•  fer0n   ( @fer0n@lemm.ee ) OP
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    1 year ago

    Amazon is adding full-screen video ads that will play when you start your Fire TV unless you quickly perform an action on it. […] “Our focus is on delivering an immersive experience so customers can enjoy their favorite TV shows and movies, as well as browse and discover more content they’ll want to watch. We’re always working to make the Fire TV experience better for customers and have updated one of the prominent placements in the UI to play a short content preview if no other action is taken by a customer upon turning on their Fire TV.” Amazon said in a statement to Cord Cutters News.

    Sure, that’s definitely a feature for customers. Especially the fact that you can only click it away in the first few seconds. I also love to have my ads be immersive. Biggest pile of bullshit I’ve heard this week.

  •  ImInPhx   ( @ImInPhx@lemmy.sdf.org ) 
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    1 year ago

    A lot of the fire tvs can be rooted! There’s a great community over at XDA with all the needed resources.

    I have two 4k sticks (1st gen) rooted and debloated running Leanback launcher. When you cut out all the junk, it really is (or was?) the best 4k streaming device under $50.

      •  4am   ( @4am@lemm.ee ) 
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        391 year ago

        Yeah, what is the alternative? “Oh you can assemble your own raspberry pi kit, after you partition an SD card and install a special version of Linux you can then tunnel it to a vpn and BitTorrent all your movies and shows using the -arr software suite and then use a package manager to install Kodi or jellyfin to watch, and maybe if you put docker on it you can use HomeAssistant to dim your lights when watching”

        Meanwhile their iPhone autocorrects half those words to something else.

  • I may be an anomalous IT professional, but despite being a coder and generally a ginormous nerd, I’ve never really understood why people buy “smart” devices. This isn’t a criticism; I honestly just don’t understand why they’re popular. The amount of convenience they provide really doesn’t seem like it’s worth it at all, to me

  •  aksdb   ( @aksdb@feddit.de ) 
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    1 year ago

    You can btw “simply” opt out from this in the settings (look for “featured content” and disable it).

    Yes it should be opt-in, but it’s not that hard to keep the fire tv (stick) being a good device for the price paid.

    •  Zworf   ( @Zworf@beehaw.org ) 
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      1 year ago

      I wish, I have not found a way yet and I work in cybersecurity. Though I have to admit I didn’t give it my best at all.

      One thing I would like to try soon is running FLauncher. Though I kinda doubt they will allow another launcher to be set as default. Their site offers some workarounds but “Fire OS” is a lot more locked down. For example using the normal ADB command to turn the screen upside down (needed for my projector) is not working either.

    • I found that the following helped: by never turning it off it just continues where it left off last time it was used. This assumes power is independent of TV.

      Useful Settings This ADB command kills the sleep timer:

      adb shell settings put secure sleep_timeout 0 and this ADB command kills the screensaver:

      adb shell settings put system screen_off_timeout 2147460000

  • I have blokada on mine I had whitelisted all the amazon servers it connects with but when I read this I removed them all to stop it updating hopefully.

    Will probably work until I get round to trying the xda fix.

      •  Teknikal   ( @Teknikal@lemm.ee ) 
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        1 year ago

        Well mine didn’t update at all until I manually added the servers from amazon it was blocking by default.

        So I kind of assume taking them off again is a temporary solution. That said I can’t guarantee they haven’t changed anything since then and I might wake up to a worse fire cube sometime.

    • Firesticks use a hardcoded backup DNS which can’t be changed/disabled without root access. This renders DNS level blocking useless because they’ll just use their backup DNS if your DNS resolves to 127.0.0.1/0.0.0.0

  • I picked up a 4K Fire Stick a few years back, connected it to my Wi-Fi and then watched the network activity from the router with little surprise. Tech companies sell ad-delivery devices with a nominal end-user benefit.

    Once NUCs became powerful and affordable enough to use as a dedicated HTPC/server, anything with a proprietary OS made no sense, even taking portability into consideration. This is just the latest example of why.

  • I’ve noticed they have added this trick to my FireCube. When it’s first powered on it looks for the remote and often doesn’t find it. Then as you press a button on it, it clicks the first show or movie being advertised.

    I didn’t pay top dollar for a cube to deal with this crap.

    I’m finding I’m using my laptop more than my cube these days. I’m also cancelling services as I go. Arrrhh time to go!

    •  4am   ( @4am@lemm.ee ) 
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      201 year ago

      Man I hate this flippant pseudointelligent passive-aggressive crap.

      Yes, not everyone missed their childhood to learn Linux like we did. People don’t have the time or knowledge to build their own streaming box. None of their friends are ever impressed when they do anyway.

      Those people are all busy specializing in something else, so that you or I don’t have to learn to farm, or manufacture Cheetos, or keep the water running.

      This is being extremely exploited by late-stage capitalism now, however. What we need are some ethical choices for stuff like smart devices, things that don’t need “cloud connection” just so your phone can turn your lights on. FFS they’re right next to each other, we don’t need to bring CloudFlare into this.

      •  Big P   ( @peter@feddit.uk ) 
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        31 year ago

        What we need are some ethical choices for stuff like smart devices, things that don’t need “cloud connection” just so your phone can turn your lights on.

        IKEA’s smart stuff is the best out there for the average consumer. Manages to be something that “just works” whilst also being fully local, no cloud connection, uses open standard APIs and provides firmware updates as downloads.

      • Man I hate this flippant pseudointelligent passive-aggressive crap.

        Then proceeds to spew different pseudo intelligent passive-aggressive crap. 🥴😮‍💨

        We’re not talking about installing Linux or anything close. We’re talking about downloading an app, paying for an IPTV subscription and a VPN. 🫠

        •  Big P   ( @peter@feddit.uk ) 
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          61 year ago

          Again, most people do not know what IPTV or a VPN is. They do not care to find out, their brain doesn’t spend any amount of time thinking about these things. If you’re not into cars you don’t wonder if there’s a way for your car to go faster or sound or look cooler. You get into your car and you drive it to your destination. This is the same concept.

          • Someone mentioned, either in this thread or another thread going outside and I found that amusing as in the same way that people used to come into pubs to sell pirate DVDs, they’re now selling Android TV boxes and fire sticks for £100. You’d be surprised at what the layman knows.

            •  Big P   ( @peter@feddit.uk ) 
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              31 year ago

              The layman doesn’t know what that it though. I know people who have those and they just called them “dodgy fire sticks” and have no idea how or why they work.