware could actually be useful. I’ve seen telepresence/videoconferencing gear with less features costing far more.
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I’m going to go with “no”.
You can get 2 55" TVs for less than that. And probably throw in a Playstation or XBox.
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The State Farm one is super easy to defeat. It is just a BLE beacon that wakes up as long as it detects motion, triggering the app on your phone to do all the tracking. Once it no longer sees the beacon for some period of time, it considers the trip ended and uploads data.
If you don’t want it tracking a particular trip, you can simply disable Bluetooth permissions for the app in your phone’s privacy settings. The app will never wake up. If you do it partway through a trip, the app is forced to quit and never uploads any information.
You can leave Bluetooth permissions off to completely disable trip tracking, but after a couple of weeks you’ll get an email about your beacon not working. As long as you let them see the occasional trip and submit updated odometer readings, you will still get the discount.
This likely applies to all discount programs that do not actually use the a vehicle’s OBD2 port or connected services (OnStar, Tesla, etc…)
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20 years on and I would expect that the bailiffs would be visiting to take the television or however much money they value it as costing (I expect more than a decent store bought TV).
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That’s a fair question. I think the answer is no, because these days $1000 is a lot for all those naked bits (that are probably if dubious quality). As other folks upthread said though, when this company inevitably bombs and all these sets show up on the secondary market for $200, well, now we’re talking. Much like Cue Cats, OnLive boxes, and other hardware oddities, it may have a better second life than it did as a first one.
Personally, I’d airgap it entirely even then. I don’t trust whatever discount networking board is in there, or anything else.
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That’s still questionable to me, especially given the lack of peace of mind. The cheapest 55 inch 4K on Best Buy was $90. Granted it was clearance, but still much less than $200. By the time these work through the system such that they’re $200 on secondary, you’re probably going to be able to get a 70 or 80 inch for not much more.
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Yea, I had a feeling there was more to it.
You can definitely get a decent 4k for under a grand.
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Me too! The company went broke immediately after I got the PC. I stripped out the bad software and enjoyed it for years.
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Was it 1984 or Fahrenheit 451 that had the Freevee?
I keep losing track of which dystopian future we’re in.
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Trick question: we’re in all of them.
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oooh boy.
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Couldn’t I just mount this 55 incher on the opposite wall so its camera only sees my back as I continue to watch everything from my current T.V.?
