Nah, it’s mostly because gamers Nexus reviewed an LG monitor, which also had that shit (monitors were traditionally ‘dumb’ before this), so he decided to do a broader investigation.

Don’t worry, they all do it. You basically have to buy a dumb display if you want privacy.

If you can detect and identify the other devices on the LAN, you know exactly which other smart devices the customer has, and at scale that’s very valuable market research. They could probably even start sending ads to customers for an LG replacement if a device drops off the network.

And the open source movement is such a blind spot to the ‘left’ as well, even though technology freedom is critical if you want to be able to organise any type of resistance in the digital space.

Lemmy users largely get it, obviously, but centre left people will happily let themselves get locked into the Apple/Google walled gardens even though you’re just giving that company a ridiculous amount of power over you.

Did they talk about nuking the great lakes again?

He’s still pushing ‘intellectual property’ as part of his philanthropy. The creators of the Oxford vaccine wanted to open source it and give it away for free. Gates opposed that and he got his way (partly because of the influence of the Gates Foundation). The delays this caused probably killed millions of extra people in the Global South (not sure if anyone ever did the maths on this).

I personally haven’t had to touch it in over a decade, but I guess there’s probably some uses for it still, yeah.