Pitlab77

iTrader: (3)

Wife and I noticed that with 100+ channels of cable we watched about 3 or 4 stations.

When we bought our house about 1 year and 1/2 ago we decided to not get cable.

have about 45 channels with the TV's digital receiver + a cheap 20 dollar anntena
+ xbox (youtube) and netflix.

We dont watch tv to often, but do go on netflix binges every now and then.

Pitlab77

iTrader: (3)

I find listening to Basketball and baseball enjoyable on the radio.

I still get football on free tv


Funny thing is due to some "cable" provider contracts about 70% of Houston doesn't get baseball or basketball either lol and haven't for the last 2 years.

Leafy

iTrader: (1)

So I was watching TV last weekend and there was a commercial that seemed to be freaking out about congress trying to get rid of free TV over the air due to cable provider pressure.

Braineack

iTrader: (62)

last weekend? or like 5 years ago?

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

I imagine that on a modern Naval warship it requires two checklists and a safety briefing to take a ****, and despite the fact that the form for the after-****-action report was recently migrated to an electronic database, it manages to be more cumbersome and time consuming than filling out the old five-part carbon form by hand, the last few cases of which are being jealously guarded by logistics.

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

It's great. You sit down, push one button, and the product works. Does it reliably every time, regardless of whether the manufacturer has pushed a ghost update in the background.

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

Irony: that broadcast you're watching is actually 1080i, and it's heavily compressed. We (TV stations) just do a really good job of keeping it clean and avoiding bad codecs.

Internally, we switch and route everything uncompressed and unencrypted using HD-SDI, which is a transport standard that carries 1080i and 8 channels of 48k AES/EBU audio on a piece of mini RG6 coax (or a multimode fiber) at 1.5 GB/s.

When it comes time to transmit the signal to you, however, we only have 6 Mhz of free-air bandwidth to use, which equates to about 19 MB/s of useful data using ATSC/8VSB. Since most of us split that up into two or three channels, we usually give the main channel about 15 MB/s of capacity, which is 50% more than a typical DVD. This is a significantly higher datarate than a typical cable or satellite channel (and we also avoid the multiple stages of transcoding and muxing that cable / satellite carriers normally do), but it's still compressed using MPEG-TS and AC-3.

In theory, 1080p is supported by the ATSC standard, but nobody actually broadcasts it because we'd have to double the compression ratio; it would look far worse. Honestly, there's no need for progressive transport given the quality of modern de-interlacers. You get exactly the same physical resolution from 1080i as from 1080p, merely at half the temporal resolution, but the human brain is pretty much incapable of distinguishing between a native 60 FPS progressive signal and one that's been re-constructed from a pair of alternating 30 FPS interlaced fields. Consider interlacing to be a form of lossless compression. Back in the analog era, this mattered. Today it does not.





Serious question: how is having my TV connected to my home network any more of a security risk than my WDTV media player, my Vonage gateway, several Android and iOS devices, several Win7 machines, an Xbox360, and a Wii?

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

You may be refering to one of two issues currently going on.


One is a movement towards de-licensing LPTV stations and translators which provide crappy programming to extremely small towns in marginal areas. Nobody really cares about those, and I say this as someone who works at a TV station. This has absolutely nothing at all to do with cable companies. It's the wireless data providers (Verizon, Sprint, etc) who are clamoring for more bandwidth, and one way to provide it is to reclaim some of the frequency space that used to be used by TV broadcasters. It's currently being overturned by the LPTV and Translator Act of 2014


The other is a move by the cable (and satellite) providers to overturn a provision of the 1992 Cable Act which presently requires them to pay (or otherwise compensate) TV stations in exchange for the right to retransmit the programming that we produce and broadcast. Essentially, they want to be able to pirate our signal for free, and re-sell it to you the way they do now. Congress isn't trying to get rid of free OTA TV, this is just an attempted cash-grab by Time Warner and DirecTV. It'll probably fail, based on the recent SCOTUS ruling in Aereo, which upheld that retransmission without consent is a violation of the Copyright Act. (Cue JasonC to explain why the Copyright Act is a part of the illuminati conspiracy to prop up the Federal Reserve and take away his 2nd amendment right to own a thermonuclear weapon for sporting or home-defense purposes.)

Also, this argument isn't new, it's been going on for two decades. Here's some more info: NAB Advocacy: Protect TV Viewers and Allow Broadcasters to Continue Negotiating in the Free Market

Leafy

iTrader: (1)

Your other devices actually have like security software and stuff, combined with having your network encrypted like a normal person, is like wearing a latex condom while having sex with a hooker, where as putting your smart tv on that network is like using a pig intestine based condom with the cheap hooker.

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

Huh?

I literally have no idea what you are trying to describe. What is it about my TV which makes it uniquely threatening to the security of my network?

How is my TV any less secure than my WDTV box?

How is my TV any less secure than my Vonage router?

How is my TV any less secure than Nicole's Wii?

How is my TV any less secure than the Xbox 360?

How is my TV any less secure than an iPad or Android device?


I'm not aware that any of the above are running anything which I'd recognize as "security software," and most of them are certainly more lucrative targets for a hacker than an LG television set which has a shitty user-interface, no user-accessible storage and contains absolutely no personally-identifiable data about me (passwords, account names, etc) whatsoever.


Also, my network is not encrypted at all, aside from the Wi-Fi portion of it which uses plain ole WPA2 and is therefore vulnerable to brute-force attack against the WPS PIN feature as described here: http://sviehb.files.wordpress.com/20...hboeck_wps.pdf

Leafy

iTrader: (1)

I cant find the article anymore that showed that most network connected TV devices, refrigerators, light switchs, etc that were checked in a security study/audit were already compromised and sending the information they have access to, including anything in shared folders to random servers. Your Wii, xbox, and hopefully the WDTV box have security features, such as not running all apps as root and other basic protection. The tablets and phones all have even better security than that. And I would hope that router does too.

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

You don't actually understand how Ethernet works, do you? In other words, if I were to say to you "Explain to me, in simple, non-technical language, the fundamental differences between a Hub and a Layer 2 switch," how would you answer that? Because that knowledge is key to understanding why the attack which you describe is more-or-less impossible (or, more precisely, of virtually no useful value) in the real world.

shuiend

iTrader: (24)

With smart TV's especially LG I am far more concerned with them phoning home and everything you watch being recorded by the manufacturer and whoever is snooping on the lines between you and them. [IMG]Source.[/IMG] Also hackers have been able to take control of smart tv's and use them for other purposes. Source.

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

That already happens, not as a result of hacking, but in the ordinary course of business. If you have a current-generation set top box or DVR provided by your cable or satellite company, then depending on what market you live in, your viewing habits are already being logged by your service provider and sold to Nielsen and/or Rentrak for the purpose of ratings. In the case of a DVR, it also logs when (and how many times) you watched the recorded program, whether you skipped over the commercials, etc. This is old news.

Not everyone who says "Privacy is dead" is a tinfoil-hat conspiracy theorist. Some of us just work in the business.






First, from that article: "In the event a TV is behind a router that uses network address translation, Auriemma's attack won't work at the moment. But with more work, he says it could be possible to use exploits based on IPv6, the next-generation Internet routing protocol, to bypass that protection."

So that excludes > 99.9% of all households.

And the article fails to mention the relatively obvious fact that even if you are using IPv6 (which nobody is yet), a common firewall (built into pretty much every home router and activated by default) will also block this attack unless you deliberately set up an incoming port-forward to your TV, and beyond the fact that there is literally no reason at all why anyone would ever do that, if you even understand how to do that, you are not worried about this kind of attack.




Second, also from the article: "If you use a Samsung "Smart TV" that's connected to the Internet, there's a chance Luigi Auriemma can hack into the device and access files stored on connected USB drives."

Uhm, ok, so if I were to have a USB stick plugged into my TV (why would I, if it were connected to the network?) AND my TV is plugged directly into the internet with no NAT and no firewall, then this guy would be able to access whatever media I have on that USB stick.

Well, duh.

This is a long way from "compromised and sending all of your network traffic to random servers" as Leafy claimed, which is literally impossible in a Layer 2 switched network; it is the nature of a modern Ethernet switch that my TV can't even see the majority of the traffic on my network. (I see that Leafy ninja-edited his post after I replied, to change his claim to "sending the information they have access to, including anything in shared folders to random servers," which is slightly more plausible, though of course still massively improbable owing to the points above.)

The attack described in that article was performed on a TV plugged into the same LAN as the attacker. If someone with physical access to my network wishes to harm me, I'm going to reach for my .38, not my keyboard.




In short: It really doesn't matter if I give a hacker my real-world IP address and the username and password to my desktop PC (or my Xbox, or whatever hypothetical insecure device I have on my network) for the simple reason that like every other living human with DSL / Cable / FiOS, I have a hardware firewall which drops all unsolicited incoming requests into the bit-bucket.


In fact, I'm so certain of this that I'll go ahead and give the whole Internet an opportunity to hack me. I just remoted into my desktop at home and did a WhoAmI. The real-world address of my cablemodem at home right now is 69.116.186.117. It's connected to a consumer-grade router which I purchased last year at BestBuy (can't remember the make or model), and that router is running a 100% stock config aside from the fact that I changed the SSID and key for the WiFi, and I set up a couple of internal DHCP reservations.

The username I use to log into both my desktop and media-server machines is "joe" (this account has admin rights) and I have temporarily changed the password on both machines to "anus." They are both standard Win7 PCs with no fancy security software other than AVG Antivirus installed.

On the C:\ drive of my desktop machine, there is a subdirectory called "HackMyPC" and inside that directory is a single .JPG file. If anyone can post that image on this forum, I will paypal you $100.

Have fun.

rmcelwee

iTrader: (1)

I remember Tivo stated that the Janet Jackson saggy titty flash was the most rewound event in TV history (or something like that). They are definitely watching you. I think I opted out of the spying stuff when I signed up with Tivo (you could opt out at one time - not sure about now).

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

Yeah, I remember after they announced that, all the privacy nuts started jumping up and down and screaming about ethics and whatnot, and then it was quickly forgotten.

People seem to have a short attention span, and a shorter memory. Every time something like this comes up (and it's treated like some new invasion of privacy), I can't help but think "no, you fool, we've been collecting and selling your "private" data in this manner for quite some time, and we even published a paper about it that was presented at a TED conference three years ago. How is it possible that you've already forgotten this?"

In case anybody was wondering, MiataTurbo.net also logs when you sign in, from what IP address, etc. So does nearly every other forum on earth, as well as YouTube, Hulu, Gmail, Facebook, PonyLifestyle.org, and pretty much every other interactive network-based service on earth which relies upon advertising for some or all of its revenue.



I was kind of hoping this would be something cool, like "Hacker penetrates a development system at Samsung, inserts a trojan into an official firmware patch which is then distributed during the next update cycle, causing every single Samsung TV on the planet to automatically join a botnet." **** like that actually used to happen back in the 70s.

mgeoffriau

iTrader: (7)

Your security is pretty good. I couldn't hack it no matter what I tried.

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

Wait a sec... are (were) you still on a nuke ship?

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

My "security" is merely whatever came turned on by default when I bought my $35 router, minus whatever weaknesses I later added to allow myself easier access to my home servers from outside.


Hint: I don't use RDP, so I don't have that incoming port forwarded at the router.


Trivia: there is a VNC client implementation for OSx called Chicken.



http://sourceforge.net/projects/chicken/


Hint 2: you don't have to leave your VNC server defaulted to the standard IP port # of 5500. You can set it to any arbitrary port number that you wish.

mgeoffriau

iTrader: (7)

I sure hope you don't think I was serious.