The spam came from inside the house: How a smart TV can choke a Windows PC

Enlarge / I have hundreds of UUIDs and I must scream. (credit: Getty Images)

The modern "smart" TV asks a lot of us. In exchange for connecting you to a few streaming services you use, a TV will collect data, show ads, and serve as another vector for bad actors. In a few reported cases, though, a modern connected TV has been blamed for attacks not on privacy, eyeballs, or passwords but on an entirely different computer.

The TV in question is a Hisense TV, and the computer is a Windows PC, specifically one belonging to Priscilla Snow, a musician and audio designer in Montréal, Quebec. Her post about her Hisense experience reads like a mystery. Of course, because you already know the crime and the culprit, it's more like a Columbo episode. Either way, it's thrilling in a very specific I-can't-believe-that-fixed-it kind of thrill.

Disappearing Settings, keyboards, remote desktops, and eventually taskbars

Snow's Windows PC had "a few hiccups over the past couple of years," Snow wrote on April 19. She couldn't open display settings, for one. A MIDI keyboard interface stopped working. Task manager would start to hang until force-closed. Video capture cards had trouble connecting. As Snow notes, any veteran of a Windows computer that has had lots of stuff installed on it can mentally write off most of these things, or at least stash them away until the next reinstall.