There's no practical reason for most people. Spying is the primary function. Edge cases like accessibility or conferencing can be easily enabled with an add on USB mic. You'd need a USB webcam with mic for conferencing anyway.
People use voice commands on TV remotes all the time if they're using streaming apps. At this point it's the default way to interact with the UI for many people.
Typing out the show you're searching for with an awkward onscreen keyboard is a huge pain compared to just clicking a button and speaking.
HN users are very much in a bubble if it's surprising to learn consumers expect voice control functionality on a new TV.
"HN users are very much in a bubble if it's surprising if it's learn consumers expect voice control functionality on a new TV."
Perhaps a few are unaware but most know. As I said in my post, some (like me) only want traditional FTA — and with it comes anonymity by default.
Smart TVs undermine and subvert the virtues of FDA services. It should be mandated that it's possible for modern smart TVs to switch to FTA-only mode if viewers so desire. Similarly, regulation should ensure that dumb TVs always be available for those who want them.
Whilst most around me do expect voice control to exist... Most expect it not to function. "Hey Siri/Google" was always more of an exercise in frustration than success.
It seems the Australian accent still befuddles most STT with about 1/8 words confused (said as someone who uses STT to use their computer at all).
It would not shock me, if outside of North America and Great Britain, these systems are as effective as the original autocorrect algo.
Accessibility is not an edge case. Every single human being who lives long enough will experience some form of accessibity challenge, either for themselves or for others around them.
You can dismiss the lives experience of most humans over the history of humanity, but it won't win you any arguments.
It’s been a couple of years but there was some thing about a p2p link between televisions that allowed c&c / exfil even on some brand of televisions that weren’t hooked up to the internet if they were within range of ones that were… so even that might not be enough.
Edit: it was Samsung, where Wi-Fi Direct was always-on, and concurrent with STA mode wifi, enabling other WiFi direct devices potentially to connect to the internet, including other Samsung televisions. Their televisions were also hacked to gain root over a standard DVB broadcast on fully patched firmware lol so it might be possible to pwn a whole city at a time through that vector.
Smart-TV platforms have long done cross-device identification, and there have been some surprisingly aggressive local-device discovery schemes.
In all, smart devices are pretty much surveillance devices, and a privacy nightmare. I have had enough exposure to shady goings on that I am nearly certain that most devices ship with intentional backdoors sold to three letter agencies or malware rings, either by unscrupulous engineers or by the company itself.
It’s just hard to pass on the payday that a wide deployment of a permanent relay/mic/camera/sniffer represents, especially if it’s likely to end up in corporate or industrial environments.
I’ve had speculative offers to compromise smaller projects, and I’m nobody. I have no doubt that engineers working on widely deployed projects and systems are given very attractive offers to provide tailored access.
Ever heard of TCP/IP over HDMI? It’s a method of exploiting HEC. Connect your smart TV to a streaming platform and it connects to the internet via the video cable. There’s no escape.
No I have not heard of it, and it's genuinely baffling! Which consortium thought this up? I don't see one sensible reason to do this apart from just random tinkering or malicious purposes.
If OP means Ethernet over HDMI it’s in the spec but as far as I’m aware has not been implemented in any mainstream chipsets anything actually uses. It’s one of those theoretical things that is somewhat surprising didn’t happen.
Overall it’s not a bad idea if devices need network connectivity. Have one central “box” get an Ethernet drop and it acts as a switch for your tv/xbox/playstation/media player/etc. The spec was made back when A/V receivers were more popular than they are now. It would cut down on a cable per device.
If OP means an exploit/hack then that’s a bit different.
This hasn't been the case for at least half a decade. Most games run perfectly fine if not better on Linux. The only exceptions are purposely broken remote rootkit "anticheat" gsmes which no sane person would want on their system anyway.
Aero was peak aesthetics. Flatcrap became commonplace because it was easy. No need for designers, just flat colors, resizable to fit any screen. Perfect for mobile slop!
Was Aero also the last instance where all of the Control Panel widgets were actually Desktop first? Ever since, they Control Panel has been a mismatch of Mobile design and being limited to a single interface pane. It is maddening to look at the historical data density that was tossed for something a programmer could thoughtlessly bang out in an afternoon.
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