Why are there such idiotic smart TVs that can’t even turn off bluetooth?!
There are at least two such devices in my apartment block and my bluetooth audio transmitter always tries to connect to them instead of my headphones. I have already talked to the people owning those TVs and we tried to disable BT, but it just isn’t possible. This is driving me insane!
I actually had the reverse problem: some stupid neighbor kept trying to pair something with my smart TV, to the point where I couldn’t watch TV at times, due to this moron’s insistence. I looked in the settings and also found I couldn’t disable Bluetooth, or blacklist devices, so I thought of a simple solution: changing the TV name to “virus”. From that day on, no one tried to pair anything with my TV.
I actually had a similar situation. I found out I had a neighbor stealing my wifi a few years ago because of BT shenanigans.
I gave the guest wifi pw to the previous neighbor, who must’ve written it down somewhere. The new neighbor was a douche who kept piggybacking off of it to watch stuff with his shitty little kid, so I’d occasionally get notifications on my network. When I confronted him about it, he got belligerent and threatened violence.
So I paired to his device and blasted porn at full volume.
Well then, just hope that your neighbor doesn’t turn around to pair into your device and blast porn at full volume on your TV, get you pissed off as to WTF you can’t turn it off, end up throwing the whole thing into the Recycle Bin, and look into some kind of CRT TV that can’t be f***ed with like you are also pissed off with the current company that produces the current flat screen stuff.
It’s all good, my dude. I run old school cabling for my devices so I never have to deal with these shenanigans. Plus it’s been over a decade since this happened and I haven’t seen that family since. They left me alone after the incident and were quite civil afterwards.
Also, you okay? You seem quite upset about an anecdote on the Internet that has nothing whatsoever to do with you.
I feel stupid for never having looked into changing Bluetooth device names but it’s clearly not easy or I’d be naming all the Bluetooth shit I own crazy stuff.
Tv companies use those features to collect advertising metrics. While the BT can’t connect with anything on it’s own, it can see things like what other bluetooth devices are near by and how often.
It’s a small inconvenience to the user but knowing device 001A3FD24AE3 was present during a viewing of all of Star Trek TNG in 4 weeks is critically important for the TV to know.
I don’t care what’s “important” for some random marketing executive to know about me and what’s happening inside my house.
I bought this device and I will use it how I want and not how these predatory bastards want.
Bluetooth gets a normal plain text device name, and many of then are default. Knowing “Steve’s S20 FE” is near by is more useful, especially when farming that information from tens of thousands of tv’s and cross referencing that with other factors like income demographics for a given area.
The best part of this? They know you inside out, what you watch and listen to, where and when, and then use it… to try to sell you stuff you already have.
Some TV remotes are now using bluetooth instead of IR, so yeah you can’t turn that off without locking yourself out…
I’m pretty sure the S-Pen uses some form of low frequency induction. It works for such a use case due to the immediate proximity of the devices, while a TV remote would likely be too far away.
IR can be used to send data. My first laptop had a IR tx/rx. We tried it for fun and it worked.
It should be legally required that on any system that has settings you should be able to disable wireless stuff.
I’ve refused to hook my TV up to the internet. Massive bloatware and spyware machine. I bought high end. Samsung 70" top of the line last year. But everything I watch is though a jailbroken 4k firestick or straight up on disc.
It’s a pain in the ass to switch inputs. THERES NO INPUT BUTTON. It wants to choose FOR ME what input I’m using based off the most recent input. Lick my balls. I’ll switch from the first stick to the Xbox but if the fire stick is still streaming I’ll choose the Xbox and it’ll switch back to the firestick. Fuck you. I can’t even imagine if I let that thing connect to the internet. It’d probably want a huge update, send everything I watch back to hq, and then try to show me ads. Fuck you Koreans.
It’s a great tv. Top of the line picture quality. But it’s about as good as it gets in this age. If I was more tech savvy I could probably make it better but I’m not.
