It's almost analagous to the "nutrition facts" that you get on food. A standard baseline so you can know what's going on.

The irony is that as people justifiably push for "more security", more and more of them are going to use HTTPS or other encrypted transports, making it impossible to determine what information they're transferring just from network inspection.

End-to-end encryption is a good thing only if you trust both endpoints and don't want MITMs to interfere. Otherwise, it's security being used against you.

When these smart device manufacturers "smarten up" and start encrypting everything (likely with no options to disable and/or e.g. install self-signed certificates - naturally, because of "security reasons"), it'll be all-or-nothing.

When I said HTTP, I meant to include HTTPS. Intercepting HTTPS and filtering it is actually rather simple, and avoiding certificate warnings only slightly less so by deploying your own CA.

You're correct that some devices may use certificate pinning to prevent me from doing this, but for those devices my solution is simple: They're denied Internet access entirely.

Edit: As a manufacturer/vendor you have zero expectation of privacy from me the consumer. I bought the device, I bought the equipment that runs the network, I pay to keep the device connected to the Internet, I get the final say on which packets your app receives. Any vendor who believes otherwise is mistaken and should be named and shamed.

Some other options include Sonicwall and pfsense, and I encourage others to post their suggestions as well. I haven't used SonicWall, though I have used pfsense strictly as a firewall.

(0) http://www.sophos.com/en-us/products/free-tools/sophos-utm-h...

I don't like the idea of having to keep a desktop/laptop computer on 24/7.

Reviews suggest pfsense runs well, and with 4GB RAM and a decent SSD one could probably run snort and squid as well. Probably about $330 all assembled.

Reading the forums there are some dual LAN Atom based mini PCs that seem OK.

Edit: Also http://store.netgate.com/Desktop-Systems-C83.aspx has some preconfigured options at under $300.

If you do not want to financially support pfSense, you can buy hardware from Netgate directly, starting from $299. Even cheaper as a kit or with older hardware, but you decide for yourself whether it will be adequate for you. I'm planning on buying an assembled APU from Netgate for myself; right now I'm using m0n0wall on a separate P3 PC (Celeron 1000), modded for silence. Probably will try out pfSense beforehand, on a separate CF card I just ordered.

Also, there is no reason why all these functions should be built into a TV. I believe that the TV should be a monitor and thats it. We dont even need to have a TV tuner anymore. Just add 6 HDMI ports or more and I will add whatever function i want.

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