Seconding this. If you're into it, it's pretty awe-inspiring to see open water all the way to the horizon, 360°.

For a six foot tall person the horizon at sea level is only 3 miles away. You could get that experience on a big lake if it's more than six miles square.

I see this claim posted a lot, and not a single person has ever provided evidence of it happening with any TV brand I've ever heard of.

I don't have firsthand knowledge of TVs doing this, but other consumer devices with WiFi most definitely do this. If you don't control the software driving the TV, and the TV has WiFi hardware, I would assume it's at the very least in the cards.

It's rationalized by the vendors as a service to the customer. The mobile app needs to be able to configure the device via the cloud, so increasing the ability for said device to reach cloud by whatever means necessary is a customer benefit.

I've never seen evidence of a mainstream consumer device doing this either. Got some examples I can look at?

Is Amazon Sidewalk still a thing?

It most certainly is. It's not wifi, but it's definitely a thing. It lives down in the 900MHz world where things tend to be slower, but also travel further.

And of course: If it exists, it can be used.

That said, I haven't seen any evidence that suggests that televisions and streaming boxes are using it.

I’d kinda forgotten about it until someone mentioned open WiFi, and this seems like a use case tailor made for it. If not already, it looks like a near certainty to me.

I also think it is inevitable.

But remember, too: Whispernet.

Available as a one-time extra-cost feature on the first Kindle back in '07, Whispernet provided a bit of slow Internet access over cellular networks -- without additional payments or contracts or computers.

And really, Whispernet was great in that role.

But the world of data is shaped a lot differently these days. Data is a lot more-available and much less-expensive than it was back then, ~18 years ago -- and codecs have improved by leaps-and-bounds in terms of data efficiency.

Radios are also less expensive and more-capable compared to what they were in '07.

This will be sold as a feature: "Now with Amazon Whispernet, your new Amazon Fire TV will let you stream as much ad-supported TV as you want! For free! No home Internet connection or bulky antenna required! Say no to monthly bills and wanky-janky setups, and say yes to Amazon Fire TV!"

The future will be advertising. (Always has been, but always will be, too.)

If you're in SF we should have that conversation over a beer.

If you are paranoid about this, most TV wifi hardware is simple enough to physically disconnect.

Someone needs to sell replicas (forgive the pun) of these.

This is super cool (and the kind of comment that I love reading on HN!), thanks for sharing.

Those vacuums are stronger than people realize.

Please just use text for that. PR descriptions on GitHub sufficiently support formatting.

Text isn't good for things like "tighten up the spacing in this dialog".

Of course not. Perhaps you misread the comment I was replying to?

Quoting from it:

> I will take a screenshot of a new type in my IDE and put a red box around it.

I think a tangential interesting question is: how many monthly active users does Firefox have, that choose to use Firefox? Not people who "click the internet icon", etc.

Like you, I suspect the brand recognition and loyalty is much, much lower than many people in this thread believe it to be. Not talking about among the highly-technical HN audience; just at large.

That was some 4000 years ago.

Unintended: agreed. Unexpected: plenty of us called out this inevitability when the CT proposal was circulated.