How do I free my television?

  • grue@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    3 months ago

    It should be a thing because most (all?) “smart TVs” run some variety of Linux, which, as Free Software, is supposed to guarantee the device owner’s right to modify the software running on the thing. However, in most (all?) cases, the practical ability to do that has been destroyed by subverting encryption functions against the owner in a process called Tivoization.

    In other words:

    1. No, it isn’t really a thing,
    2. It’s wrong for it not to be a thing, and
    3. You should be pissed off about it.
      • cecilkorik@lemmy.caEnglish
        2·
        3 months ago

        I mean, they did it with phones too. Android is just Linux. That was one of the main attractions, for me at least.

        At first, many people and groups supplied their own phone OSes. There was a whole thriving community ecosystem. Then they started to make it really hard, locking bootloaders and including critical pieces of hardware that didn’t or couldn’t have open source drivers (look up WinModems for a very early example of this technique, it remains really effective) or otherwise required extremely convoluted methods to access and the phone might function marginally without some of these fully functional, but at least you could still install a custom ROM on it if you were stubborn enough.

        But even that wouldn’t last. Nowadays they’ve made it literally impossible to defeat the security on most phones, in the name of keeping hackers and criminals out, but really a big part of their motivation is blocking these pirate OSes that let you actually control the hardware and software in your phone, doing criminally nefarious things like stopping them from downloading ads (the horror!) and preventing them from funneling all your data and activities back to Big Brother (how rude!) and worst of all updating it with modern functionality after they’ve declared it “obsolete”. The goal going forward is to sell you things that you don’t and can’t control, so they can shut them down or make them gradually more and more useless and make you buy new ones forever. They want you to have a subscription for everything including physical objects without realizing that you’ve been forced to subscribe to their regularly-scheduled-disposable-device-replacement-plan for no actual reason.

        They’re coming for computers too, or at least they’ll try. They want control of everything we interact with. For profit, mostly, but I wouldn’t rule out other motives. It’s a powerful thing when you have control of everything people see and do.

    • rudyharrelson@lemmy.radio
      0·
      3 months ago

      It’s interesting to see some of the back-and-forth on this topic between different proponents of free software.

      I listened to this talk by Linus Torvalds a while back and it relates to the GPL license used by the Linux kernel and why the kernel hasn’t changed to GPLv3. Apparently Linus doesn’t find this practice by Tivo and other hardware manufacturers to be an issue.

      • grue@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        3 months ago

        Yes, it’s a damn shame that Linus is weak on property rights.

        Because that’s what this actually is, by the way: violating the device owner’s property rights in order to prioritize the manufacturer’s temporary monopoly privilege over the software – which was only created for the sole and express purpose “to promote the progress of science and the useful arts” in the first place – above them.

  • pickleprattle@midwest.social
    1·
    3 months ago

    Why has no one mentioned Projectivy?

    It’s a regular app, doesn’t require root (though it benefits from it). It’s free unless you want complicated parental controls (I pay for it but otherwise have no relation to it).

    I have a Bravia TV, and with it I no longer have ads, I can change exactly what apps show up, including hiding Sony apps, and can totally customize the whole window.

    Finding it was a huge relief for me, as there’s no point setting up parental controls for a small child when ads showing horror products show up anyway.

    Hope that helps.

  • TrueStoryBob@lemmy.world
    1·
    3 months ago

    It is still possible to buy “dumb” TV’s. Tons of businesses need them for display purposes (like at fast food restaurants and corporate expos, etc, etc), but you need to search for commercial displays. Like this one.

    • Takeshidude@lemmy.world
      2·
      3 months ago

      Bless you for providing a link; I can’t tell you howany times I’ve seen this advice without any link or instructions on how to locate these

      • TrueStoryBob@lemmy.world
        3·
        3 months ago

        No problem! I work in television/live streaming production. Finding and buying “dumb” monitors when we build out new sets and presentation spaces is literally part of my job.

  • henfredemars@infosec.pubEnglish
    1·
    3 months ago

    In principle, yes, and I believe a few small hobby projects have attempted to do this and support specific TVs. However, interest in developing a custom Smart TV platform tends to get siphoned away into a project where the output from your actual platform is displayed on the TV rather than running directly on it. Simply, it’s easier to develop and maintain support across different models.

    Why would you develop a custom TV OS that runs on one TV when you could develop it for any mini PC and immediately support all TVs? You’d have to develop your OS to run on each specific TV model which will make it quite hard to reach a critical mass sufficient to attract attention from developers and users alike.

    The juice isn’t really worth the squeeze. It’s not like TV vendors are publishing detailed hardware specs and drivers. Writing or even porting an OS is hard. Look at the state of the Android ROM scene, and that’s about as good as it gets when some vendors are actually attempting to open source their drivers. The difficulty is much higher and the interest lower due to the existence of a viable alternative.

    With that said, motivated minds have done it anyway. You just need to have the right TV for it.

  • LovableSidekick@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    3 months ago

    I bet somebody’s done it. There are people in the Linux world who dedicate themselves to getting it to run on anything - a TV, a toaster…

    But it would probably be a lot easier to just run Linux on a Raspberry Pi or something and use the TV as a monitor.