MudMan

You go to tech news sites? Did you time travel from the 2000s? Can you bring me back with you?

Hey, if extremely good, hassle-free emulation didn’t do it I wouldn’t hold my breath, but I guess more options can only help.

See, when people need to rephrase your point to answer it, that tends to not be a great sign for good faith engagement. Case in point, ignoring the inclusion of “and supposed allies” at the core of my point is doing a lot of work in your argument with an entirely fictional version of me.

For the record, you’re not off the hook because you’re a targeted minority. Plenty of organizing and activism is driven by vulnerable people rallying society at large around them. The idea of arguing that protest is for white people because they have the numbers is bafflingly individualistic, which I suppose is on brand. The point of collective action is… you know, that it’s collective.

Look, my argument here is that Americans are handling this situation from an absolutely bizarre set of assumptions and cultural behaviors. I fully stand by that. The passive compliance while bemoaning the ineffectiveness of actions they’re not taking is not unheard of historically but man, is it weird and frustrating.

If you choose to take that as a knock on you specifically that’s your prerogative. I will say that it definitely doesn’t exclude you or the OP. It’s a society-wide issue. Identities aren’t segregated bubbles. The entire framing of this argument is part of the bizarre self-exculpatory, entitled set of cultural assumptions that re-elected the same fascist idiot twice because milquetoast liberals weren’t exciting enough or whatever the hell.

I think the part that gets me is the one-two punch at the very visible performative outrage at Trump doing exactly the things he campaigned on paired with the extreme passivity as they watch it unfold. The impression from the outside looking in is the US, from elected Democrats to marginalized citizens, is collectively waiting for the regional manager or the kindergarten teacher to come out of the back room and fix things while sharing safety tips and sternly worded objections. And there doesn’t seem to be any sign that things will bubble over into actual action. They will be carried to the camps while aggressively demanding a refund. It’s a grotesque spectacle to watch, being perfectly honest.

No, I am absolutely sure they’re coming after queer people and other minorities.

I’m questioning what infosec will do to prevent that. I’m questioning where political action from both directly affected people and supposed allies is. I’m questioning where all this was during the campaign and the election. I’m questioning why people are choosing to express fear and anger online and share progrom tips in social media instead of organizing.

I genuinely can’t parse how Americans are processing this. Turkey, Serbia? Yeah, I get what’s going on there.

The US? Alien planet. It’s like they never heard of civil society or political opposition before.

Go outside. With a sign, maybe, but you may also find you have a sound-making enabled face-hole.

Voting also helps, if the chance is ever provided. That ship may have sailed, though, so you may find you need to go purchase a time machine type device instead.

Maybe it’s just getting grumpier in my old age, but I’m increasingly annoyed at all these posts going “here’s how to lock down your comms from all the people coming after you for all the protesting you’re not doing. Now hold tight while sitting at home, I’m sure the official summons to go do the revolution is incoming from the official revolution organizers any day now”.

Oh, I’m super onboard with it. I don’t collect old games for speculative purposes. Hell, I didn’t collect that one at all, I just bought it when it came out.

Well, there goes the market value of my launch edition of Fire Emblem Path of Radiance (look it up, it’s no joke).

Honestly, given Nintendo’s scorched earth approach to third party emulation I’m not inclined to give them extra money on top of their base subscription for this. Double that for the choice of making visual improvements to backwards compatible games a paid upgrade.

Heh. On that we agree.

Look, not everything someone posts online is a call for help. I noted the frustrations with my TV setup and why I can’t or won’t effectively mitigate them. It’s not because I don’t know my options, it’s because they don’t make sense to my setup at the moment. I don’t mind someone suggesting something that helps, but you can safely assume I’ve tried the obvious stuff.

Dude, I don’t tell the people I live with what to do. You are assuming I’m some patriarchal figure making choices for these people, that’s not how it works. They make their own choices with their own money, my family situation isn’t a US sitcom scenario.

You’re also assuming our local broadcast solutions here are… I presume American? The balance of quality and issues is not the same worldwide, the specific technical implementations aren’t the same. My “cable box” is in fact a IPTV solution and it also parses what you’re defining as “OTA” directly from an aerial antenna and bakes it into the channel list. And for the record, all different sources there range from 720p to 4K with different levels of compression through some combination of regulation requirements and which broadcast source has decided to update to newer standards when.

The one thing I find interesting in this wall of text is that you seem to be okay with some datamining solutions (Apple or Nvidia) but not others. I’m not sure if this is again a regional thing, but I don’t find those alternatives any better. The only meaningful difference is between being entirely offline or not. The most I can provide with a meaningful improvement is selfhosted media, at least without additional setup.

And we are back to my original objection: That is a restriction based on activism, not practicality. I can do that for myself, but not for every family member. It’s not reasonable to tell someone that they won’t be watching this or that show, despite being bundled in our cable, which is in turn bundled with our internet package, because I’m annoyed at privacy pop-ups. It’s not reasonably to tell everybody in the house that we’re cancelling all of our streaming services, which are routed through the offending hardware, because we’re a Bluray-only household now, I’ve decided.

Both the structure of the service and the implementation are now industry standard. You can go “off the grid” with some effort and enduring some restrictions, but you can’t choose to keep the same level of service and not use the mandatory cable box your cable provided installs if you still want to have access to cable channels.

I didn’t even have OTA TV last time I was living alone. All I really need is a disc player, a tablet and a computer. Now I’m not living alone I don’t get to be fussy on principle because I don’t like having to click “opt out of cookies” every time I want to watch the news. It’s already a stretch to insist on rejecting all the cookie prompts instead of accepting the intrusion for convenience.

So very happy about how high your horse is in your unabomber media setup, but that’s not practical for me or in general.

Oh, no, that’s not it. Or not entirely. They definitely do inject ads sometimes, often for proprietary services more than sold products.

The real issue is that they are also doing on-device display analysis for statistic data mining. Effectively snooping on your usage behavior to sell the data for advertising.

I don’t even mind that much, but the problem is with the current local regulations that means they have to pop up cookie acceptance prompts. And if you don’t accept them they keep trying. Constantly. The prompts are way more intrusive than the ads, but I’m also not inclined to reward their very deliberate dark patterns with a blank check to mine my data. At least in the old days of audience meters they’d pay you some or at least send you a gift basket or something.

Yeah, but then what? I mean, at least one of the TVs isn’t using the TV OS, it’s using the cable box. And guess what? the exact same malware is baked into the cable box’s OS.

And of course the same data tracking is baked into the apps themselves, and it’s baked into the Apple, Google and Amazon mainstream versions of add-on support. And on the Microsoft and Sony consoles that will do the same service for some streaming tools.

So yeah, if you’re tech-savvy you can either block ads upstream or set up a dedicated media device built from the ground up for non-shittified streaming while keeping legacy old-school non-cable broadcast running like it’s the 20th century but in the real world that’s a protest action, not a functional service.

Sometimes the TV, sometimes the settop cable box that also handles broadcast TV (and data mines it). Because, as I said elsewhere, family members are not tech-savvy and want the ability to watch streaming services from their remote without having to switch back and forth to multiple devices depending on what they want to watch.

But to be clear, this is with the TVs logged off from first party services. The data gathering is just baked into the TV’s OS.

Honestly, at this point the dealbreaking enshittification stuff I bump into is mostly subscription requests and paywalls from the sites themselves. Which, fair enough, people need to get paid and I don’t have a particularly good answer to give them about how. I am not watching ads on purpose as a support gesture, though.

No, you absolutely get this.

Maybe because cookie warnings are mandatory here, I am PAINFULLY aware of when the layer of TV malware is pulling info to go along with the TV broadcast. I dismiss advertising cookie warnings in three separate TVs on a daily basis. Once per channel, even. It’s incredibly obnoxious.

For the record, the data mining is not happening over the broadcast. It’s the TV software that is pulling watch data and then repackaging along with the broadcaster and selling it to advertisers. I know because they are mandated to disclose it, so they make me read about it a dozen times a day.

Are people concerned with WHICH ads they see?

Do people see ads? I’m on Firefox with an adblocker I haven’t seen an ad in ages, anywhere. Except perhaps for that brief interval where Youtube nominally tried to stop adblocking, it worked for like two weeks and it made me go check out FreeTube until they gave up.

You’re asking the wrong person. I mostly watch stuff on a Windows tablet. I’m hardly your prototypical media consumer.

But when I do want to watch something on a nice screen it’s an LG or Samsung TV where I haven’t logged in and turned on as many privacy settings as possible. Mostly I use a local Plex server, and I do have a Windows PC hooked up to a TV as a media center and gaming device.

IMO there isn’t a “good experience silver bullet” thing out there. You’re navigating like three layers of advertising datamining on all options, including straight-up live broadcast TV. At this point it’s about mitigation. I should give a pihole a try and see what that does to the TVs. If I could at least kill the need to manually opt out of live TV cookies every time a family member tries to watch something that’d be a major win.

I have my LGs connected, but logged out.

It’s a hassle in that it requires to log in and then back out for mandatory updates of some apps (others will update without a logout, for some reason), but at least it removes the need to agree to a whole bunch of their garbage and add it to an identifying account.

I would keep it offline and use a set-top box, but I have family members that aren’t tech savvy and won’t want more hassle than pressing the “Netlfix” button on the remote.

I’ll say that even they are increasingly annoyed at the constant cookie prompts during live TV watching. Honestly broadcast TV is an absolute hellscape these days.

Definitely. And the patterns are actively a feature for these chatbots. The entire idea is to generate patterns we recognize to make interfacing with their blobs of interconnected data more natural.

But we’re also supposed to be intelligent. We can grasp the concept that a thing may look like a duck and sound like a duck while being… well, an animatronic duck.

This. People NEED to stop anthropomorphising chatbots. Both to hype them up and to criticise them.

I mean, I’d argue that you’re even assigned a loop that probably doesn’t exist by seeing this as a seed for future training. Most likely all of these responses are at most hallucinations based on the millions of bullshit tweets people make about the guy and his typical behavior and nothing else.

But fundamentally, if a reporter reports on a factual claim made by an AI on how it’s put together or trained, that reporter is most likely not a credible source of info about this tech.

Importantly, that’s not the same as a savvy reporter probing an AI to see which questions it’s been hardcoded to avoid responding or to respond a certain way. You can definitely identify guardrails by testing a chatbot. And I realize most people can’t tell the difference between both types of reporting, which is part of the problem… but there is one.