Tag: samsung

1847: Your TV Is Not Trying to Kill You

So another outlandish “privacy scandal” looked set to erupt on Twitter earlier. For the benefit of anyone who might be considering sharing anything regarding Samsung Smart TVs sending your personal information to third parties, allow me to clarify a few things.

Samsung Smart TVs have a voice recognition feature. I know this because I have one. (I also never use it, because voice recognition is, for the most part, stupid and pointless when you have a remote control right there. Assuming you have hands, it is pretty much always just as quick to use the remote as it is to remember exactly how you’re supposed to phrase a voice command.)

Anyway. The way this voice control works is very simple. You press a button on the “special” remote, not the “normal” one, and the microphone in the remote starts picking up your voice. When you’ve finished speaking, it sends what you said over the Internet to a speech recognition service (that more than likely converts the speech into computer-friendly text for more accurate processing) and then your TV receives an instruction based on what you said. The TV itself isn’t doing any real processing; that all happens remotely, and the TV simply receives the instruction to do something based on what the speech recognition service thinks you said.

Astute iPhone-owning readers will know that this is exactly how Siri on Apple devices works — it’s why you can’t use Siri when you don’t have an Internet connection, even to access information stored locally on your phone such as your address book and suchlike.

The reason these services work like this is to take some of the processing workload off the phone/TV/other device with voice recognition. It’s not an ideal solution, but it does mean that the devices in question can be less expensive because they don’t need hefty processing power or software to recognise voices pre-installed on them. One day we may have devices that can recognise our voices accurately without requiring an Internet connection — although chances are by the time we’ve perfected that, the Internet will be “everywhere”, rather than just in Wi-Fi hotspots and mobile coverage areas — but until then, this is how voice recognition tends to work.

As such, a necessary part of the entire process involves sending a recording of what you said to the third-party speech recognition service. This means that if you press the microphone button on your Smart TV remote and then decide that the appropriate thing to say at that moment would be “My credit card number is…”, a recording of you saying your credit card number will be sent to this speech recognition service. Chances are, nothing will happen with it, but as with any sort of unencrypted information transmitted across the Internet, there’s a slim risk of nefarious types intercepting the transmission and taking advantage of it.

Because of this slim risk of stupid people telling their TV remote what their credit card number is, Samsung have had to put a disclaimer in their Smart TV documentation that the TV may send your personal information to a third party, and of course, people have misinterpreted this as the TV always listening to what you’re saying, and it therefore being unsafe to share any personal information while within earshot of your TV. This is, of course, utter nonsense, because as I’ve outlined above, you have to specifically press a button in order to activate voice recognition mode, and the “third party” it’s being sent to is doing nothing more than converting your babblings into something the computer in the TV can recognise as an instruction to do something.

That is it. Nothing more. Nothing sinister. And if you’re still uneasy, you could 1) not buy a Smart TV, since technology clearly terrifies you, 2) not use the voice recognition function (which, in my experience, is patchy, slow and pointless anyway) or 3) not talk about credit card numbers or other personal information when you’ve pressed the button that specifically asks your TV to listen to you.

So there you go. This has been a public service announcement. I thank you.

1542: Terebi Desu

Our new TV arrived today at some ungodly hour in the morning — which felt all the more ungodly for the fact that excellent Vita dungeon crawler Demon Gaze had kept me enraptured until 3am — and I’ve been having a bit of a play with it. (For the curious, it’s a Samsung Series 6 55-inch LED TV; it has a catchy three thousand-digit model number but I have no idea what it is.)

When Andie suggested we grab a new TV, I was a little concerned that it might not be a significant upgrade over what we already had — a 40-inch Samsung, albeit one that is now about four or five years old. After all, despite the fact that my previous TV was an end-of-line model when I bought it — making it much cheaper — it was pretty good. Three HDMI ports, built-in Freeview tuner, full 1080p support — it had pretty much everything I needed, though it would have been nice to have an optical output port. Everything I connected to it worked just fine, though, ranging from the PlayStation 2 through the SCART port (yummy, blurry standard-def picture) to the various games consoles and PC through the HDMI ports.

With the previous TV working just fine, why buy a new one, you might ask? Well, having spent this evening playing some Final Fantasy XIV on it and having watched some anime and TV on it earlier… yes, it was a good investment. The increase in size is extremely noticeable — it’s big enough to have a touch of “peripheral vision” now, giving a much more immersive feel to both video and games — and the LED screen is lovely, bright and clear. I have no idea if I’ve optimized its settings appropriately — I’ve put the PC input into Game mode, because prior to that there was noticeable input lag, but haven’t really fiddled with much else — but it certainly seems to look very nice, although as Andie pointed out, the bigger the screen you get, the more of a dog’s dinner standard-definition footage and TV broadcasts look. Oh well.

It’s a Smart TV, too, which means it has two remotes, one of which has a trackpad rather than, you know, just being normal, plus “apps” for doing shit old, dumb TVs don’t do. There’s stuff like BBC iPlayer and Netflix built into it, for example, and even apps for things like Spotify and the like. (There are also games to download, but somehow I don’t see them being particularly worthwhile, and as such I will be giving them a wide berth.) I’m not entirely convinced how much I will use the “smart” features over time, but it’s nice to have them there, I guess — not to mention the fact it is seemingly now impossible to buy a new TV that isn’t 1) “smart” and 2) 3D.

The 3D thing surprises me somewhat, I must confess. I thought 3D TV and gaming had been a colossal failure, and yet all the televisions we looked at over the weekend were 3D in one form or another. The TV we ended up getting is “active 3D”, which is supposedly better because you have to turn the glasses on before they work properly (and for some other reasons, too) and sure, it’s quite fun — we watched a couple of trailers in 3D earlier and it was quite cool — but it’s not something I can see myself using a lot of, and certainly not for protracted periods of time. It will almost certainly be something to show off to people who come and visit, but little else.

Anyway, I’m very pleased with it. It fits nicely on our TV stand and doesn’t look too big or too small, and it’s a noticeable upgrade over what we had before — plus the almost bezel-free design, with the picture going right the way to the edges of the front of the unit, looks absolutely smashing.

I’m sure I’ll be taking it for granted before long — and I’m not looking forward to moving it when our new house is sorted — but yes; I’m glad we got it. And now I’m off to bed because I’ve been staring at it all evening and I think my eyes could probably do with a rest!