Do not buy a Hisense TV (or at least keep them offline)

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Smart TV annoyances and privacy concerns

  • Many commenters report that most TV OSes are slow, ad‑filled, and heavy on telemetry.
  • A common strategy is to never connect TVs to the internet and use external devices (Apple TV, Chromecast, HTPC, game consoles) instead.
  • Some note that even cheap Android TV boxes and cable boxes suffer from laggy interfaces and ads.
  • There is frustration that “dumb” or commercial displays are rarer and often more expensive, despite avoiding spyware and bloat.

Hisense UPnP UUID behavior and Windows failure

  • The linked diagnosis: certain Hisense TVs repeatedly change their UPnP UUID, announcing themselves as a “new” device every few minutes.
  • Windows’ device association framework then accumulates thousands of logical devices, causing device enumeration to hang.
  • This in turn freezes Task Manager, Bluetooth, Settings, and network discovery, effectively a LAN‑local denial of service.
  • Similar UUID‑churn issues are mentioned for some Philips TVs and a Fritz!Box/minidlna setup.

Blame: TV vendor vs Microsoft

  • One camp: the TV is misbehaving; a UPnP device should not constantly generate new UUIDs.
  • Another camp: Windows is more at fault because untrusted network traffic should never be able to deadlock core system services; this is a DoS bug.
  • A middle position: both are buggy; the TV’s behavior is unreasonable, but Windows should bound and garbage‑collect its device records.

Privacy, “randomization,” and protocol design

  • Some initially compare UUID randomization to MAC address randomization for privacy, then others point out this analogy doesn’t fit: UPnP is local, and frequent UUID changes add little privacy but create chaos.
  • Broader discussion touches on how caching and discovery should be robust against malicious or broken devices.

Alternatives: dumb displays, signage, projectors

  • Suggestions include using large computer monitors or commercial/digital signage displays (often with minimal or no networking and no ads), though some criticize their color quality and missing features like ARC/CEC.
  • Some recommend buying any TV but never connecting it, doing firmware updates only via USB if necessary.
  • Projectors are proposed as an alternative, but many argue TVs are cheaper, brighter, simpler, and better suited to typical living spaces.