For example OS running on Amazon fire stick 4K kills your background processes after ~20 minutes.

Specific to LG tvs:

https://webostv.developer.lge.com/develop/getting-started/ap...

This. The only "smart" things allowed in my home are those under my control. This means devices that work over Zigbee, or that that run free firmware natively (like ESP32-based devices), or that can be hacked to run free firmware. Everything is orchestrated via Home Assistant and in its own VLAN. It's surprising how far you can get. For example, I recently set up a voice assistant by wiring together a few Home Assistant components and a small local LLM (Qwen 4B). Response times are basically on par with commercial solutions like Alexa, and all processing is done locally.

This is why I don't run a tor endpoint; possibly objectionable traffic I don't control sourced from my network. All it takes is one horrible request to come from your IP and you're on a list

From the content hosting side (getting reamed by scrapers overloading infrastructure), the problem is that we have to be able to set "reasonable" ratelimits to share finite network uplink and server cpu resources between all of our real users and these scrapers.

When you can identify the nature of the traffic (quickly in realtime, based on simple deterministic rules), you can protect the resources: you can rate/concurrency -limit the AI scrapers in the name of saving resources for the real humans, effectively putting the scrapers in a lower priority band (which is how it generally worked for search engine scrapers before!).

The problem is they're using resiproxies to disperse and whitewash their traffic, making it extremely difficult to tell their requests apart from the legitimate human requests. They're basically lying to us about the origin, and thus denying us the ability to put them in a lower priority band than humans.

They may scrape us at, say, 25K reqs/second, but it's coming from 50K random residential eyeball IPs at an average rate of only 0.5 reqs/second/IP, and then they're intentionally lying with the UA and headers and other fingerprint details as best they can to "blend in" with the humans so that we can't differentiate.

Let's do an analogy: Imagine if there was a neighborhood grocery store you and all your neighbors rely on for food. It's cheap because they keep their margins low, and more importantly the next store down the road is like 50 miles further away. That store 50 miles down the road also charges double the price. Now they've decided to play arbitrage: they load up 100 employees in the back of an air conditioned semi, clothe them to look like local shoppers, park it 3 blocks from your neighborhood store hidden inside a fenced property, and have them all go in and buy out all the inventory in the store over the course of a couple hours. The store just looks like it's having a great sales day at first. All these customers waiting in line, each getting just a few things at a time. But two hours later, the store shelves are empty, the semi is loaded up, and they're headed 50 miles back to double the price and sell it to someone else. You go in to buy some veggies to cook dinner and there's nothing to buy.

We've been playing this game with AI scrapers and resiproxies for way too long, and someone needs to hold them accountable for their fraud.

Here's a bookmarklet which fixes that:

  javascript:(function(){const e=['wheel','mousewheel','DOMMouseScroll','touchmove'];e.forEach(e=>{window.addEventListener(e,function(e){e.stopPropagation()},{capture:true,passive:true})});const t=e=>{if(!e)return;e.style.setProperty('overflow','auto','important');e.style.setProperty('overflow-y','auto','important');e.style.setProperty('overflow-x','visible','important');e.style.setProperty('scroll-behavior','auto','important');e.style.setProperty('position','static','important')};t(document.documentElement);t(document.body);const o=document.createElement('style');o.innerHTML='html, body { overflow: auto !important; overflow-y: auto !important; scroll-behavior: auto !important; position: static !important; height: auto !important; } ::-webkit-scrollbar { width: 12px !important; display: block !important; }';document.head.appendChild(o);})();

In the article they mentioned that Amazon and Roku block apps from using these SDK’s, and specifically after Roku recently made a change to disallow this kind of thing, many of the affected apps were withdrawn from the Roku app store. The implication is that those other smart TVs don’t have the same third-party apps because these apps were specifically created to act as a foothold for these residential proxy networks.

The LG WebOS Store is a different beast.

Just browsing the list of apps raises eyebrows for even the most non-tech audiences. 99% of it is spam, with maybe 1% being well known apps like YouTube.

The rest are weird IPTV Players, Wallpaper apps. It feels like a portal into 2009 apps, but its not.

I think the person you were responding to was being sarcastic.

It's been a very long time since they were given an option.

I'm not sure the adtech is even enough to subsidize the price in a meaningful way.

Google’s global ad revenue equates to roughly $61 per user per year, most TV manufacturers would be unable to extract that much out per user, even with crazy levels of tracking, ads, etc.

I haven't used a modern TV in a very long time, but I can't imagine LG is extracting over $20 in ad revenue/data revenue per year. It might move the needle on <$500 displays, but when LG displays costing over $5,000 still have this spyware its hard to defend.

To parody the Arthur quote [1]

Do you really think somebody would do that? Just go write apps for the love of programming and not to make money?

[1] https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRGIV3u...

Yes it's possible for the apps to exist but not the apps programmers if they can't make money to eat

I remember seeing reports a few years ago about some TV that would constantly complain if it wasn’t connected. I don’t know what brand it was.

If you do this, connect it to the internet at least once, because most smart TVs ship with missing features that aren't activated until you do a firmware update.