alt Hacker NewsPretty much the same with my newly acquired LG Smart TV. I thought I might like webOS, since it's technically a descendent of palmOS, but oh no. No no no.
I've opted just to not plug it in to the network and not provide a WiFi password.
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I recently bought a second hand eight year old 4K LG TV. Pretty cheap too. All models running webOS 3.x and 4.x are trivially rootable as LG never provided an update against DejaVul [1]. There's a handy website to check which models are rootable [2]. You can write directly to the (old!) Wayland socket; haven't tried a libwayland yet that is compatible.
IIRC the last public exploit for all LG TVs for webOS > 5 was in the beginning of 2025 (so pretty recent), but as most sellers on the second hand market have auto-updates turned on, there's no way to know which TVs are vulnerable.
It should be doable to strip down much of webOS with root access. It's nice that webOS in general is very well documented and much is implemented around the Luna service bus. LG offers a developer mode for non-rooted TVs, and there's an active homebrew community because of it. It's a pity that you can't modify the boot partitions, as the firmware verifies their integrity. It would be nice to have an exploit for that.
I picked up this used 4k sony bravia recently and the thing is such junk. AndroidOS, seemed promising, but it has hardcoded ads on the homepage from whatever movies were coming out in 2015 when they were selling this screen, so much input lag, crashes constantly, can't even change picture settings as it will crash and reset to default. Sometimes it will just boot loop and not turn on until hard reset. Useless device today. Probably cost a thousand dollars when it was new I'm guessing, now it is ewaste.
Meanwhile my ancient 1080p panel still works, and I noticed I can't actually see the pixels from my couch so, ehh, I guess...
My Samsung and LG TVs have never touched the LAN, nor will they. They have one job in life: being the HDMI display for our game consoles and Apple TVs. That's it. I'm sure they'd both like to serve me ads and report my viewing back to their servers, but they're living the life of dumb panels.