- cross-posted to:
- privacy@programming.dev
- cross-posted to:
- privacy@programming.dev
Hacker reverse engineers his Samsung TV and finds on-device AI listening for your dog and baby, watching what you watch, and borrowing your soundbar’s mic if the TV doesn’t have one. Then OpenAI banned him for reverse-engineering it.
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Their own harnesses breaking out of their test environments and hacking third party companies is “oopsi” but their customers using an agent in a controlled manner to reverse engineer firmware of a device they own is bad. I see. Fuckers.
to reverse engineer firmware of a device they own in order to show the additional privacy violations by Samsung.
Yeah, this is completely messed-up. I wonder if Samsung broke any laws by accessing customer soundbars without consent, reporting what they watched, etc…
Corporations gonna corporate.
It’s high time we had a revolution of our own in North America to chase out these corporate barons that own every little minute aspect of our lives.
Lina Kahn was kicking ass at the FTC! First thing I thought when I woke to another Trump win, “There goes our last, best hope.” She’s a hero of mine. Mamdani snatched her for his team, so more evidence he has his shit together.
Lina Kahn is a hero of mine as well!
I highly suggest you to read “Enshittification” by Cory Doctorow, especially the new and updated version.
They stripped our freedom to own our devices. We need a revolution.
More than anything, we need to stop buying this shit.
Sales, as in “there are none…” for a few quarters would tank the stock valuations enough that the stakeholders would make life quite uncomfortable on the C-suites for their decisions to bake spyware into everything.
NGL, BEST decision I made was to jettison cable TV service back in 1999 when we came online. If (and this is a BIG “if” nowadays…) I watch something, it’s from a DVD or I hoist the Jolly Roger and sail the seven seas…
My current 10 year old TV is doing duty as a 50-inch 4K display for my gaming PeeCee… and it’s kinda “special needs” as a supposedly smart TV in that it doesn’t have a single app installed that can actually stream 4K - what can I say… it was a WalMart special… gee, I wonder why?
I put it online (via ethernet) when we got it to test it’s “smart” abilities and quickly discovered it was an absolute dog.
Works great to game on though.
LOL!
More than anything, we need to stop buying this shit.
Or we can pull together and design boards as drop in replacements for the circuit boards in the SmartTVs. I’m shocked at how cheap it is to get custom boards printed these days. Since SmartTVs are sold at a loss with the intent of making even more money by selling your data, replacing the hardware in the device should still end up being cheaper than the cost of an unsubsidized TV.
With the AI tools available for designing boards now, it shouldn’t be terribly difficult for those with the right skills to do this.
Hmmm. that is a great idea.
If all manufacturers of smart TV’s with the best picture qualities are using this targeted avertising/spying firmware, as much as I agree with your sentiment, it’s not really a viable option for someone who’s in need of purchasing a TV.
Is there a reason that a TV needs to be new? I picked up a 50" plasma for 80 bucks last year, for use in my work studio. NGL, attaching it to a MacPro that’s used for graphics - with the color saturation on that thing? - holy hell, it’s beautiful and I can match the outputs to the color profiles for the print jobs I run off… Facebook marketplace for the win, my man.
This is way too complex of a topic to leave to “consumer choice”. There are layers upon layers of complex systems at play, not to mention miles of legalize and precisely crafted PR statements to say one thing and mean another.
The only way this gets better is with government regulation, pretending consumers can make a difference here is blaming the victim.
I’m gonna have to disagree with you on that.
As someone that spent 15 years in the Nielsens Homescan Consumer Shopping survey (rebranded as National Consumer Panel) the power IS in the hands of the consumer… Hence the huge industry effort on determining what advertising does and does not work.
In that survey, one would scan ALL purchases and send in the data weekly and the company would then send questionnaires on WHY one buys an item and what, if any, commercials they see (in print, radio or TV - then later online) and if the ads were memorable.
As I was answering the questionnaires, I was also noting how they framed the questions, and what assumptions they made in the pre-selected answers we were to use. (…you’d be astonished by the assumptions that are made about the public…)
The fact that panel members didn’t even have the ability to use their own words to say what they did or didn’t like about their purchases or the businesses and instead it was about feelings… that right there told me that emotional manipulation was/is the main leverage point used by advertisers and corporations.
The consumers have ALL the power in the equation, as all a consumer has to do is say “no”… the level of manipulation that industry has to go to - and the surveying and the depths to which people are plumbed and pumped for info - is more about maintaining customers through deception than it is about keeping them by creating high quality goods and services.
Used shit is the way to go… or better yet, be the cultural change yourself and jettison the old media. For sure I did by cutting the cable TV in 1999, …and we haven’t looked back.
you’d be astonished by the assumptions that are made about the public…
Please provide an example or two. I’d like to be astonished.
The best one was the pharma survey… They assumed that EVERYONE in middle age is on meds.
I got sent a pharmaceutical survey and how those operate is you would get a mailer with a series of questions and you’d use the barcode scanner to scan the answers.
I got into that targeted survey (somehow) and was sent a three ring binder of pages and pages of drugs.
The first four pages were questions related to when you’d started on meds, for what illness and when did you stop taking them and why…
Nowhere in the initial survey questions was the option to say “I have not STARTED taking medicine / have no need…”
I called in and talked to a representative and she couldn’t wrap her brain around the concept that as a middle-age American there were ZERO prescription drugs being taken by anyone in my home.
I had to ask her why the survey was predicated on the belief that everyone was on drugs - and she got a bit testy and huffed “well, I wouldn’t say that!” and I asked her where the “no use or need for meds option” was on the survey if that wasn’t the case… she replied “well, don’t you need medicines?” and I said “Nielsen has our full scan list of the food we’ve bought and eaten for the last decade and no one can draw a connection between proper food and health?”
Crickets…
“Oh, you must be really healthy!” “Yeah… we don’t eat garbage…” More crickets…
Then she credited me the points for the survey (It was a big one so it tallied large - I got two iPods out of that year’s totals…) and quickly hung up.
The assumptions that we also watched TV and the questions about ads on it that we’d seen were pretty interesting. they also sent out a Media Recording device (looked like an old-school pager) that would listen all day for an ultrasonic sound that was broadcast on the various Clear Channel radio stations and we were to wear it as we went about our day. Sorry to say that one was a bust - by that time I’d discovered somafm online and was well into streaming radio.
But the government itself has bbeen bought out by most of these bige companies …so…
What ‘government regulations’ you thinking of? I sure theyll all be very helpful… 🤭
Bro the government itself is part of the prpblem cauae the government is A-OK with a capitaliistic set of governmental regulations that give the richest capitalists many freedoms even when theyre being ‘regulated’. These government regulattions you speak of will be like palcing these rich companies under house arrest…in a 26,000 square feet mansion!
We have tto destroy the system itself in its entirety, both the bribed governmeent and the capitaliists that contorol our economies and our governments.
Why cant WE be our own government? Werecognize that thhere is a problem. We investigate the problem and recognize that this is psychopathic. We recognize that the execs at companies thatt do this type of bullshit should be arrested , or worse, and then have their assets nationalized … We cant do this shit our selves?
Why cant WE be our own government?
Because most of “we” are checked out dummies who are easily manipulated by unscrupulous entities. And the more money you have, the more dummies you can manipulate.
Once again, theres an amazing amount of ethical ai use out there but apparently nigh nobody cares about that
The 10% of ethical AI use is drowned out by the other 90% of absolute liquid trash.
That’s not touching the ethics of stealing everyone’s work for your AI then selling it back to them.
That’s not touching the ethics of aggressive Data Center build outs that threaten people down to their actual health.
That’s not touching the fascist supporting corporations that run and own the frontier AI models.
That’s not touching the lack of those frontier AI company’s ethics. They operate like it’s the fuckng wild west.
How can you possibly have a victim complex about this?
That’s not touching the ethics of stealing everyone’s work for your AI then selling it back to them.
Yeah, it’s the “selling it back to them” part that gets me. I don’t want to outlaw scraping, because then the Wayback Machine couldn’t function. The Wayback Machine is free, though. It’s a public service. (One which is very much needed, IMO.) If, instead, the Internet Archive required that you pay for a subscription in order to use it, I think most people would be very upset, and rightfully so.
You want to scrape the Web to feed your LLM? Cool! Make it an open-weight model.
I wonder what % of actions being ethical would be needed from Germany before WW2 would be considered unjustified.
I’m willing to bet that 10% of the actions the Nazis did (note: out of all the actions the German govt did, including enforcing laws, running trains/buses, collecting taxes, building infrastructure etc) were ethical, and yet the Nazis were still obviously the bad guys in WW2.
„Hitler wasn’t all bad; he built the Autobahn” is one of the things some right wingers actually say.
Ethical from the start you mean? Trained on data with the blessing of the owner?
First of all, yes, and also not all ai has to be generative or llms. Theres also a lot of other ai that was done before openai fucked everything up.
So, you’re against the Wayback Machine?
When we say AI, we generally mean the LLMs. It’s become a marketing term for them.
Obviously, we used neural networks and such ethically for a long time.
The problem isnt those, it’s the mass harvesting of data, the endless copyright breaches, the stealing of peoples work. All to resell it. While ruining the planet environmentally, economically and it has fucked with the way people think.
I mean yeah thats true but ethical llms are still completely possible but nobodys investing into it
So you think website scraping should be illegal? When LinkedIn was trying to prevent other people from scraping their website (and lost the court around it too), you were on LinkedIn’s side?,
It’s far too late to put those horses back in the barn.
“we can’t get rid of the Atlantic slave trade it’s here to stay”
Ok buddy
Lemmy: “If we tiny speck of people make a moral stand and don’t use LLMs, they’ll give up their stolen content and go away!”
The theft is done, over, you’re not going to get those horses back in the barn no matter how high your horse is. Do you imagine that on some glorious day the entire planet will legislate wiping all training data and say, “Sorry. Let’s not do that.” Sure. Soon as we get textbook communism working for 8,000,0000,000 people.
Bullshit like this is why I left lemmy last year. It feels like a bunch of children arguing over their personal version of a perfect world. Bluesky was kinda nice, people with some age and experience and an understanding of real politik. Kinda vanilla as well, but cutesy little quips like yours weren’t met with much acclaim.
Go reinvent the world kid, with no understanding of history or human nature. While you’re at it, maybe every museum on the planet can send every artifact back to the original peoples. Uh, gotta put a timeline on “original”, but it’s the right thing to do! Good luck.
Oh yeah please leave again!!!
Well, maybe you should leave Lemmy again.
I had commented many times on other platforms as to how insular lemmy is. “Believe as we believe or fuck off!”
Well…
And then we’ll see a post about how to grow the community.
Yup, Smart TV’s of any brand (at least in the US) are essentially spyware. I made a video about it recently.
The upside is that if you don’t connect your TV to the Internet, all that data just sits in its internal memory and doesn’t go anywhere. So don’t connect it.
The weirdest thing in all this is that it’s Texas, of all places, leading the charge to hold these TV manufacturers accountable. (And Ken Paxton, the most cartoonishly corrupt politician in recent memory at that.)
I’m guessing he’s probably pretending to hold the line so he can hold out for a bigger bribe later. Same thing with Jose Vega in NY who’s apparently another POS politician.
I suspect that it won’t be long until keeping it off your home network is meaningless.
Many smart devices already search for and connect to open networks. Not an issue for most tech-savvy people who maintain their own networks, but there are a lot of people out there that either don’t know or don’t care that their telecom-provided gateways maintain an open wireless network by default, in addition to their private networks for home use.
My pessimistic take: the intent behind this is to create a de-facto mesh for IoT devices in areas where people live close to each other, i.e. apartment buildings and townhomes.
Integrated cellular modems are relatively inexpensive; it’s not too far of a reach to think that soon, IoT devices won’t need to rely on wifi to send their
surveillance reportstargeted marketing data.Could be. I don’t think it’s going to get that far.
Companies are trying to speedrun and normalize intrusive tech like this because people and governments (at least at the state level here in the US) are starting to catch on. For example, since June Flock has lost nearly 400 contracts in 36 US states, which I personally would never have predicted, and if Texas of all states is taking on mass surveillance, it’s not a stretch to think that local laws against this kind of tech will materialize in at least 2/3 of the US states.
You’re more hopeful than I am, but I hope that you’re right. Historically, the US hasn’t had a good track record in that regard. While some have stepped away from the tech altogether, many of the municipalities that cancelled their Flock contracts just to sign on with a new ALPR vendor. For them, want to keep the government overreach and police-state surveillance, without the bad public image associated with the Flock brand.
many of the municipalities that cancelled their Flock contracts just to sign on with a new ALPR vendor.
People keep saying this, but there’s not a ton of info out there to substantiate it that I’ve seen. More than 100 of those Flock contracts were canceled in September alone. I think it’s just speculation, but there is also an election in a few weeks, so I suppose it’s possible we could see a pivot post-election.
I also don’t think a brand change is going to matter. People are pissed in bi-partisan fashion, and it’s weird, but there’s something about this level of surveillance that has inexplicably radicalized otherwise apolitical people.
You’re more hopeful than I am,
It’s not so much a matter of hope as it is a matter of what’s dangerous to the state, which is ironically why Paxton’s so hardcore on this. TV’s being weaponized as mass surveillance tools is, evidently, something the state was not clued in on and most of these are manufactured in China. I don’t think any US government at any level cares much about intruding on civil liberties, but they do care about protecting the Epstein Class.
6 mos into owning a Samsung TV, I started getting ads.
So I put a pihole on my network which fixed it but I also started seeing the ENORMOUS amount of times ALL my samsung devices were being blocked. I’m talking THOUSANDS per day per device. Like the TV would be blocked 1,200 times in one day, my samsung smartphone would also be blocked 1,000+ times per day while my wife’s iphone that she uses for every and all social media was being blocked maybe 100 times.
Since then I’ve never bought another Samsung device and hooked an apple tv up to my Samsung TV while disconnecting the tv from the internet. It’s fucking disgusting how you buy their product and still get milked for data/money.
“Shifted it to the consumer”
• The “Guest Consent” Clause: For example, Section 6(d) of LG’s updated terms of service states that it is the owner’s sole responsibility to obtain consent from household members and guests whose voices might be captured by the TV’s artificial intelligence and voice recognition features.
• The Legal Trap: By agreeing to these terms, you contractually accept the responsibility to warn anyone sitting in your living room that the TV is listening. If a guest sues over an illegal recording under state wiretap laws, the manufacturer will use the EULA to argue that you breached the contract by failing to get that guest’s consent. That’s assuming someone actually reads the EULA
Especially in
• California • Delaware • Florida • Illinois • Maryland • Massachusetts • Montana • Nevada • New Hampshire • Pennsylvania • Washington
because they have all-party consent laws : In these states, recording an oral conversation requires the consent of everyone involved. Because a house guest has a reasonable expectation of privacy in a private home, a smart TV capturing their background audio without their explicit knowledge constitutes a violation of state wiretapping laws, regardless of what the TV’s EULA say
So, you have to have everyone in your household agree to the EULA not just yourself if you use a smart tv in those 11 states to not violate wiretapping laws.
I can’t wait for this to be put to the test legally. It won’t be me because I broke my last smart tv.
Why do people post things like this in twitter? Why can’t they write it up in a single blog post on a site that does not require users to authenticate to view the whole thread? I have never understood these long twitter threads.
Edit: I just remembered that there is a solution for this: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/2113014142600953868.html but it’s still ridiculous that an app needs to exist to aggregate dispirate tweets, and of course it doesn’t work with the parent tweets because they’re not all one thread. Also this app quit working during the twitter API debacle, which is why I forgot about it, but it looks like it’s back.
It’s entirely the wrong format for it. Same as using Discord in place of old text forums. I will rant for HOURS to anyone who will listen about how Discord is an apocalypse and has completely wiped any documentation off the face of the internet for soooo many projects. It’s not searchable or indexed, and even if they make a good discord forum it’s like writing questions and answers on toilet paper and wiping your ass with it after 30 minutes. Moderators and admins constantly complain about people not reading the FAQ or asking the same questions over and over… I WONDER WHY THAT IS. HMMM? MIGHT IT BE BECAUSE NOBODY CAN SEARCH ANYTHING AND YOUR FAQ IS GARBAGE!!! MAYBE ASKING QUESTIONS IS THE ONLY WAY TO GET A FUCKING ANSWER!!! (MAYBE. IF YOU’RE LUCKY AND SOMEONE WHO KNOWS THE ANSWER SEES YOUR QUESTIONS LIVE AT THAT MOMENT AND RESPONDS)
Summarizing a discord channel into a usable format would be an excellent use for an LLM.
Or people can just use the right format instead of making an LLM play pick up 52 million.
I agree it could make something slightly more useable than discord’s current state but it would be a bandaid fix that doesn’t solve the core problem.
It’s no surprise. They’re all in bed together.
Softbank invested $122 billion in Open AI: https://tracxn.com/d/companies/openai/__kElhSG7uVGeFk1i71Co9-nwFtmtyMVT7f-YHMn4TFBg/funding-and-investors
https://www.thelec.net/news/articleView.html?idxno=5132
The bosses of Samsung Electronics, OpenAI, and SoftBank held a three-way meeting in South Korea to discuss potential collaboration in AI. Samsung Electronics Executive Chairman Lee Jae-yong met OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son at Samsung’s office in Seoul on Tuesday.
In case anyone was ever curious if AI could be used against our corporate masters, here’s your answer.
I suspect that if the AI industry ever gets any sort of regulation, it will be to wrench any kind of power that end users have that may threaten the capitalistic hegemony away from them. Can’t have people reverse engineering their tech to figure out how they are using it to spy on you, cuz THAT’S CYBER ABUSE! :/
that is why anthropoic got scared, afraid of deepseek and other free models.
That, and the price fixing.
… on whose part?
… Yes.
One of the things that AI is actually useful for. Banned!
Hey guys, I am starting to think AI isn’t actually for us.
LoL
This “advanced tech” that’s based on stolen IP won’t even give you the lyrics to Happy Birthday to You.
Do the Happy Birthday people hire Disney lawyers?
Everybody declared me an idiot when I didn’t hook up my smart tv to the internet. This is why
These TVs can connect to open networks or other smart devices with Internet so that doesn’t necessarily save you
Everyone keeps saying this, but I’ve yet to see any TV caught doing it. They enumerate the devices and networks around them.
I want to build an esp32 with an open access point that logs mac addresses that connect to it. Maybe have it cycle through SSIDs- FreeWiFi PublicWifi Xfinity etc
Maybe deploy it in an apartment where tv density is high?
You need to give it real internet and watch it connect. Android (and i suspect ios) constantly scan all network ssids to refresh the local nework ssid list.
It doesn’t know my device is a dead end until it connects. By then, i have the MAC
That’s accurate. But you’re going to have the mac address of every laptop, tv, phone, light bulb, toaster, microwave, and corporate access point.
EVERYTHING sweeps the network.
And most of them are going to hit some form of beacon to see if the connection is even online. They’re not just going to blindly call snarfingallyourprivatedataoversomeotherunsecurednetwork.samsung.com
They might even call some base telemetry on samsung.com to identify the network as open to your internet connection wizard, ESPECIALLY if they’re not connect. right?
The best option is what the subject of the post is about and just tear down the firmware and see what it does. This is happening now and is the best answer.
the second best option is to give it real open access and see what it does with it. If you start seeing telemetry that’s a strong indicator. That said, if you leave it over for long periods of time, there’s a chance that someone will eventaully tell their tv to go ahead and use that open access point. at which point your checks of does it do it on it’s own are questionable.
Let the leet crew tear it apart; trust what they find.
The best option is what the subject of the post is about and just tear down the firmware and see what it does. This is happening now and is the best answer.
I don’t know, I think an open source board replacement would be good too. I’d prefer that, actually.
Hell, if I could make a decent replacement for Roku and plug it into my TV, I’d open the TV up and disable the WiFi altogether.
