As far as networking is concerned, what should I google for separating a device like this onto its own internal private network? I have devices that I want to whitelist traffic for while not affecting other devices in my home.
I'm not sure how technical you are (this isn't a simple subject to implement), but I'd look into "managed switches" (to enable classifying traffic from specific ports, aka one the TV is plugged into), "VLANs" (what the switch uses to "segregate" traffic), "policy based firewall" (allow you to be explicit in what traffic is allowed or not, two examples you might look into being pfsense and mikrotik).
I actually have one of these TVs and the best thing you can do is just give it a static and then only whitelist certain data/ports on your ip fire/ of sense firewall.
When connected over wireless, something in the TVs networking stack crashes my entire wifi router too.
Some people have rooted them, which is what I was hoping for when I got it, but if you update to a new version and try to root it can brick.
Honestly, I think this conversation should be more about the right to control the devices we own more than just egregious privacy breaches. If we are to prevent such breaches from other manufacturers then what we need is the ability to control our devices. I have a quad core processor in my TV, but apparently if I don't want samsungs crappy proprietary OS and want to install Linux, too fucking bad for me. I think that's bullshit and needs to change.
I agree, reading your entire comment, you probably should have researched it more if your intention was to replace the factory OS image with one of your own. But it happens to all of us; I have a useless Motorola phone sitting on my desk because I naively thought "it's Android, it must be hackable", and only discovered after I bought it that Motorola made the bootloader impossible to unlock.
I decided a while back that a TV should just be a dumb monitor, and whatever "smart" features I want it to have can be had via a set top box, home-built HTPC, or a streaming stick. So far I've been very happy with the Roku 3 combined with a home-built HTPC/PVR. If I decide I want to upgrade to bigger or better screen, I only have to replace that one component. Ditto for the "smart" side of things. I see so-called Smart TVs as the TV/VCR combo of the 90s: When one half inevitably fails, you have to throw out the whole thing.
Sure, that's one solution. But let's take the Samsung example. What happens when the device needs to update firmware? I want to allow traffic of that sort, while disallowing things such as the voice communication.
Security vulnerabilities. Performance increases. All the devices that were vulnerable to Heartbleed (as an example) with no ability to update themselves are still vulnerable. One could argue that simply disconnecting the device would be sufficient, but this ignores the possibility of internet features being useful; I wasn't limiting the discussion to TVs.
But it's a useful exercise to limit the discussion to TVs exactly because most TVs don't need any Internet connectivity at all! They just need to display input from other devices that are connected to the Internet.
The trend for Smart TVs these days is to leak data like a sieve. The small risk of vulnerabilities in e.g. a TV's HDMI layer being exploited is arguably a price worth paying for privacy.
I recently bought a Panasonic TV that doesn't have smart TV features - the pictures as good as the smart variants, it has a couple of HDML ports and no network interfaces.
The discussions around smart TV vulnerabilities is making me very pleased about that decision.
