How do I free my television?
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.
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
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.
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:
- No, it isn’t really a thing,
- It’s wrong for it not to be a thing, and
- You should be pissed off about it.
Thanks for teaching me a new concept to be angry about, I guess.
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.
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.
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.
