I have heard of this as well. But I don’t believe I have seen any reliable source actually confirming it. I vaguely remember some posted about it on Reddit years ago saying their Samsung tv would do it. That said it is clearly a possibility that the TV could do it if programed so it is good to keep that possibility in mind. Might be worth running a few tests if your worried about it.
The good news is Open WiFi hotspots are very rare, so unless you live next to a cafe or something that provides free WiFI you don’t really have much to worry about.
I have never seen a removable WiFi card on a TV board. They are always integrated directly on the main board itself along with the CPU RAM and other components. Just look up TV Main board on ebay and see if you can find any WiFi cards on the photos.
I am pretty sure TikTok would comply if you posted something illegal under Canada law or US law. Sure they aren’t based in the US but that doesn’t mean they don’t operate within the US and can just ignore the US laws. I assume they also have operations within Canada as well.
If you really want a true dumb TV, you should look into the commercial TVs
Personally I just get any TV and don’t connect it to the internet. I disable any popup interfaces/home menus as much as I can on the TV so I just turn it on and it goes to HDMI1 and that is all the TV’s interface needs to do.
I also disable alot of the picture altering features as well. My LG TV has some true motion crap that just made everything a little bit off.
For the most part the handful of TVs I have tried just work.
Yeah a reverse proxy would be a really easy way to do it. Assuming whatever your trying to expose will work with one.
But for traffic like a game server or something else that doesn’t use the traditional http protocol you could also setup the VPS as more of a router/NAT if you wanted.
Although that said I think NGINX can do a proxy stream that will work with most TCP/UDP connections no matter the protocol, I haven’t ever done it so I can’t say how universal that works.
You have a few options. Depending on what your trying to do you could look into Tailscale or ZeroTeir. Basically they create a small VPN that you can join multiple devices to. This won’t open the services to the public internet but it will open the services to whatever devices join your private Tailscale/ZeroTeir network running over the public internet.
Someone already mentioned but CloudFlare Tunnels would be a really good fit as well.
Another option but more expensive and most complex is rent a VPS in the cloud somewhere setup a VPN link between the box and your PC and then route the traffic thought that VPS. All public access will hit your VPS public IP and port numbers and get relayed though that back to your PC.
Lots of scams and even computer viruses will be sent out though the ad network so it is best to just block all ads so you don’t have to interact with potentially bad add.