Good question. Please see my follow-up comment.

Not putting your WiFi password in would absolutely be reliable.

No, it would not.

I’d love to hear your ideas on how they’d remotely break into your WiFi Network

They wouldn't, of course, nor did I say they would.

(Although we have already seen internet providers quietly using their CPE to create special-purpose wireless networks surrounding customers' homes. These could obviously be made available to any company that paid the ISP for access, just as cellular networks have been made available to companies like OnStar. So a TV could do this with a business deal rather than breaking in to your normal WiFi.)

However, your network is not the only network in the world, and WiFi is not the only kind of link. Neighbors exist. Open guest networks exist. Drive-by and fly-by networks exist. Mesh networks exist, and have already been created & used by Amazon devices. Power line networking exists. Bluetooth, LoRa, cellular, etc. etc. etc. Maybe you live on an isolated mountain top where these things are unlikely to reach you (at least until satellite links become a little smaller and cheaper) but even that is not absolute, and most of us don't.

Unless you disassemble your TV and examine all the components within, and know what they do, it could have any number of these capabilities.

Also, given how prevalent multi-network support is becoming in electronics integration, it is not unusual for related functionality to be dormant at first yet possible to activate later.

I'd love for you not to be adversarial, and to learn more about a topic before making bold claims about it in absolute terms.

Friendly reminder that gaming console monitors, computer monitors, projectors, dumb TVs, and commercial displays exist.

Yes, I could hack a smart TV to disable its networking capabilities. (Merely withholding my wifi password is not reliable.) But that would still be showing the manufacturers that I find spyware TVs acceptable, and supporting the production of those models.

Also, this would be a good time to pressure our legislators into criminalizing this nonsense.

It's disappointing to see that a couple dozen people decided to hit your post with drive-by downvotes, rather than using their words to express themselves in a way that actually contributes to this community.

Your question is a legitimate one, and relevant at a time when Windows is increasingly bloated and invasive, spyware is out of control, and Linux is increasingly a viable alternative even in certain tough areas like games. I just wish you had elaborated on why you singled out Ubuntu when several other widely-supported Linux distributions exist.

If those were my only two options, I would pick Ubuntu over Windows, no contest. I would replace its default desktop with KDE Plasma (or just choose the Kubuntu variant in the first place), rip out as much of Snap as I could, update the kernel, and plan to migrate to a distro that I like better whenever I was able.

For what it's worth, Debian Stable with a few hand-picked backports and flatpacks suits me well, mainly for gaming and software development. (I'm a bit of an outlier among Linux users who post on social media, though: Having my system be low-maintenance is more important to me than always having the latest features in every app, and I've been known to make my own debian packages and flatpaks when something I want isn't ready-made.)

Linux Mint, Pop_OS, and Arch Linux are also popular. There are quite a few more.

All desktop environments are fancy compared to a simple window manager.

threat actors backed by Beijing broke into a “handful” of U.S. internet service providers

Which ISPs?

Also, it would Be(e) better to link the original article (archived here), rather than this secondary reporting based on it.

Our capitulation to the virus is a combination of a population where most are now many months or years from their last vaccine dose, and that vaccine dose was in any case poorly cross-protective for the very distinct current variants.

I think most people don't realize just how important that first part is. Many seem to believe a dose will keep them safe (and no longer dangerous to others) for at least a year, but that's a mistake. Even our best Covid vaccines don't protect for years or decades like the vaccines we're accustomed to from childhood.

Immunity from these new shots wanes rapidly, reaching less than 20% effectiveness after just 6 months.

Sorry; the new tool, then. A bug report is a good first step toward getting those APIs supported in Wine. (Even undocumented things are sometimes added.)

Thanks for sharing.

What errors are logged by Wine when ~~FWUpdater~~ the new tool fails to run? If you file a bug report, it might get fixed.

I guess that makes sense. I haven't used Discord in a while, but I think tags are less noisy over there, since they don't render as something long like @someusername@somelemmysite.example.com. I avoid unnecessary tags on Lemmy because all that extra syntax makes for cluttered comments.

More power to them

:)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_754