Why is that even possible? It’s not like I needed another reason to not buy Samsung but there’s no reason a TV should be able to act as an access point.

I know amazon has something like this with their devices so I would not be surprised if they did it with an app. Its supposed to allow the speakers to still work for low bandwidth uses. Honestly the times where your internet is out but not your neighbors is a rare event.

Yeah.

That’s Samsung’s job.

Modern TV is a computer that runs apps with network access. The reason for this is streaming video over the Internet which is rather popular. If an app can send and receive data over the Internet it can be exploited to act as a residential proxy for a larger botnet. If that app doesn’t utilise native libraries / APIs to do that it might be hard to detect by the platform owner.

It's possible because, for some reason, TVs run full operating systems now. The ban isn't even a limitation on their functionality as far as I know, it's just Samsung threatening to remove known offenders from their official repositories.

Honestly the times where your internet is out but not your neighbors is a rare event.

Fuck, just realized with constant power outages in Los Angeles and having a UPS I’m the neighbor that’s online much longer than everyone else (until the cable goes down, but sometimes I use my 5G travel router as backup).

Luckily I don’t willingly install typical spyware apps on my devices, but I have turned off all my DNS filtering for my wife and guests (I use VPNs on end decides).