A few manufacturers are now shipping monitors with the same OS as their smart TVs, so they can stream Netflix and stuff standalone. OP has an LG one, and I know Samsung are also doing it on some of their newer models. Thankfully there's still plenty of dumb monitors on the market for now, including most LGs and Samsungs.
Given how garbage the software quality is on hardware devices, why would I ever want them to be connected to the internet? Ad/privacy or security concerns aside, even companies who should know better have shown they cannot be trusted and will continue to load up irrelevant patches onto a device until it eventually crawls under the increased computational demands. Slowing a previously responsive system.
Why does my monitor need to do that? My OS, the Intel Management Engine, my application, the website I'm using, my internet provider, my modem's hardware stack, and the several networked microphones in my home are already doing it.
Your comment is very similar to past comments in HN where the user was sadly not being sarcastic (generally people with defeatist attitudes). Please use the widely-accepted sarcasm symbol. Example:
Consider the case where there's a quiet observer looking at the screen alongside you. The monitor also needs to identify them so that it can ensure that you're not an accessory to thoughtcrime by letting them look at your screen.
I don't think that really caught on that much. Film studios care about it, but TV manufacturers don't really.
This is for advertising plain and simple (and probably selling user data to some extent). That's direct income for the manufacturers so they care about it a lot.
But, why doesn't the ethernet just connect to the device directly? Have they really taken so many ports away from us that the only way to connect to ethernet is to daisy chain through a fucking smart monitor?
Single cable docking. You plug your laptop into the monitor via USBC and it charges your laptop, provides it a Ethernet connection and drives the monitor display.
Not defending the sickening concept of a “spy” monitor.
But my Dell P2423DE monitor has a USB-C “dock” built into it so that I plug a single cable into my laptop which connects it to 2x 1440p monitors, power, mouse, headset receiver, keyboard and a wired ethernet connection.
Quite frankly, it’s awesomely convenient.
It’s totally legitimate to have a network port on a monitor.
I've never heard of this. What specific devices, if you don't mind me asking?
I had no idea a Thunderbolt hub could serve as a parallel Ethernet hub, nor that there were devices that could or would want to take advantage of this.
AFAIK, while there is a standard for Ethernet-over-Thunderbolt, typical Thunderbolt docking stations simply expose the underlying Ethernet controller as a PCIe device, typically using a chipset with drivers that are widely available if not preinstalled on all major OSes.
In other words, they not hubs (or switches) in the Ethernet sense, just a different physical connection to an otherwise ordinary PCIe NIC.
I imagine non-Thunderbolt USB docks are similar, presenting as a USB hub with a garden-variety USB Ethernet controller attached to one of its ports.
With that said, I imagine a "smart monitor" with integrated dock would additionally include Ethernet switch-like functionality, to enable sharing of a single physical Ethernet port (or wireless connection) between the connected host and the smart TV subsystem, just as some servers allow sharing of a single Ethernet port between the installed OS and an onboard BMC.
