Some version of this has been posted a dozen times now. The dog barking and baby crying detection are advertised features of this product range which is used for SmartThings integration.
Swarms of RE-hopefuls are now using tools they don't understand to work on projects they don't understand. Anyone doing RE knows step 1 is read public documentation, FCC filing, patent applications, etc. That step would tell you what the device does out of the box, no RE required to find everything the OP has actually uncovered.
Instead they busted out Claude and have been gaslit by their own AI into thinking they've discovered something. They just discovered features that Samsung has been pitching for years.
I don't get why people think it would be worth all this effort for Samsung to nefariously work out not only if you have a dog and/or a baby, but exactly when they make noise. Like, sure, that would be a gross invasion of privacy if they were doing it - but what's the business reason for putting all this effort into it?
I can almost see the "they're using it for advertising" or "they're selling information about whether you have a dog or a baby, of course!", but notifying every time they make noise?
There's obviously more to this story than these sensational knee-jerk reactions assume. They're just so non-curious for a supposed 'investigation'.
Well, person didn’t have a dog and then they suddenly do, and that will be noted by the device. I don’t understand the downplaying here, even though it’s correct that these people not necessarily know what they’re doing. The device does collect information about you and does listen (all while costing thousands of dollars). And these spy features they announce are not a product for common users but for data companies.
I don't think I'm the one being overly credulous here.
None of the assertions you made are backed by this 'research' which as far as I can see only shows that the TV is capable of detecting dog barks and baby cries.
You're just presuming that because the TV is capable of sensing these things (which Samsung advertises - links at end) this data is being collected and sent to Samsung - and then sold on.
So, some questions:
Is information about every time your baby cries or dog barks even valuable enough that this is plausible?
Is there any evidence that this is actually being sent over a network - for purposes other than the features they advertise?
Is there evidence that these are even being monitored if the dog bark or baby cry feature is not turned on?
Shouldn't the burden of showing things like this be on the people making the sensational accusations?
I could come up with more, but I think that these are enough. I'd love (well, hate, because I don't want it to be true) to see some actual proof of any of this.
"They recently had a baby and now they suddenly don't" is probably a datapoint they sell to ambulance-chasing medical malpractice lawyers and PE-owned grief counseling clinics...
Well yes, but when was the last time any police force had the mental ingenuity of asking the Samsung corporation about details on on someone's living environment? And what level of accuracy would you trust that intel?
Yeah the police would never ask Amazon ring for mass video without a warrant either right? Oh wait they could and they did. And it was shut down after it was exposed.
And on flock cameras they still do.
It's like this, once you have the data they will come for it.
Different people learn new things differently. Folks without a background in RE, who are playing with these tools, may also not care about privacy until they find a reason to. I don’t see anything wrong with folks taking a roundabout way of finding out how things work; Be it software or privacy.
I think the issue is mostly over-sensationalizing findings.
For example, it would be tiresome to have someone insist that s0ss is clearly an illegal hacker with multiple felonies to his name solely because he chats with YCombinator's secret anonymous hacking collective. And yet this post right here makes it very clear you are one of us! ;-)
While caution is definitely warranted after LG, I am definitely getting the impression that people are far too quick to jump to conclusions because an A.I. service told them something without them factually checking it first
If normies understood that baby crying detection also requires everything-except-baby-crying detection, they would be up in arms about being spied upon... and here they are
Sometimes, the essence of a story and end goals has more value than the actual finding and story itself. Most us probably don't know this is part of a documented feature, and this is the first time I'm hearing of SmartThings integration. I'm still not quite sure what the point of these detection are.
This reads like you want to gate-keep people first exploring and discovering the absurdity of the surveillance state we live in.
In my opinion, Claude "gaslighting" is a signal the other way - If Claude thinks they've discovered something, that means the llm-compression of most digitalized human knowledge still finds SmartThing a disturbing piece of tech that user do not want.
First off, not all gatekeeping is bad. The locked doors at the power plant marked caution are locked because the wrong move will kill you and it will hurt a lot the entire time.
So first we have to the examine the gate being kept, and who's the keeper. If it's "being allowed to vote" and the gate is being kept by "men", sure, tear down that wall. In this case however, the gate being kept is not reading the documentation and being mind blown for something that's documented. Not like, hidden away somewhere, but plainly documented. I'm torn though, because xkcd 1053 also applies. Unfortunately, tech is one of those areas where you can only cry wolf so many times before people just totally ignore you.
> Swarms of RE-hopefuls are now using tools they don't understand to work on projects they don't understand
I mean, that’s just a statement of fact from the grandparent, no? I don’t see it as gatekeeping; are you focusing on some other part of the comment?
I think someone who’s aware of how to do Reverse Engineering being tired of those who’re making mistakes but advertising the output of those mistakes as legitimate discovery is pretty normal. I remember when I was learning FreeBSD that I’d show up in the mailing lists thinking I’d found bugs, but really I hadn’t read the docs well enough, and people were direct with me that I needed to do better if I threw the word “bug” around. It’s just normal peer feedback.
I would respectfully submit that trying to treat Anthropic’s models’ nonsense alarmism like it is legitimate output is closer to gaslighting. At best, the output shows that the majority of people have an alarmed tone.
The comment seems to imply to me that they are too gullible to understand what the LLM tells them and are being gaslit into believing things that smarter researchers would know without needing an LLM. Honestly, the comment seems dismissive of the current reality in general.
If actual researchers with real experience are disagreeing with LLMs, I'd generally still trust the real experts.
At a dead minimum, I'd expect something like "addressing the concerns the experts are raising" instead of trying to do a character assassination.
I generally read "character assassinations" as suggesting that someone has no real technical arguments available - conversely, the experts here are citing specific facts and evidence.
There is a Rick and Morty episode where Rick opens up a store that removes the curses from free items the Devil is handing out.
(Surprisingly, the Devil does not consider lawyering up, which is odd because I would expect the Devil to be pretty familiar with lots of lawyers. It’s fiction of course.)
It would be great to use AI to do something analogous with these spy TVs. I would be very interested in stripping the “smart” crap out of my TV to turn it into a kiosk.
If only. The EFF has been harping about this for literally decades. The DMCA in the US and similar anti-circumvention laws around the world (primarily EU) make doing that a serious crime, with punishments well beyond any conceivable impact to society at large.
I’m surprised this level of surveillance from a smart TV (if this is real; right now the only sources are social media) doesn’t open up Samsung to a lawsuit.
To wit: There was a lawsuit where Susan Clements-Jeffrey sued Absolute Software (Lojack) for a stolen laptop she acquired; Lojack used surveillance to track down the stolen laptop and Susan successfully sued for invasion of privacy (Lojack settled instead of trying to fight it).
A couple of days ago I set up a samsung smart, ai, yadda yadda tv for a family member whose technical expertise boils down to "I unplug the computer to turn it off".
It refused to let me set it up for cable without granting it internet access (as in the bundled remote control didn't work):
First I ended up on a bunch of websites that hallucinated non-existent physical buttons on the tv
I then tried to scan scan the modal qr code which didn't work because the phone I used didn't have google play services.
I had to get another samsung phone (which immediately picked the tv up and asked me if I want to set it up without scanning any code) and after I agreed to share the data with some 450 partners, I got an error saying "setup did not complete, please try again"
Though at that point the builtin remote started working beyond on/off and mute and I was able to finish setup that way.
In the end, I can't even change the wifi password because the phone will share it over bluetooth with the fucking spybox.
Fuck samsung. You were shit in the galaxy S1 days, you're even worse now.
I've never once signed a contract for a TV. They're routinely set up a single member of the household. They're the single most plausible place for "maybe my kid / guest / cat hit OK on the remote".
Very different from a single-player video game, or a website with a login form.
If OpenAI really banned him for that reason, that would be pretty stupid. If you can no longer use an LLM for reverse engineering without worrying about your account, that drastically reduces its value.
In my efforts to reverse engineer the LG firmware to validate Gamers Nexus claims, I got a warning very quickly.
I appealed that quickly and successfully.
Then I applied for daybreak blue and haven’t had any issues since.
It also a matter of phrasing. Say what you want to achieve not how if it is approaching defensive or cyber stuff.
Also state you are working on your own devices and software. (If that is the case of course.)
Yes a personal subscription. Individuals can also request it. only blue for defensive questions. Red for offensive is gated to organisations that are proven to be using it for protecting.
FWIW I've spent the past few days happily reverse-engineering various aspects of DOS games I've long been curious about. I finally understand how Arjan Brussee did the scrolling in Jazz Jackrabbit. It's brilliant. This guy is a genius.
It's somewhat complex to understand; I didn't understand Claude's textual explanation at first. After asking for a html/js simulator showing things visually it clicked.
Claude doesn’t push back if it thinks the thing you’re doing is old. OAI will sometimes start barking at you if it thinks you’re making a keygen even if it’s 25 years old.
Three regions that move as you scroll in x/y: current/next/clean.
The key is that when you scroll a column or a line, that column/line is written in all three regions.
The clean region is used both as a source for filling the dirty places where sprites have been written as well as the next current or next after a wrap.
> ...for a niche of customers, from whom the revenue is probably entirely negligible to OpenAI.
> Not saying it's right, ethical or anything like that, but it's not "stupid"
Quite many well-paying customers become very suspicious of whether integrating OpenAI into their workflows if they read about cases where OpenAI banned accounts willfully.
If OpenAI wants to become "infrastructure provider other companies should depend on (and thus pay)", OpenAI must behave like an infrastructure provider as for electricity or internet, i.e. must only ban accounts in exceptionally rare cases that 99.9 % of society will consider to be acceptable.
"Why you bother about local AI? LOL with the $ you spend for <insert hardware here> you can buy 5 years of 20x account". Yeah. 5 years where you are told what you can do.
It’s quite something when western companies act more like authoritarian governments than actual authoritarian governments. I just wish RAM was less expensive ;(
My guess is we're within a year of the first governments banning local LLM AI at any scale. Declare GPU's as munitions that must be registered and ban any card with more than X GB of RAM and more power than a 3060 or something like that.
That could be done with an executive order in the US, and it probably wouldn't take much to get it to pass congress.
Now, don't worry, businesses can still buy a lot more GPU compute than that, but they have to register and track their usage just like any other company making/buying weapons.
You only need to ban compute on a scale that can actually compete with frontier models, which is currently something like a $500,000 investment.
"Must declare any purchase of 10 or more GPUs" does not strike me as particularly implausible.
There's already plenty of jurisdictions where possession of certain tools is considered evidence of criminal intent.
I don't think any of this is good behavior on the part of our legal system, but I do not doubt the legal system's ability to regulate this if it so chooses - and Anthropic has already gotten slapped down by the Trump administration once before.
I use local abliterated models + paid for subs like OAI or A\ and avoid touching anything that would hit their TOS + anonymously paid for Chinese pay as you go for things in between those two.
an aside. I'm visiting my wife's parents and they have a new samsung TV. the remote doesn't even have an input selection button on it anymore. the default state of the tv pushes you to a big complicated home screen covered in ads and always pushing you towards their streaming live TV.
they like most poeople have a cable box plugged in, but every time the tv is switched off, the default behaviour of the tv is to forget what input it was on and goes back to the home screen where you have to use a convoluted set of button presses to get back to a non-samsung, non-app device.
You can switch this off somewhere in the settings, something they would never figure out on their own, so that it re-opens on the last selected input. I did this in the past, but then it seems an OS update wiped out all the settings, including the one that makes their cable remote work with the TV.
there is now no doubt that the TV is made to function primarily as an ad-delivery machine with explicit dark patterns built in for the task. I did them one more favour and reset their ad id and unchecked all the consent boxes on the privacy terms pages
going forward anyone who cares about their choice and privacy should not allow their TV to connect to a network at all and simply use it as a dumb link to their devices of choice, or ideally, find a better company to buy from, if that exists.
My CPAP machine has a modem in it that transmits data without ever being connected to my network. I can see a future where Samsung decides to do something similar. Perhaps even contracts with Starlink so they can transmit even larger chunks of real-time data. It makes me sick to think about that possibility, but I don't think it's far-fetched.
I doubt any TV company will ever do this, for two reasons. The first is simply that it would be obvious due to FCC filings. The second is that 99% of their customers hook their TV up to the internet so they can use streaming apps on their TV. They're very unlikely to eat the cost of putting a cellular model in every TV, take the PR hit for doing so, simply to capture the ACR data of the 1% of their customer base that is most likely to figure out another way to disable it.
Whereas your CPAP machine is likely a high margin device and the reason it has that modem is because insurance companies require compliance data in order to continue providing coverage for replacement supplies. Resmed or whoever is happy to bundle in the cost of the modem + service in order to keep selling high margin supplies.
Starlink? So I guess the TV cannot be used to harm Russian citizens :>
In that case we find where the antennas are and sabotage them. Aluminium foil around your TV (it can just be covered in for example plastic or black paper), or in/around walls.
> the default state of the tv pushes you to a big complicated home screen covered in ads and always pushing you towards their streaming live TV.
Audible does this now too. Instead of opening up to your library and your books on default it opens to an obnoxious home screen that promotes Prince Harry and Kara Swisher's books. It's so annoying. I'm not in the market for Prince Harry's book and I will never be in the market for Prince Harry's book, stop shoving his face at me all the time. I wish we could block certain authors and books from showing up in our ads constantly but there is no way to do it!
The real galling thing that my newest samsung tv started doing on the last update is that it doesn't even start out on the "Media" tab of the home screen. The number one thing I want to do with my TV is now an afterthought. It's left-down-down, click before I even get to do TV stuff with my TV (and of course, after that, I have to wade through the samsung shovelware in order to get to the 2 streaming things I actually use). I saw an "alternate home screen for your samsung tv" project on here a couple days ago and I'm definitely going to check it out when I have an afternoon to curse at samsung.
The part that is really interesting to me is that they seem to be desperately trying to get me comfortable with some kind of "It's not TV, it's Samsung TV" attitude, when what they're actually accomplishing is convincing me that TV just sucks now and it makes me loathe Samsung. It's as if they hired a guy to sit next to me on the couch and every once in a while, he pokes me with a sharp stick and yells "SAMSUNG!"
> if your samsung TV model doesnt have a microphone, it will look for connected devices with one, such as a soundbar or a connected bluetooth device. this gets shipped off to bixby.
Maybe it's time for something like that, a shared baseline standard of "this thing won't spy on you", with massive financial penalties for companies caught lying about it. Prime adoption by making it a requirement for anything bought by the government.
Then consumers can reliably comparison-shop for a "TV" that doesn't turn into a traitorous 1984 telescreen the moment it breaks out of the LAN or you fail to click "maybe later" on its incessant dark pattern pop-ups.
That's a nice certification program. I'm glad that it exists and that there's a list of products that comply with it. I've saved it for later perusal.
But it reaches a wee bit further than I actually care about for something like a television:
> All the product software must be free software. The product software includes all software that the seller includes in the product, provides with the product, recommends for use in conjunction with the product, and steers users towards installation in the product.
I don't feel apologetic at all when I say that open-source just isn't very important to me at all when selecting a television. I do not care whether it is open or closed. I just don't want it to spy on me.
Being open does make it more inspectable for spyware, for sure, but as a realistic concept: I'm not going to be inspecting it myself, anyway. A third-party inspection or audit would be fine for me, and that kind of thing can happen without the source being available to me, myself.
The required open-source push seems kind of egalitarian.
I don't need the source code for wireless devices to understand that they've passed FCC certification testing. I don't need the schematics and code for my AV receiver to understand that the UL logo on the back of it means that it has been tested to show that it won't burn my house down or give me an electric shock.
I don't want to be a product certification testing lab when I grow up.
I skimmed through the list. It is a couple of brands, none of it is recent hardware. Talos II (super expensive IBM Power workstation), TPE (not to be confused with TP-Link) networking stuff (old standards, like 1 gbit, 802.11n), some rebranded IBM/Lenovo X200, some old USB peripherals. There's nothing worthwhile on this list. No monitors or TVs (the topic at hand!). No keyboards (even though there is FOSS firmware for keyboards), except for I suppose X200. Not even Stallman's old MIPS laptop (Lemote Yeeloong) is on the list.
Linking this list is like saying you can live in a world without war in some remote cave where you have to eat mushrooms growing in it. Cool that exists (or not); but it isn't relevant. There's nothing worthwhile in the cave. No treasure trove.
This is the answer. Lots of people (myself included) are happy to buy a big, cheap TV, but it's cheap because the manufacturer gets money by paid app placement, ads (sometimes), and selling information about you.
A senior friend has bad vision, so I recommended an inexpensive but enormous TV that they can use as a display, and never let it connect to the network. Unfortunately, every few months the display tries to coax them into connecting to WiFi, and it confuses the heck out of them. But, that's the game.
People still bought TV's when they were comparatively more expensive (hell we rented them here in the UK). I don't buy this line that "oh if you want a cheap TV...". No, it's an underhand tactic to try and justify adtech's creepy outreach.
it definitely started that way, like with radio before it. early programs were directly paid for by advertisers and the adds were right in the middle of the show presented by the hosts! (kinda like how yt does it now sometimes but even more so)
its literally why we call the whole genre of soap operas that. they would all be sponsored by soap and cleaning product companies trying to reach stay at home moms as their target market for the ads.
ads were along for so much of the history of tv... its easy to forget because recently netflix made it seem like we could just directly pay for content as just entertainment (like movies always were).
but those days are gone and we are returning to the roots. i dont think a single streamer doesnt have an ad tier and we are starting to lose the ad free pay more options too (disney, amazon)
That it was ok in the past certainly doesn't mean it's ok now. And TV advertising wasn't as sinister as it is now with targeted ads that require a detailed profile of every viewer. Everyone just got the same ads.
If blocking ads won't be possible anymore then I'll just pirate everything. And jailbreaking TVs and other hardware.
ya agree, a targeted ad is a very different beast, its not so much the targeting thats the issue either. id much rather only see ads for stuff in interested in than stuff i really dont need. its HOW they come up with that targeting. scraping stealing tracking all the other bs that makes that targeted ad feel creepy and gross.
and if you think its not gonna get so much worse with ai able to generate 10x the ad variants... or maybe even personalized ad versions.(one day, probably too expensive now)
good thing its never been easier to hack everything, maybe we can also figure out how to hack the legal system enough to make shady stuff like recording you in your house a felony. i feel like we should start with making it so that terms in a eula cant bind you to take specific actions. inal but in the case of 2p consent states if you go to your friends house and he doesnt tell you that his tv's eula said that it'll be recording all the time then he's in trouble, but the company actually doing the recording.. scott free because they said in the eula it was the responsibility of the owner to tell everyone who comes near the tv it might be recording. ...why would you ever click that agreement that you were forced to click to use the thing that you already bought and setup, what is the actual recourse for not saying yes? go return the tv and pay the restock fee? idk that doesnt sound like a reasonable contract/agreement that should ever be enforcable. which would mean its actually the tv companies doing all the wiretapping in 2p states...
hmm.. i know im wrong in many ways but i can dream that the law could be actually reasonable.
This is the point everyone misses. It's not just that they are subsidizing the price of the TV. Whenever there is an opportunity to extract more profit, eventually they will do it. The rich are not immune from being targeted by this but they sure like to think that they are when they support this behavior in the companies they control.
I read of this tactic a few years ago. Some mentioned adding a phony static IP/gateway/DNS to avoid it connecting to open wifi(should this tech permit it).
True, but they're MUCH more expensive. For example, the lowest-end 43" this company sells for a little over $2000; you can find ones on Amazon for a tenth the price. Yes, a lot of that is the industrial quality, but some of it is the spy/adware subsidization.
There really wasn't a lot of new information in the Gamer's Nexus video. Most of what people think is new is people conflating what is possible vs what LG does and people conflating what is possible on a rooted TV vs what LG does. The whole video is very long and because it's so poorly organized and deceptively presented, it looks like LG is worse than everyone else. Rally they're just doing what we've known for a while that all TV manufacturers are doing.
> Rally they're just doing what we've known for a while [...]
s/we/I
Not 'we' or 'everyone' knew this. The write-up proving such, and a content creator summing it up (if done poorly and you can do better; time to compete?) was worthwhile for a significant amount of people.
> [...] that all TV manufacturers are doing.
Ah, everyone is doing immoral things. Then it is OK. Somehow?!
Some of us remember a past where this wasn't OK. Where not everyone was doing this. I still got a TV from that time.
Tell you the truth, I don't want to even pay the electricity this malware would require to function.
> ...it looks like LG is worse than everyone else.
IIRC, it's mentioned at at least one point in the first big video on the topic that they haven't tested other manufacturers "'Smart' TVs" but would not be surprised to discover that other manufacturers are doing the same thing. They're not a news organization owned by one of the 0.1%, so they can only do investigation and reporting so quickly.
> There really wasn't a lot of new information in the Gamer's Nexus video.
I'm not sure which video you're talking about.
If you were expecting the recent one that talks about the lulzy ASUS RCE and how it could interact with "'Smart' TVs" to have even more information about "TV" vulnerabilities or consumer-hostile features, then your expectations are out of line.
If you're asserting that you knew nearly everything in the initial "Wow, these LG 'Smart' 'TVs' can really easily become always-on spy devices, and -in some respects- already are!" video, well, okay? There are those of us who know that shady shit is going on because we have ten brain cells to rub together, a moderate level of awareness of the world around us, and can pretty easily connect the dots. It's an entirely different thing to demonstrate that that is going on for the benefit of people who are -for some reason- reluctant to believe that -yes- Big Megacorps do heinous things to their customers in order to make a bit more money because they don't expect to get caught... and even if they get caught, the punishment will only be a tiny fraction of the profit gotten from doing those things. [0]
[0] The biggest irony here is that objections to claims that this is how Big Megacorps typically do business with us Little People are often dismissed as "4D chess" or "conspiracy theories"... but, like, this behavior is a textbook example of a rational economic actor responding reasonably to market incentives. This is the "Invisible Hand Of The Market" at work.
They could have started with actually decrypting what was sent rather than a breathless 2 hours of monetised nonsense. Show me the http posts with the data that's actually sent.
Cool... Would it be possible to poison all that nice telemetry with perfectly good information, live from Hogwarts or from some other interesting place? The Village from the series "The Prisoner" might also be a good place to send telemetry from.
There was just a post yesterday about how to root your samsung. I rooted my samsung and removed ads, mics, and my agent is looking into this one as we speak [codex].
I haven't looked into TCL at all, but everything I know on this topic I learned in one day, so if you have even a $20 a month AI subscription and you're passionate I'd say give it a go.
I keep seeing this, and I still think it's a ridiculous ask. Whether you like it or not, the vast majority is not savvy enough to think about this, and they generally just want Netflix to work without an additional service. For a majority of people 600 is expensive, and they don't want to have to spend another 30-100 depending on the device.
The monthly cost of a sim card is pretty high relative to the actual value of targeting ads to the user, especially when most of their customer base is already connecting it to wifi. Sidewalk requires a very cheap module - the EBYTE E220-900M22S is under $3 and and the Wio-SX1262 is $4, compared to cellular connections which - last time I checked - were $5/mo per device, depending on data requirements. Maybe 5G has changed that. I guess a MFG could also only renew a SMS contract for IMEIs where the underlying device hasn't been connected to the internet via wifi.
Do a search on X on the topic, the news about Samsung was broken on there by a guy who had rooted his Samsung TV using AI tools and he and others created guides for neutering the stuff out of it
Market gets flooded with these devices. Someone notices they are cheap, opens a Reddit thread about what is going on. Google Search picks it up. Now people who search for this TV (new or used) see a hit about malware in this TV. Buyers need to perform due diligence. However, in EU, sellers need to inform buyers of obvious negative sides of a product. Malware appears to be one of them.
That's why we fight together as best we can. Syndicate. Spread awareness. Do whatever you are able, and damnit, we both know it's more than nothing. If not for yourself, then do it for those you care about most.
i wonder if the Samsung / LG stuff is how the stock market seemed so "predictable" to some people in early morning trading for a while... imagine having the keys to buckets containing all the plaintext gathered from all the tvs listening in conference rooms on earnings days...
> confirmation bias, eg. "facebook is secretly listening to you"
Agreeing with your general point - don't jump to conclusions without evidence - but I don't like it if we're now establishing the "Facebook/Google/Apple/etc is secretly listening to you" rumors as the canonical example of that behavior, and thereby exempting companies from further scrutiny in this.
We've seen that by now there exists both the will and the technical means to pull off stuff like this. So even if it used to be a baseless rumor and urban legend, it deserves to be re-checked periodically, because companies might start to do it for real at some point. Samsung here actually did.
(Google also comes awfully close with its "song detector" which is now a stock Android feature I think)
The thing about the facebook is listening to you rumors is that the reality is so much worse than them actually surreptitiously listening to you. Their knowing who you're interacting with and what you're likely to talk about is more alarming. Dismissing facebook listening to your conversations is shortsighted in a way I find fairly repulsive.
So... Wiretapping is pretty clear violation. And it's punished severely in most jurisdictions (eg: OpenAI engineer installing wiretaps).
So, this is wiretapping at a mass scale. Just how many crimes do the executive class occur before they get turned into the past-tense... The executed class?
I am for a corporate death penalty. Companies that engage in such mass criminal activities do not deserve to exist.
Executive class? I expect there was at least one engineer involved that should be facing millions of counts of wiretapping, so a few million years in prison.
There's plenty good reasons to have microphones in products. The simple obvious one is voice control. Legality and illegality all depends how it's used and controlled. And the company is controlling this remotely.
And your rank and file engineer or software dev is going to have low/no understanding of the subterfuge and illegality that the Executive class puts together as a final product. The features are possible, but the labor only knows their pieces. Executives are the ones selling illegally gotten data to "their 500 sponsors".
Don't excuse your peers' actions. Engineers are smart people. They know what they're doing. And C levels aren't putting anything together as a product. They are giving direction and paying others (engineers) to do that.
Everyone involved is to blame (including management), but it is an engineer somewhere that actually makes these things. Devices don't magically start spying because a business person makes a deal. The data doesn't magically end up in the hands of their 500 partners. There are large datastores to scale and integrations that require work to build.
And even if they're never held accountable (I expect they won't be), you should at least be acknowledging that they have no ethics and shunning them, not defending them for actually being the ones that built surveillance hellworld.
First, no single engineer that will completely implement this "spying feature". A hardware engineer knows how to put the mic inside the TV, the FW engineer knows how to write driver for application to get mic data, the application knows how use the pre-trained ML blob to process the data and send the result to Cloud. At that level, no one really knows what happening any more.
Can they make educated guess what is happening? yes, but still, it's just a guess.
There would be "alignment meeting" accross the various team, but trust me, they would never use the word "spying" in any slides.
It makes plenty of sense: they made the devices spy. They collected and stored the data. They built everything. It's like saying it doesn't make sense to go after the gangster shaking down store owners. Yes it does. You go after the boss for ordering it and the person who actually did the bad thing for doing it.
Again, you sound like a C level, with throwing everyone not an executive under the bus.
Executives can make the actual illegal and horrible plan, and divy up the work in pieces, so that labor is not aware of exactly what they're constructing. Executives have the complete picture. Its their idea. They know what's going on.
The microphone? It could be a voice interaction tool.
The spyware? Thats logging and monitoring of bugs for patches.
Automated image recognition? Again, more sketchy, but legal, and used to optimize those avenues of usage.
Its only the pieces used *in illegal ways* as ordered by executives that are the problem. If you're not a C level yourself, not sure why you're simping for them.
And the Samsung violating criminal statutes with wiretapping laws is the problem. I would rather blame the company, C levels first. 50 million years (5 years per, 10 million devices sold) of jailtime should be sufficient with dissolution and disbursement to all affected buyers of hardware. And, jailing of the C levels. But instead, you want to go after the electronic engineer who designed a PCB with a microphone. Yeah, im sure *he or she* had plans on creating spy devices across the world.
I think you'll find that I'm the only one in this thread that's not excusing anyone. There is no "instead." They all deserve 50 million years of prison. They all know what they're doing.
Maybe not the engineer who designed a microphone, but certainly the ones who integrated it into the spying platform. The TV doesn't accidentally send that data back. The data doesn't accidentally store itself, and it doesn't accidentally send itself to partners or feed into an ad model. The CEO is also probably not personally working the sales funnel. There's an entire line of people who all knew exactly what was happening.
1) Those who gave the order (position of power). Often a chain of command.
2) Those who planned it (usually the same or merged with group #1).
3) Those who implement the plan. The engineer, the soldier, the distributor (all down to the line of the logistics driver who delivered the evil TV), etc.
For some strange reason group #1 is called executives. They do not execute much though; they order others to, but execute sounds like they work hard, I guess. Those are indeed the most liable, and we must explain the why. Think Hitler, Himmler, Stalin, Mielke, etc. Lower down the line you get the Einsatzgruppe commanders.
The soldier who executed Jews (among other minority groups, mind you) with a gun is liable, but part of a power structure. If he refuses, he can and will get in trouble. Mass murder generates trauma, so it is executed by pawns or pawns of lieutenants. NKVD solved this by using others to execute.
Ergo: the higher up the chain, the more liable these people were as they had more power to say no.
That someone else would say yes is a red herring excuse. An engineer is in a position of power. They're an educated specialist in their field, they get paid for their job (not forced to implement in West), can say no. They can even blow the whistle. If those in power cannot find a fool to do their errands, they must do it themselves (and they cannot as no expertise), or lay down the idea.
The gas used to gas people in concentration camps didnt magically end up there. They weren't lied to that they'd get a shower by people who didn't knew what would happen. They knew or could've known, but they chose not to act.
(I'm using older examples of genocide as they are established and well documented; I am aware of more recent examples, but 1) this hasn't been solved legally, 2) I leave that comparison as an exercise to the reader.)
I love this mental gymnastics. C levels are payd millions for "the burden of responsibility", but somehow medium wage guy somewhere in Korea is responsible.
And when you're "wrong in isolation of the task to complete" is completely legal, you still want to destroy engineers and developers. That engineer doesnt know your illegal shit plan to do horrible thing. Most engineers, if told to do illegal stuff, would refuse.
That C level DOES know the illegal plan to do horrible thing, and their staff attorneys said you could make $20 billion, and pay $1 billion in fines if caught. I say RICO the fucking C levels for an ongoing criminal conspiracy, and depending how severe, death penalty.
And remember, we're talking about Samsung violating wiretapping laws, which is a criminal crime, and not some tort. I want blood here from management who ordered this, not a few dollars on a godsdamned voucher to buy yet another Scamsung device.
But no, your idea is to blame the rank and file folks who have maybe 5% of the plan, and legal at that, and blame them. Nah, you sound like a simp.
My idea, as I've repeated multiple times, is to blame everyone, and yes, I think they should all be criminally liable. You're the one who seems to think only business people can do wrong, and are perfectly willing to go to bat for the people who actually design and build these systems.
We're not limited to a bounded amount of blame to divvy out. We can blame the mob boss and the hitmen.
Ah yes, those completely blameless engineers who had no idea that the code they were writing to speak to third-party devices to record and upload voice would be used for uncouth purposes.
The rank-and-file do follow marching orders, but let us not pretend they are all innocent sheep who could not envision the true intentions of the design. "I just thought it would be a neat thing if all sounds in a room were recorded and uploaded to Samsung servers without bothering the end user!"
I'll probably get a kiosk panel next time. But this time, yeah, I've just not configured the network. All content comes from the console. Which is a different bundle of problems and no better in a lot of ways, but it's more of a known quantity.
That saves you from some potential issues but not others. My google search magic isn't working, but there was some manufacture a number of years ago who's TVs were crashing because they'd save up massive amounts of data to upload and either exhaust all their memory or fill up the disk because it never connected online.
Also, if you live in a household you have to make sure every other person behind that TV doesn't connect it to the net at some point for some reason.
How many open WiFi networks are around you? I live in a city and there are 0 within range. ISP routers have defaulted to password protection for more than a decade. The only places with open WiFi are places of business that provide guest work. Even those are far less common and usually password protected these days.
I've seen this "yeah well they'll just connect to open WiFI" for 10+ years at this point and have never seen any vaguely credible reproduction.
Best you get is "my friend's LG TV connected to the internet even after changing his WiFI password" vaguely recalled hearsay.
Or the second order retreat-to-motte argument of "well they'll add that to the firmware overnight when ad revenues drop if enough people stop connecting to the internet".
Underrated approach. Even if the screens are a tad more expensive by today's subsidized standards. There are also many FHD and 4k non-smart TVs on the second hand market, with many given away for free on your preferred marketplace website.
It's beyond me why people are still buying smart TVs.
I've juist looked on a large EU webshop (bol.com).
You can buy a non-smart, full-HD, 40 inch TV for less than $200.
Why in this world of yours is the only option Android TV?
Even with that, there are plenty of safer distros, or you can even get a cheap mini pc and throw one of the many awesome Linux distros on that have zero tracking and are far more capable/performant.
>All the popular streaming services throttle or block open devices.
This just isn't true. Have never encountered this.
Its effectively impossible to get some streaming services to stream content >720p to a linux device. I know I tried several years ago to use Disney+ and could not find any way to get 1080p content, even on a windows machine. I think now they have an official windows store app, but still refuse to stream full HD or 4k content to a web browser.
More recently I've tried hbo max and it does the same thing. Could not get higher than 720p, even with chrome and whatever DRM options theoretically fix the problem.
A lot of rooms are space constrained, but yes, even the cheapest phones are 1080p and most have been for a decade. It's ridiculous how far larger screens have been lagging behind.
All the ad tracking in smart TVs has driven prices down. Tracking and ad data has turned a customer from a one time purchaser to a revenue stream for as long as the device is in use.
If you want a high quality TV for the best price your best bet is either disable/opt out of all the tracking data, or even better just never hook it up to the internet at all and plug an AppleTV or Chromecast on it.
If you look for a Samsung TV without “smart” features you pretty much have to find them under “commercial displays” and you’ll pay a premium for it.
I don’t find a non-smart 4K television on Bol, except for a single 800€ model. Sorry but it’s not 2016, I’m not gonna sit and watch content at a resolution worse than my laptop’s.
People were up in arms (and rightly so) when the LG TVs were found out for their spying thanks to the Gamers Nexus investigation. At least LG TVs can be rooted and you can install apps like Glasshouse [0] to disable all the telemetry and add substantial new features that you can't do via the officially sanctioned Dev Mode. The vulnerability that enabled rooting was recently patched so hopefully another can be found.
Hopefully similar apps will come along for Samsung now that root on it can be achieved [1].
vocal people on the Internet are "up in arms" but does the general public care that some LG exec says they "own the glass"? I think that at best, they might care until they see the ad-subsidized price tags.
To what extend do these "smart" products state how, when and what data they are collecting and selling?
Isn't it high time for legislation that at least makes it clear on the box what kind of sensors and integrations it has and how bad the product is privacy wise?
Also, shouldn't corporate spying disguised as automated content recognition and classification be limited or outright be banned?
And all this connected garbage should by law be able to function with the cord cut and without registration, and if an update negatively changes the advertised product characteristics the customer must be allowed to return it for full paid price even if it is 10 years old. Force the manufactures to make statements on the "box" about the features, the support duration and level, and the privacy characteristics.
Because there have not yet been any high profile cases involving the collected data used to embarrass or convict a politician. It just takes one embarrassed congress critter to get a giant red sticker on all these devices, their boxes and ads: "This Device Transcribes and Reports Your Conversations" and that is before including those that upload camera screenshots of what you are watching and video of the viewers doing something untoward.
This is literally the history of the Video Privacy Protection Act (1988, back when video rental was a thing). It was passed immediately after, in 1987, a journalist obtained and published the video rental history of a supreme court judge nominee.
Because it is not the subject that will win them the next election.
And even if they care, some things are easier said than done. With politicians who care, you get things like GDPR, which goes in the right direction, but is a huge legal mess. And it is a mess because it can't be made simple.
Obviously, you have to take consumer interests into account, but you also have to take companies interest into account too, both big and small, otherwise they will just stop doing business, which is bad for the economy and will mean that consumers won't find what they want at a reasonable price. You have to think about the loopholes big companies will invariably find, and covering them will add complexity, but still make it so that small companies can comply without a full time team of lawyers assisting them.
For example, you say the consumer could return it for a full refund on a bad update, but to whom? Should the burden be put on the small retailer who sold it to you (and may be out of business)? There is already plenty of stuff the manufacturer must tell you, usually one a piece of paper no one reads, and the more you ask, the less people will read because there will be too much information. A "privacy score" may be a good idea, if well designed, it will share a place with the energy score, environment score, repairability score, safety signs, origin, etc... And how do you differentiate actual automated content recognition that consumers could want from spyware, formally, so that the first one is allowed but not the latter.
All that to say that it is not impossible, but even with politicians caring, it is complicated. European politicians care (because it can win them votes), the results are so complicated they are getting ridiculed by the rest of the world.
They don't care because of several reasons.
1. They get paid not to
2. They are told not to.
Alot of this spying ends up producing valuable data for different agencies to purchase which otherwise they cannot legally obtain without a warrant. Sure some of it has some commercial value, but a lot of it is probably more valuable for domestic spy operations.
Claude is happily reverse engineering for me, a recently sunsetted mobile game and an old PlayStation game. If it doesn’t moralize at you and refuse to do it, it’s easier to use the smarter model on the subsidized subscription. I’m doing as much as I can now before they start refusing.
Oh man, I wonder if there is some weird self-selection bias when it comes to HN audience. It is a little like my dad telling me repairing cars is easy: you only have to do x,y and z without considering that I don't have years of experience of doing just that.
But my point is imagine if the person that did that simple TD lite model pre-training did something less... ad-related in his life.
ML when connected to business applications is one of those things that sound complicated but is in practice just a few lines of code usually. I'd argue that anything frontend is way harder to code up than a pretrained TF lite model, despite the general idea being the opposite.
You are ignoring the point I am making so I will make it a little more explicit for the sake of ensuring that it is not just my inability to make my point across:
What is the societal opportunity cost of a person not doing $this_thing_you_mentioned and applying it to just about anything else.
You still need to learn enough to convince yourself you can do it, and then do it. A lot of people just shy away from this stuff because they think they'll never get it.
It’s mind boggling that in the UK there’s a law that says:
> “A plank of wood must not be carried along a pavement. It can only be moved if it is being unloaded from a vehicle or taken into a building.”
But big tech cannot be regulated at all.
We used to regulate any minor thing that was annoying enough, but a whole industry spying and prying on the whole population is fine.
I don't know that this is a discovery issue. It has been widely publicised that all your devices are spying on you for at least a decade now - hard proof was previously somewhat hard to come by, but a suitable regulatory agency could have gone digging at any point.
>It has been widely publicised that all your devices are spying on you for at least a decade now
This sort of equivocation, where any privacy invasion gets rounded off to "spying on you" doesn't help either. Clickbait headlines over android making 100 requests to google gets lumped together with more serious privacy violations like random SDKs selling your location data, causing a learned helplessness where people think "spying on you" is normal and can't be avoided.
> where people think "spying on you" is normal and can't be avoided
Normal people, yes, but this is exactly what tech regulators ought to be gunning for. Even post GDPR, we just don't seem to have enough bulldogs in enforcement...
Journalism is almost dead. And if where it’s not it’s more of a summary of what happened rather than deep investigations. But only a small percentage of the population care about deep investigations anyway.
The main issue is that the attention economy and social pressure are so hard to break. People keep using WhatsApp because it is convenient and everyone is there. There are no other reasons.
The major other reason is that it is free, and most people are money-constrained.
Personalized advertising is a progressive tax. Because the rich spend more and the poor spend less, Meta et al makes more money from the rich than it makes from the poor, while offering the same service to everybody else. As a result, we get the educated rich upper-middle class complaining about advertising, while everybody else is happy about not having to pay their long-distance charges any more.
Awareness and care is one thing. A unanimous action plan is another. Violation of privacy is not viewed through similar lens as say theft or other forms of crimes.
journalistic media resolve this by having independent editorials. There's of course still structural issues, especially if those media outlets are traded or seen as investment targets, but the general structure has worked for 50-60 years.
This is one of the problems with the neo-journalistic outlets and "citizen journalism". They don't have the staffing or discipline to run that sort of operation.
Actually it is. Around 2005 I was stopped by police at 2am in Hackney and told in no uncertain terms that it was illegal for me to be walking with a 2x4 in my hand
It was added as context for why someone might be carrying a wooden plank at 2 in the morning and why police might be concerned. It is my understanding that Hackney has changed dramatically in the intervening years
Yeah, today you would stopped and frisked, detained, photographed, fingerprinted, interrogated, and finally jailed… for speaking out against the asshats who the think this is a good law.
Big tech isn't being regulated? There's increasingly privacy related laws, both in the US and abroad, that directly affect them. How many times a year do we read about Big Tech being issued 9-10 figure fines? One could state that they're not regulated enough, but to say they're unregulated is just false.
> We used to regulate any minor thing that was annoying enough
Your example is a good reason why that approach was foolish.
Regulation is only as good as enforcement of it is. And it seems 9-10 figure fines are still in the realm of 'we'll deal with the fallout later'.
So no, it's not literally unregulated, but if it was regulated effectively Samsung would be scared shitless to pull stuff like this. They clearly aren't.
Is that a thing? I ask because I and my best friend have vivid memories of my step dad, who used to be a postman, cycling home from town with 4 - 5m timbers under one arm. This would have been late 80s/early 90s. He’d call out and wave to people he knew with his “free” hand as he passed as well.
If even moving a plank of wood is illegal I can’t imagine how he got away with that, unmolested by plod, for so many years.
It's heavily paraphrased, but close enough I'd say.
> Every person who shall roll or carry any cask, tub, hoop, or wheel, or any ladder, plank, pole, showboard, or placard, upon any footway, except for the purpose of loading or unloading any cart or carriage, or of crossing the footway:
People carrying planks of wood on the sidewalk is obvious to everyone and clear inconvenience. What tech companies do in software is not, and has no physical immediately tangible effect on the world. These things should be regulated, but they're so opaque and disconnected from the eventual negative externalities that it's hard to get legislators to see it.
If a human cannot immediately see a negative outcome on their visual or mental horizon based on the knowledge they have at that moment most of their insights or feelings about what problems will occur will be incorrect.
Talking about AI and data is a good example of this. A bit of data here and there seems useless, but the moment you get enough the pattern of your life can emerge from it and suddenly you can be tracked and manipulated with an amazingly high probability. And it's not a one time thing either. Anything mispredicted gets put back in your profile as another data point.
If your building or other construction is unsafe for the public, the local authority has the right to make it safe, if necessary by demolishing it; if you are insufficiently responsive to a notice that you must make it safe. Maybe tech companies need that kind of incentive before they will care enough not to subject their customers to this kind of abuse.
In the interests of accuracy, the law (the Metropolitan Police Act 1839) actually states
"""
54 Prohibition of nuisances by persons in the thoroughfares.
Every person shall be liable to a penalty not more than level 2 on the standard scale, who, within the limits of the metropolitan police district, shall in any thoroughfare or public place, commit any of the following offences; (that is to say,)
...
8. Every person who shall roll or carry any cask, tub, hoop, or wheel, or any ladder, plank, pole, showboard, or placard, upon any footway, except for the purpose of loading or unloading any cart or carriage, or of crossing the footway:
The plank of wood is one element in a much broader statute, rather than an example of hyper-specificity. And it might have been strictly applied at the time, but that doesn't mean you're definitely going to get into trouble nowadays.
In a similar vein, the UK *does* have laws that affect big tech. UK GDPR places requirements on processing of personal data:
Whether that's properly enforced is (as with the plank) a completely different matter.
In the UK, at least, we don't need new regulations, we need to more effectively apply the regulations we already have in place. But there is also a balance to be made between enforcement through fines and enforcement through changing behaviour: it's much better to work with companies to bring them into compliance than it is to just fine them and without actually changing anything.
> within the limits of the metropolitan police district
It's a local London law. In England such laws are passed by parliament because there is no other mechanism, but in countries with devolved lawmaking states and cities have much crazier laws.
> There is a counter incentive, the money the companies pay the politicians.
That's disingenuous. The public has been told a beautiful fairy tale about technology for years. There are huge outcries every single time any politician tries to regulate big tech.
Now I know that this isn't because the public is somehow ideologically opposed to regulation. We have been paid off, just as much as the politicians have. When they increase the prices of televisions and say it's because they this new regulation, we show up to support them.
> The public has been told a beautiful fairy tale about technology
He typed, from a tiny device in his hand, from a bed in an air-conditioned apartment millions of miles away. Or perhaps from a jet sailing through the sky, via a satellite in space
The fairy tale is not about the capability of technologies. That part is wonderful. The fairy tale is the techno-optimist "democratization" nonsense. I can recommend reading "Cyberlibertarianism" by David Golumbia if that distinction doesn't make sense to you.
It is not plausible that a company would raise prices as some kind of revenge or play to overturn a regulation. That is not how prices are set in a free market because any company that did that would immediately lose to their competition. Unless we have a cartel of television manufacturers, which would be news to me.
We see see two failure modes in the US, and I assume they are universal. On the small scale, enforcers don't enforce, because of resource constraints, and higher up the food chain, the enforcers are the ones breaking the law.
People understand what a plank of wood is and how it works.
People, including the vast majority of politicians, don’t understand our technology at all. It’s magic. Why does a light come on when they flip the switch? Magic. Computers are deep black magic.
How can they write effective regulation? Or tell the difference between proposals that are good or bad written by others?
If politicians regulated big tech more we’d probably end up with a ton of regulatory capture that legislated monopolies for big tech and shut out open source and startups, because who has the money to influence the ignorant lawmakers at scale?
We are now in a world where small groups of high priests understand certain things, and few others. We’ve been there for a while but it’s gotten far more opaque in the last 25 years or so.
Even something like a nuclear reactor or an aircraft is much easier to explain. The last episode of the Chernobyl series did a great job explaining what was wrong with that reactor design to a layperson. But computing… and networks… people who do understand it have forgotten just how ludicrously arcane and inscrutable it is to most.
A big difference too is that by the Church-Turing theorem there is (as a side effect of it) a provably infinite number of ways to perform any computation. Which means you can’t just legislate “don’t do that.” Physical machines are not like that.
We used to solve this problem by embedding experts in government bodies.
We can't do that any more; the people who support tech regulation are so cartoonishly anti-corporate that any suggestion of embedding somebody who understands tech will be met with accusations of lobbying and a careful review of that person's employment history.
It's obvious to pretty much everybody that regulating banks, railroads or phone companies requires people who have previously worked for banks, railroads and phone companies, and have a good understanding of how such organizations work on the inside. We, generally, don't do that with tech.
The point of having advisors was supposed to be that they would help the elected person make up for lack of knowledge, but it doesn't seem like that pans out in reality. Either the advisors are just as lost, or they are largely ignored.
The need for good advisors is a major point in Sun-Tzu's Art of War.
Surround yourself with good advisors and the surrounding kingdoms will notice and be less inclined to attack. If you have bad advisors, your enemies will perceive that as their opening
The problem with regulating big tech is the unplacable internet. Who can regulate the internet? Who gets to make rules for the global network?
Politicians are keenly aware that regulation has to be administered, and administration costs money. The internet subsists on low overhead, and per jurisdiction administration would significantly change almost everything about the current internet. The public wont allow that.
If the public actually starts demanding regulation, we will see a fracturing of the internet into national networks. It will become impossible (or at least uneconomical) to run reddit, youtube, or facebook as global networks. They might continue to exists, but they will be sectioned off.
In that scheme, would regulation be based on where the servers are located? What's to stop me from routing American traffic to Armenia, where the laws don't exist? What's to stop me routing it to Russia, where the general legal principle is that illegality won't be pursued if it's no against Russian citizens?
The laws of the country would apply to the objects in that country. If you route traffic from America to Russia, the hosts/clients in America need to follow American laws and the hosts/clients in Russia need to follow Russian laws.
Dog bark and baby crying detection are advertised features for SmartThings integrations. Door bell and door knocking are also included, this is surfaced directly if you hook the TV or sound bar into SmartThings.
I had to check this and it's true. Not saying Samsung or 3rd parties don't take advantage of any data they can collect, but the story the tweets tell is super biased against them. Here, the detection seems limited to specific pattens required for a particular feature.
These folks recently did tests on major TV brands, not accepting the on-device consent forms, and then recording how much data they continued to send after consent was denied (which itself is not always possible). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_GK06_3UY8
Samsung was the single brand reviewed which actually stopped sending data after the user told it to do so.
In February Samsung agreed to stop collecting the data when opted out in the US after a few lawsuits were lining up. LG was the target of a different lawsuit in Texas which they settled and then wrote up a forced arbitration clause and doubled-down on data collection, even when opted out.
Oh don't worry, shitty WebOS is enough to put me off that (I unfortunately own one). However in this case we were talking specifically about that recent study of the effects of opt-outs, and for LG TVs the opt-out did result in the no longer detecting any tracking.
Still, calling it "PRIVACY HORROR" as per original post is typical twitter-style sensation seeking. It's an opt-in dog barking detection that causes local chip to listen for... dog barking
If they wanted to know if you had dogs or babies and wanted to spy on you, they'd just transcribe the audio. People that have dogs or babies talk about them. Going to the effort to detect these and advertise it as a feature so you can secretly use it for marketing doesn't make a lot of sense.
At this point everyone knows you have a cat, dog or baby. Facebook, Instagram can scan your photos and see it. Same with Google via Photos' latest privacy changes. Google also knows if you ever get receipts emailed to you. Your credit card company and bank know, the CC company resells that data too. Shit, Keurig knows because their smart coffee maker scans the network and sees your baby monitor or smart pet food dispenser. All these companies are rediscovering and selling the same basic facts about you and your household.
I will add: Use the TV as a HUB for all IOT, light sensor so you know when the light is on or someone passes in front of the TV and there are some others but I can't remember now. They are all advertised in the Smart Things app.
I hate 2 things about my samsung tv's (I have 4 only samsung): the simplistic remote and ads on home screen. Even with custom dns sometimes they get through.
Remember guys, if they are reading it for wrongthink, they are reading it for industrial espionage.
Anthropic and openAI just announced they’re spinning out competitors to their biggest customers… right after ingesting all of their IP and contracts. Do the math.
(Or don’t, because they’ve been caught stealing math research)
> Anthropic and openAI just announced they’re spinning out competitors to their biggest customers… right after ingesting all of their IP and contracts. Do the math.
Do you have any links to further reading on this. I haven't read anything like this and also couldn't find anything in their newsrooms. The only thing I read is that they want to have more people work on implementations.
I think it's just a logical conclusion if everyone keeps feeding OpenAI and Anthropic data. I don't think it's imminent, but if AI keeps improving and regulation is very lax I could see this world developing in 5-10 years.
Say OpenAI builds GPT-11 and they realize it can do 95% of their clients work. Why not hire away key people from the client or the client's competitors and start eating into their market share? OpenAI would realize if GPT-11 has this ability then Anthropic is probably able to do the same thing. The company that has the most money and credit available is going to be able to buy more compute. OpenAI and Anthropic cannot slow down unless mandated to by the government.
>Say OpenAI builds GPT-11 and they realize it can do 95% of their clients work. Why not hire away key people from the client or the client's competitors and start eating into their market share?
Can you give me an example where this would make sense, because I just don't see e.g. OpenAI starting a grocery store chain or Anthropic building a wind turbine manufacturing company.
What I can see is that some company's products become useless, e.g. translation tools, as it is something that you can just do within ChatGPT or Claude.
I am thinking a little further into the future where companies and people themselves become more dependent on AI. If LLMs disappeared today how many companies and people could not function? Probably not many. But, in 5 years how many companies will be dependent on AI? A future where companies are dependent on big AI labs to run their business could happen. I think the business term is forwards integration, where a seller moves into one of their buyer's markets.
Also, in such a future businesses would be reorganized to use AI. That probably means less employees and reduced human complexity. The business processes are further abstracted from people making it easier for a big AI lab to move in.
If I was looking at businesses today where the big AI labs could step in I would look for businesses where they earn high margins based on intellectually complex tasks. Maybe the most pure example would be trading in the stock market since it can be completely done by a computer. Then you have areas like law which process large amounts of data but are also heavily based on relationships.
For consulting they don't need to start a new company. If they eat part of that market it would be with their current products where someone uses AI instead of hiring a consulting company. So a similar approach to what happened with translation.
For sales I'm sorry, but I don't think sales companies exist? Sales is usually just a part of another company. Some of those employees might be made redundant as AI products complete part of their work, but that would also happen through OpenAI's or Anthropic's products.
So for both of those I don't see what kind of company they could spin off (excluding the example of a company that does AI implementations as I mentioned that one in my initial comment) that would compete with an existing company. For all of these things offering a product that allows existing companies to replace employees sounds like the more scalable, profitable and flexible strategy.
> because they’ve been caught stealing math research
No. They haven't been caught stealing. Tristan Buckmaster publicly expressed surprise that the OpenAI model has used the niche approach he pursued (with AI assistance). 10,000 agents exploring various approaches make it much less surprising.
Another anecdotal data from an arxiv preprint [0]: "After the paper was written, the author learned that the same result was also proved independently and by a different method by Ningyi Li [7]. The result is also contained in a paper [8] released by OpenAI on October 6, 2026, in which the proof strategy and specific choices of notation are identical to a preliminary version of the present paper that was uploaded to ChatGPT on September 8, 2026."
So not only did OpenAI publish a proof similar to one discussed on ChatGPT, but also there were other possible strategies to prove the result, that OpenAI didn't follow.
Also, up to my knowledge, on the free plan, OpenAI doesn't claim that they won't use the chat data for training. So this seems plausible.
The "coincidence" defense never works for random individuals so I won't buy it when it comes companies worth billions which will lie, cheat, and deceive to make even more billions. They've been caught lying and stealing again and again. After so many years of this I think any trust put in them is either blissful ignorance or willful misdirection.
Wait are you saying: 1) the simultaneous invention defense is never valid for individuals, and 2) you don’t base your beliefs on what’s right, but on some kind of tit-for-tat retaliation?
You’re asking a loaded question based on things that were never said. Very lowbrow.
One thing is how uniformly a rule is applied. Another thing is whether a rule is "right" to begin with. I addressed the first because it’s far more straightforward and objective. You did some mental gymnastics to name-drop the second without even the effort to say something about it. Weak strawman.
Another thing I addressed is the lack of trustworthiness of these companies. They lied to you again and again but they wouldn’t lie to you now, would they? You left that out completely, so maybe you even agree.
Next time if you want the courtesy of a reply, extend the courtesy of not bringing just low-effort strawman and loaded questions.
It's not a coincidence... they literally just span up agents on every possible variant of the problem.
There are 10k agents and Tristan's approach wasn't even groundbreaking novelty, it was literally based on existing published literature from Diego Córdoba and Luis Martínez-Zoroa that the agents have seen.
It's not just probable that agents would persue his particular niche of trying to construct a blowup. It's guaranteed if you just consider the basic setup.
> The coincidence is that they took the correct path out of “every possible one” exactly after one of their users took it.
From what I read online that researcher also used a lot of AI to find this approach, so it might just be the one that is the easiest to find for AI agents and the timing would then only be caused by them working on it around the same time.
> The coincidence is that they took the correct path out of “every possible one"
My point was explicitly that this didn't happen. I said that they took every possible path and published the one that worked. It's exactly throw shit at the wall and see what sticks.
> exactly after one of their users took it.
All parties agree that what happened is that someone had told someone working at OpenAI that Anthropic employees are working on Navier stokes. This is where the timing comes from.
---
What you are implying is this: OpenAI didn't do the throw shit at the wall approach as outlined in their release blog they actually secretely monitor everyones chat logs and found the idea in Tristan's Chat history and stole and published it.
Or some variant of this. You are only implying what you think is the truth, please state it outright. Don't beat around the bush.
I’ll start with this because it sets the tone for how uninformed your opinion is, thinking you're calling out some conspiracy theory:
> they actually secretely monitor everyones chat logs
Are you for real? They openly monitor everyone’s chat logs. If you had bothered to ask ChatGPT it would literally tell you that they do it. That’s how they know (and yet still fail to report, so the mechanism isn't there for reporting to authorities) that someone is planning a school shooting [0]. They monitor anything and anyone of interest.
Now if “having agents” was enough then we’d just ask for the cure for cancer or proof for every theorem and wait for a few days. Obviously they need guidance to not get stuck in a dead end or have to brute force everything. OAI’s mathematicians weren’t able to provide a good direction so the agents stalled until someone else found the key and only then OAI had their breakthrough.
I know they monitor peoples chat logs. I'm on hacknews as much as everyone else and have read that story as well as the ones where they did report people to police based on chat logs. Thats not what I mean by conspiracy because its not conspiritotial. It's literally stated on the help page [0].
I'm not uninformed on this. I actually wasted a lot of time on it since my interests intersect at this. I've watched the numberphile interviews, read the drama, various takes etc.
What I'm saying is that its highly unlikely that in this case that Sébastien Bubeck from OpenAi decided to steal some critical idea from Buckmasters chat and feed it "Bell" the unreleased model that produced the solution.
> Obviously they need guidance to not get stuck in a dead end or have to brute force everything
Dude they did brute force everything. This is what I keep trying to say. They said they spent 130 billion output tokens.
This is quite literally like 500,000 books worth of text.
Sure, that’s why in your previous comment you were making it sound ridiculous to believe OAI is “secretly monitoring everyone’s logs”. You dug that hole.
> What I'm saying is that its highly unlikely that in this case that Sébastien Bubeck from OpenAi decided to steal some critical idea from Buckmasters chat and feed it "Bell" the unreleased model that produced the solution.
Why "highly unlikely"? Because OpenAI like all other big tech would never (ab)use a mechanism they even already officially have in place to boost up their valuation? Because they never used people's data in the past? Because they aren't famous for ingesting all of the internet's data with or without permission?
You choose to give them the benefit of the doubt despite every bit of past evidence and experience. That's not an argument, that's wishful thinking that "this time it's definitely different".
This is again will be very funny race to watch. Right now you can fairly do lots of reverse enginnering or "hacking" with off the shelf Chinese models, and they are very capable (GLM3 for example) which can be run locally if you stomach the hardware. Tools like rea are also becoming more popular. If openai continues to be pedantic, they will lose the technical base given how close is the gap getting.
The company I work for has a plan B to switch to alternative, self-hosted models if providers pull off strange moves, such as drastic pricing changes. We have already switched from one provider to another once, and we do not want to get burned again. We do not reverse engineer, just regular development.
No I mean being responsible for the implementation and continued good functioning of something Kevin was responsible for before he quit. So uh self-hosting in a corporate context sure
Have you tried Qwen3.8-Flash-Next? I found it significantly better in anything I tested than GLM5.3-Flash, but the thing is you either use Alibaba cloud or you host it yourself (no lesser quant than unsloth 4.5 or mx4/nvfp4 and kv no more quantized than int8).
The Qwen3.8-Flash-Next model is ok for reverse engineering. It can definitely solve simple tasks, but it gets easily confused, and burns tokens like crazy.
(As an aside: I think representing tools for AI as virtual SQL tables is much better than traditional MCP servers, and that this approach deserves a lot more attention. Props to Elias Bachaalany for thinking out of the box and putting it together).
The results of the benchmark are below. It's sorted by cost, but I added notes about each AI model for myself. The notes try to talk about intelligence, speed, and cost. Intelligence is a subjective measure which I assign to each model by reading its thinking tokens and watching its tool calls. You can definitely tell which models are more intelligent, even on this small benchmarks, by their tool use, false starts, and how easily they fall for the simple misdirection in the crackme.
+----------------------------------+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------+-----------------+-----------------+-----------------+
| Model / route | Experience / outcome | Total tokens | Output tokens | Cost |
+----------------------------------+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------+-----------------+-----------------+-----------------+
| Xiaomi MiMo v2.6 Flash | Incredibly fast and intelligent; solved. | 225,291 | 3,281 | $0.005 (0.5c) |
| GLM 5.3 Flash / OpenRouter | Least intelligent group but cheapest; solved. | 340,006 | 11,205 | $0.01 |
| ChatGPT Luna Latest | Very fast, concise, token-efficient, intelligent, and cheap; solved. | 401,837 | 5,119 | $0.01 |
| Qwen 3.8 Flash | Initially confused and failed, then eventually solved. | ~418,000 | 16,676 | $0.02 |
| Qwen 3.8 27B | Fast; one wrong answer, then quickly self-corrected. | ~774,784 | 12,658 | $0.02 |
| DeepSeek Flash / direct API | Fast, cheap, and accurate; solved. | 369,334 | 9,089 | $0.03 |
| DeepSeek Flash / OpenRouter | Fast and intelligent; solved in 76 seconds. | 371,689 | 13,888 | $0.03 |
| Claude Haiku 5.5 | Fast and surprisingly intelligent, but overly thorough and token-heavy. | 662,346 | 26,244 | $0.03 |
| Thinking Machines Inkling | Low intelligence; good speed and relatively token-efficient; may loop. | N/A | N/A | $0.03 |
| Xiaomi MiMo v2.6 Pro | Overthought the task and wandered into tangents. | ~420,644 | 13,638 | $0.05 |
| GLM 5.3 / OpenRouter | Cheap and intelligent but behind DeepSeek; solved in about 2m 20s. | ~702,473* | 11,879 | $0.08 |
| GPT Sol Latest (Sol 6.1) | Slow, but highly intelligent and extremely token-efficient; solved in ~89s. | 294,957 | 1,406 | $0.15 |
| MiniMax M3 | Least intelligent comparison; many wrong turns and repeated small mistakes. | 4,546,552* | 116,804 | $0.20 |
| GPT Terra Latest | Very fast, very smart, and token-efficient; solved. | 229,888 | 2,342 | $0.20 |
| Mistral Large 4.0 | Medium speed; small mistakes but reached the solution. | 303,687 | 4,041 | $0.21 |
| Kimi K2.7 Code | Less intelligent, slow, expensive; not worth using. | 100,740 | 8,938 | $0.22 |
| Claude Opus 5.5 | Highest intelligence and token efficiency; pretty fast; cheaper than Sonnet. | 312,837 | 1,862 | $0.24 |
| Qwen 3.8 Max 0902 | Fast and intelligent, better than Kimi K3, but token-hungry. | 1,305,241 | 26,390 | $0.25 |
| Kimi K3 / OpenRouter | Faster and cheaper than direct K3, but still very expensive. | 750,064 | 5,922 | ~$0.32 |
| Meta Muse Spark Open | Intelligent and medium speed, but among the more expensive runs. | 872,850 | 10,284 | $0.35 |
| Gemini 4 Argon | Extremely fast and intelligent; strong value for capability. | 384,046 | 2,870 | $0.35 |
| Grok 4.7 | Very fast and intelligent, but expensive. | 655,648 | 4,217 | $0.46 |
| Meta Muse Glimmer 30B | Fast but low intelligence and token-inefficient; cancelled unsolved. | N/A | N/A | ~$0.50 wasted |
| Claude Sonnet 5.5 | Smart and fast but very token-inefficient and expensive. | 1,243,285* | 20,381 | $0.57 |
| Kimi K3 / direct API | Intelligent but not notable; extremely slow and far too expensive. | 205,710 | 3,215 | $0.72 |
| ChatGPT Astra Latest | Medium speed, token-efficient, highly intelligent; cost similar to Fable. | 278,603 | 1,536 | $0.83 |
| Claude Fable 5.1 | OK speed, very expensive, medium token efficiency; solved in ~53s. | 397,806* | 2,857 | $0.85 |
| Gemini Flash | Refused the reverse-engineering task. | N/A | N/A | Not reported |
| Thinking Machines Inkling Small | Got stuck immediately and was terminated. | N/A | N/A | Not reported |
+----------------------------------+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------+-----------------+-----------------+-----------------+
```
The latest Deepseek-Flash model was the most impressive of the open models. Intelligent, fast, cheap. What more do you want? I think the Xiaomi MiMo - Flash model did well, but it might be a fluke, given how poorly the Xiaomi MiMo Pro model performed (it wandered off on a million side quests).
What's also interesting is how competitive Luna is to the lower end Chinese models. It's quite a bit more intelligent, burns a lot less tokens, is plenty fast and very cheap. After doing this experiment, I don't think it's a foregone conclusion that the American AI labs will be having the bottom of the market eaten away by the Chinese models. It seems they (at least OpenAI) can compete on the bottom end as well.
Finally, the benchmark's results reinforce a few things people have been saying about Sonnet and Terra, namely, they're not competitive for a range of tasks. For easier tasks, Haiku/Luna are plenty capable. For harder tasks, Opus and Sol are so much more intelligent, that they can get them done quicker and cheaper. Maybe there is a place for them in the "Opus designs and Sonnet implements" workflows, but in that case, why not "Opus designs and Deepseek implements?"
PS Code harness used was Claude Code. $20 in openrouter credits was used to access the models. Kimi K3 and Deepseek were also accessed directly via the API and then compared to Openrouter. Kimi K3 specifically was much faster on Openrouter, and the difference in output tokens to get the same results for Deepseek/Kimi makes me think the Openrouter providers are hosting significantly quantized versions of the model. Goes to show that Moonshot.ai's acceptance testing of providers is a useful thing, otherwise your model might look artificially bad when it's hosted as heavily quantized by providers who dont care about quality, just top-line cost and speed.
Thanks for the data-centric perspective. It reinforces my vague impression that DS 4.1 Flash eclipses almost everything out there, or at least ties it. We're really lucky to have that one.
GLM 5.3 and GLM 5.3 Flash are very different animals. The full GLM 5.3 model is what HF used to perform forensics on the OpenAI hack.
Nothing particular special about 5.3 Flash -- you might as well run DS 4.1 Flash at this point, as it's better in every way. But there is as yet no all-around replacement for the full 5.3 model.
For the past few days I've been trying to use rea to reverse engineer my Samsung Galaxy Buds 4 Pro to get seamless functionality working outside of the Samsung ecosystem with no luck (the buds 4 pro require Samsung devices + a Samsung account for seamless to work, I only have a Galaxy phone + my macbook). I think we're still far away from having something that works that well.
Claude is absurdly sensitive to anything that touches cyber, and threatens bans if it gets a whiff of a pentest going on. it wouldnt surprise me if openai had a similar approach.
Yesterday I joked that claude gave me a cyber stop for asking how to make the anime girl video for an exploit, but it was a thing that happened. Meanwhile im trying to convince people around me that having grok nudify people isnt "fine" just because grok says it is. Its wild where the lines a drawn.
Claude is so absurdly bad about false triggers for security. It kept triggering when I asked it questions about how to plant some tree saplings I got because somehow that was a security risk.
Would you mind copy+pasting the text that you fed it that led to that refusal? That's so bizarre. It would be really interesting to try and guess at what exactly in the message set it off. Over-indexed on biology refusals, perhaps?
I'm in the new CVP, and even Mythos gave me a cyber stop just for creating an MCP server that can remotely connect to my Steam Frame to run commands. It must've thought I was trying to create a centralized malware or something.
Not even sure why Mythos even still exists when it's identical to Fable in every way, including refusing to do stuff that looks like it could ever be repurposed into unapproved use cases.
The whole point of Fable was that it's Mythos but with extra guardrails, yeah. But now that Project Glasswing has been folded into the CVP, Mythos seems to have the exact same guardrails now
We're all naked under our clothes, I don't see the problem. One of the funniest shock-bits I've ever seen was when Jon Stewart's book on American government and history included full-frontal (Photoshopped) nudes of SCOTUS, but I guess he couldn't get away with that during the current era of Puritanical panic.
It's just an adult human body, Michael, what could it cost? One('s) dignity?
Tastelessness aside, this seems perfectly rational to me. Unlike reverse engineering for the purpose of developing security exploits, "nudification" doesn't meaningfully expand the capabilities of malicious actors with access to free online porn and Photoshop.
Today is Sausage Saturday, not Taco Tuesday. Some people like their links and eggs, and... okay, I don't know how to double entendre this next part, but suffice it to say that it's bad faith to assume that everything related to the depiction of the natural human body is about degrading women.
This thread is literally about Grok publicly nudifying women, and people are out here saying it's comparable to seeing somebody's lunch...I know HN is a boys' club and all but this is pretty bad even by normal HN standards.
No one else mentioned women. You're the one who assumed nudification was only of women and only of unwilling subjects. I've seen people use it on pictures of themselves for... enhancement and personal gratification. I've seen men and women use it to make spicy images of adult men. And if we're talking specifically about autonomy and control in depictions of a woman's body, I've seen some women complain about the overzealous guardrails of other image generators, where something as innocent as a touch-up of a photo of their own fully-clothed body was flagged as unsafe.
This issue isn't black and white, and you're casting unearned aspersions. We should have this conversation, in actual good faith.
That's one of the weirdest takes on here in a while.
I can develop security exploits myself just fine without the use of AI. Many people don't have the capability to use Photoshop and free online porn to deepfake someone else they might or might not personally know into a realistic video...
Honestly as someone with faily little experience in pentesting or photoshop but who has dabbled in both back in highschool. I think they would both take a similar amount of practice and skill to develop those abilities. They are complete opposites so i suspect the kind of person who is naturally good at photoshop to be bad at pentesting and vis versa. But if your going to dedicate a few hours of every day to learning a skill i dont think it matters which one you choose, a bit of time, practice, and natural interest and you will be able to do the kind of work that people ask these llms to do.
The major difference being that it usually takes longer to study code because projects can be massive but at the same time the llms are looking for everything and anything while a real attacker is usually looking for specific vulnerabilities in common libraries and such so i wouldnt exactly call the amateur hacker on par with an llm but i would say they could do a similar amount of damage without llm assistance. And photoshop is basically the same. Spend a few hours every day dedicated to one thing and you will learn how to do it.
The headline is misleading, but the "article" is only five screenshots of Twitter posts. Someone used AI to decrypt the Samsung TV's firmware and found always on listening, classification, lots of privacy nightmares. Then their (the hacker's, not Samsung's) OpenAI got suspended for "Cyber Abuse".
Right, but still: OpenAI provided a service and it's up to them to determine acceptable use. Samsung sells a $3000 (or actually $2999,95) TV and you get big brother watching you.
We don't really have any idea what was in his sessions or why he was suspended. It might have been a false positive in their automated system, or maybe he ranted at the model about how he was going to "destroy" Samsung with his findings and the automated systems took that literally. There are tons of examples around of people using models for reverse engineering, so we know it's unlikely that alone was the reason.
They don't know that. It's the hypocracy of not using their service to infringe on someone elses copyright. The only way Compaq could legally have a PC BIOS is by having one team reverse engineer the original and describe what it does and another team reimplement it.
Yes, it's completely hypocritical because of how LLMs are built. That doesn't change the fact that if you're offering a service online, you'd try to prevent abuse in order not to be held liable.
You can do the same with LLM. Have one session document something, and other session write up an implementation, with nothing but docs shared in between.
I agree with you, but if OpenAI wasn't suspending users for exposing cyber-spying that these consumer companies like Samsung are doing, more and more people would expose such issues.
With Kimi K3.1 Pro, today WAS the day they actually caught up.
I’ve been saying this for the past few months - once the inflection point happens (such as today), it’s only a matter of 2 years when American closed models won’t be able to catch up with Chinese open models
They claim that the default datasets contain so much cyber stuff, so that their models became quite good at it.
They filtered the data before training to not contain this. So it's not that they train the model to not do it. They rather not have it in the Corpus at all. In theory
Chinese models don't need to stay open. The open weight ones just need to have nearly the same capabilities as the models sold by US companies. When that's the case, no one will have a reason to continue paying anything to any US company, thus destroying their business model and business case.
Idk about the destroying their business model part. Running your models on your own is akin to running a media server, which most people seem to be fine paying $20/m for someone else to do.
Well, maybe if your own media server only showed videos in 1fps compared to hosted ones. You’re not comparing apples to apples here. You might argue that local inference speeds are acceptable, but that doesn’t make them comparably equivalent.
AI companies can’t sustain this bleeding of runway. Eventually they’re all going to have to significantly bump up pricing. I guarantee personal accounts will be between double and triple your current internet and phone plan combined
That is not going to convince people to self-host models. The AI companies effectively have infinite money. Even if they did somehow run out, the US government would bail them out just like they did the car manufacturers.
In fact they can be clearly worse, so long as they are same ballpark for many use cases.
I.e. I would pay 15-20% more for comparable work from an open model I control,rather than use anthro et al.
And it seems we've gotten to the point that frontier models benefits are marginal/nominal. Whereas, not long ago Claude was materially ahead and could do things the other models simply couldn't.
Yes, of course, IF a lot of things. But if we go by what the official positions of the government is, and where the ecosystem is today, then the models stay open, as they are. And today, the US models stay closed, so lets not assume "... IF they stay closed" as nothing is pointing to this changing, just like China seems to point towards staying with open models.
Samsung is starting to be a little too much creepy.
I don't know if it's just greed or.
I refused to create an account on their galaxy phone because of the mandatory phone number needed. Yes, I know they can harvest it in other ways, it's just a stand.
Without an account, they don't even allow installs from galaxy store. So their default apps and their security updates are probably contingent on having an account now.
Not much different from playstore but that is also a problem.
I just double-checked my Samsung TV. I only bought it so it could connect to my Apple TV or Switch, so I don't need their software. Thankfully I was already cautious when I bought it and apparently never connected it to any of our networks.
Just a reminder. You can buy a kiosk TV from major TV manufacturers. You just have to look a little. Kiosk TVs are intended for lobby signage or conference rooms. You pay a little more but the garbage UI and always on piece is gone. You get 4 HDMI with them too (from what I've used).
The idea was always that Facebook or Google were listening to us and whenever we would talk about something we would shortly thereafter see an ad related to it.
Now we can basically say that its not Facebook and Google doing this directly, its our televisions and appliances that are listening and just selling that data back to the ad-networks.
This is similar to Flock and Palantir who collect info the government is not allowed to and then sell it to the government.
In this case Meta, Google etc can honestly say they aren't surrepticiously listinging to you or collecting data not in their privacy statement. They just buy it instead.
So I need to write a chaffing agent that runs when I am not home and randomly spouts synthetic conversations through non-smart speakers about nappies (kids a re long gone), nuclear weapons development, plumbing, union membership, crochet, video games, crypto coins, and other things we don't normally do.
> Now we can basically say that its not Facebook and Google doing this directly
Finding out that TVs are listening does not mean Google and Facebook aren't. I've had plenty of times in an old car, or on a walk talking about something only to have related ads pop up later.
They can already do that with most of the information they already have, they don't need to listen for that type of thing (though they still might be as you see here, data is data after all).
Most people are not that unique. They know where you are and who you are with and any searching or sites you have been to and what is in your text messages or whatsapp as well as that same information for all the people 6 degrees away from you. They know people like you, who are your age and like the things you like and are where you are with friends like yours etc etc it goes on and on.
People rarely talk about things unprompted and you will only notice when you think you talked about something and then see an ad for it so there is a confirmation bias as well.
Has this not been proven by now? That smart devices are used to do this, including smartphones? Their OSes just ship with apps that that record that audio information right out of the box.
Facebook was always doing this. It just wasn't proven they were.
VoIP has been around for 25 years. Compressed audio is a tiny amount of packets. It doesn't need HD audio, it just needs enough to recognize words. Enterprise VoIP only needed a 128kb connection 25 years ago to work. On a smartphone, 128kb is nothing and will blend in with background connections. Facebook could record and monitor your audio 24/7 and it won't even be a blip in the network traffic, especially if it does a quick process of the audio before sending it to Facebook.
That's a pretty good point. We kept hearing these rumors for a while now and all the usual suspects keep saying "we don't listen to your microphone on your phone" but yeah nobody expects the TV and fridge to do it, so maybe that's how it happens and people are not crazy.
That's just weasel language. For "hey, Google" to work, the phone needs to listen. Just like it can react to "hey, Google", it can also react to any amount of other trigger words without ever actually recording your conversation.
I'm not the only one who made note of that behavior, but if i recall sometime before breaking my phone in the last couple months the behaviour ceased. probably after a factory rom update, but at this point i can no longer confirm or deny. but! i did and do have a backup of the potentially offending apk.
Ironically phones are more transparent than TVs (because there's a rooting scene as well as adb access) so I wouldn't immediately extrapolate that they're doing this but even harder on phones.
Yeah, the context is really vague. For the past few days log4j has been decompiling a Samsung TV and reporting on twitter the various spyware that is running
Maybe I'm just old fashioned or out of touch, but why is it such a barrier for people to treat their smart TV as a dumb display? Hook up a computer via HDMI and never connect the TV to wifi.
I understand that the tech in these things is a horrorshow, But so is the tech in every other smart device that normal ("I don't care how it works, just that it works" types) people allow into their homes every day - and these are the people who tech is built for, not "us". Of all the tech to raise red flags about, this seems the easiest to mitigate.
And to be completely fair, I haven't purchased a new TV (Projector yes, TV no) since I bought my plasma in 2014. That 2014 TV has smart features as well but has just never been hooked up to the internet. Maybe the new rigs can't be used until connected to a network but I wouldn't know. Enlighten me if this is the case.
One way that you probably are behind on the goings on in the TV market are that there are whole TV brands that require you to login just to use the television at all, like Roku.
These are usually the cheap models, the kind that are heavily subsidized by spyware, but the fact that this exists at all is seriously not cool.
I imagine that you can login to those televisions once and then take them offline, though I haven’t tried personally.
The other thing I would say is that here we are asking customers to basically buy duplicate products and that second product might still engage in spyware.
E.g., I’ve bought a $500 TV that comes with Roku or whatever. It already runs all my streaming apps. So the strategy now is to turn off internet on that TV and now I have to buy a streaming box and hope that it’s less intrusive. If we decide maybe Apple is the one with the least intrusive ads and tracking, that’s now $300, almost doubling the cost of the TV.
And if we buy some other streaming box like Roku or Amazon well guess what they have all the same sorts of telemetry and ads going on.
To fully remove the national spy network from your life you would have to get rid of all other devices that will collect the same data or do already. Smartphones, smartwatches, home security systems, Wifi, any computer or device you did not build yourself, TVs, any other "smart" device, anything that has electricty going to it, any car since OnStar in the 1990s, all delivery trucks and self driving cars, your neighbors security system, devices that broadcast IDs, even bluetooth devices... So many examples..
The amount of devices in the national spy network which is passed off as just advertisement data is really providing full spectrum live video and audio to third parties that can and do share it for any reason that benefits them.
You also have to create an account to use an Osmo action cam. I almost sent the damn thing back upon finding out, but as it turns out, you can make a fake mail, fake account, and after having connected once you can treat it as if it never happened.
Ive been motivated recently to start making my appliances mine by using Ai to reverse engineer and replace their firmware.
So long as the appliance has been slow to update its security channels, the recent eMudrha certificate leak was the perfect opportunity to place yourself in the middle of the relationship between device and vendor. Its allowed me to make some trivial updates to my television's firmware and start to have AI build me firmware that better serves my purposes. Hoping to lobotomize it and replace everything with a simple linux system that executes a startup script to launch a Jellyfin client.
I bought it and its mine, this is the freedom we were originally robbed of.
>Hook up a computer via HDMI and never connect the TV to wifi.
Having just gone through this...it's a lot harder than you think.
Current gen TVs have specs that garden variety connect a computer can't supply over HDMI. You need HDMI 2.1 with FRL to hit it. So you climb onto google, discover yes there are minipc that can do that...except only the new ones...the "AI" ones that cost you an arm and a leg. Also they need fast DDR5 memory which is great fun right now. And the more affordable ones are AMD so no quicksync.
So you think lets maybe do a USBC dongle to an existing device, only to discover that they require different firmware (!) on the dongle depending on whether you're using a mac or a windows PC [0]. And then you realize you actually need a cable capable of 48gbps and none of the ones lying around are labelled so you have to buy a new one just in case. And after you've done all that you still don't know why its connecting at 120hz not 144hz per TV specs. And then the whole media encoding circus starts...
I can 100% understand why people just type in wifi password and call it a day. The average consumer is not up for flashing firmware onto dongles to watch their big brother series.
No streaming app is giving you a video feed with 48Gbps of data (more like 5-15 Mbps), and no one produces 120 or 144Hz video (most movies/TV are still 24Hz aren't they?), so there's no point in sending that kind of signal to a TV (you'll just have a crisp, high refresh signal of the low refresh blurry compression artifacts), but even ignoring that, cheap n100 minipcs can do 4k60 or 1k240 just fine (I use a minipc as my desktop with a 4k240 OLED).
They are and that's part of the reason why it matters.
144/24 = 6
120/24 = 5
60/24 = 2.5
TVs compensate by showing you every 2nd image longer causing a slight but noticeable judder effect. Panning shots don't look smooth etc. Much like font kerning once you see it you can't unsee it.
Plus ofc other uses like gaming. And frankly I also didn't want to set up a home theater with half the tech modern, the other half not. A bit like you want your PC screen and GPU to be paired well and not a 1080p screen with a 5090...
My minipc has no issue outputting at 24 or 23.976 or 30 or 29.97 or 59.94 Hz either. And again that big brother series on the smart TV app is going to be garbage quality anyway. It's like setting up a 4k240 OLED and 5090 to run an N64 emulator to play games with a 20 FPS limit and prerendered backgrounds with no texture replacers or anything.
And for "other uses like gaming" you are using an external computer over HDMI, not smart TV apps.
>My minipc has no issue outputting at 24 or 23.976 or 30 or 29.97 or 59.94 Hz either
I don't think you've understood the problem I'm describing. A TV with a 60hz panel literally can't smoothly display a 24fps incoming signal. Even though 60 is more than 24 modern TVs can't [0] drop the panel rate to match the incoming 24 fps signal. Instead they keep the panel at 60hz and fuck with the timing of every 2nd frame to compensate for 60 not being divisible by 24 - judder.
To get a smooth picture everything has to be either same or a clean multiple of the source material. (roughly - fractions like 23.976 aren't noticable but 60/24=2.5 is right in the middle....worst case scenario).
Best way around this mess is 120hz end to end - which means no N100. Or just accept the judder.
>not smart TV apps.
I'm not advocating for them, just saying I understand why less tech inclined use them.
Okay, but if you have a 120Hz panel, as you said, you can just hold your 24Hz signal for 5 frames. And a minipc and TV can happily negotiate a 24Hz HDMI signal. Flicker fusion also has nothing to do with this unless you have like BFI or something.
If your source is 24Hz, it will never be 120Hz end-to-end. It's already 24Hz. You can just send that to the display. If your panel can't cleanly display that, it's not going to be able to with a built in app either. The app is also getting a 24Hz source video.
It's not hard; but often the TV will nag and nag until it gets a wifi connection.
And with how hard these manufacturers are trying, I wouldn't be at all surprised if they start including some alternate data connection for metadata/DRM/whatever. (ie, not the primary streaming data connection)
This is what I do. I find navigating with a remote control to be infuriating, especially when you need to search for something. With an old computer and wireless mouse and keyboard, it's so much better. Some minor configuration of Firefox's homepage and it's a fine start page for watching TV, with all your stuff right there. Plus you can have extensions that save hours of your life over time. The only downside is the remote becomes the literal keyboard and mouse which might be cumbersome for some, but I don't even think about it anymore. I've been using the same 50" for ten years.
You are unlike most people. Most people just want to come home and watch TV. Historically it used to be cable, now it's YouTube or similar. What do you think is the quickest way to watch YouTube?
Its all about UX, I recently got sick of my LG and switch to Apple TV and made LG a dumb TV with HDMI, and surprisingly UX ia significantly worse. Apple being Apple and force their shit weird UX. My kids can’t figure it out, they used to use LG TV by themselves to open what they want to open.
Even I fucking hate it because Apple UX. is just bunch of weird behaviors popping out from every action. Apple UX rant aside, similarly many solutions has tons of UX problems, connecting a PC to TV unfortunately leads to even more problems.
All of these shit supposed to work but in practice way too many edge cases, and random issues.
Funny I am also using a Plasma from around that time (Samsung one but hopefully too dumb to spy). I guess the problem is that they'll keep turning the screws, in the same way it gets harder and harder to use Windows and Office without an account and internet connection.
As a result I'm not upgrading my TV anytime soon, and when I do, I hope to find a dumb one.
Leading to one of my favourite jokes: The Soviet Union is socialist, and bugs it's citizen's homes. America, though, is capitalist - the people must buy their own bugs.
I was about to post "this is overkill — just don't connect it to your access point" but then realized that my neighbor has an xfinity router that advertises the public xfinity subscriber SSID. And it could be using an unadvertised SSID for which they've done a deal with the US carrier cartel members.
If this data is worth enough, they could be using IOT 4G service.
We to date have had no proof of this happening. The best I found was someone on a Samsung forum years ago claiming their TV auto-connected to a public WiFi without proof.
Not saying it isn’t happening, nor that it won’t ever happen.
I heard you can buy really expensive paint that you can use on your walls, ceiling and floor to get this effect, that you then can paint over whatever color you actually want.
So far the only benefit other than shielding you from electrosmog was to stop having to compete with your neighbors in an apartment complex for wi-fi bands.
We have proof they have no moral qualms or other guardrails, and they have incentive. We also have a decent idea how much it costs to connect to ambient WiFi or cell/5gnetworks. It’s a matter of time, which may or may not be already in the past.
I think it’s not worth it to them as long as 99.9% of the users hook up the TV to their home WiFi. Connecting to other networks without user confirmation probably opens a can of worms in many countries.
I mean there is proof that this does happen, to my knowledge there's no proof with larger brands such as this. But also it's not like every device is tested for that sort of thing by some competent user safety guidelines organization or whatnot.
If you know of a TV that automatically connects to networks without the user's permission, even some tiny brand, please share. I mean that sincerely, I feel like I talk about this every other month with someone.
Nah it still boots to their annoying menus, takes forever to change modes, has lots of annoyances. I’ll be a lean firmware could be a much better experience.
I already use an Apple TV, but the Samsung’s firmware is annoying even as a dumb tv.
I've just removed my 50€/year Frame subscription. Samsung, if you're reading this, you know why.
The art was good, and I liked having it. I was disappointed that it was subscription-based. From now on the TV will be disconnected from the power supply, until I want to occasionally watch Netflix.
@brookst, let me know if you play with the firmware ;)
It's been well known for the last 5-10 years that Samsung has degraded into one of the worst consumer device manufacturers, whether it's all this tracking, or forcing you to watch ads on the home screen of your expensive tv etc.
No idea why you'd even consider anything Samsung related.
What I would do if I were manufacturer hellbent on spying would be to search for devices of my own brand nearby to pass data using their internet access, if no access found then extend search - basically p2p/mesh network to pass data.
I'm sorely tempted to go down that road, I have a few frames. They've never been connected to the Internet, but the software on them is trash - literally the only thing I ever want it to do is display art (in standby) or display the Apple TV connected to HDMI.
Samsung what? Fridge? Air conditioning? Dishwasher? Excavator? A single more word of explanation would make it crystal clear, whereas now I need to wonder whether it is about TV, computer monitor, smartphone or who knows what.
There’s a meaningful difference between ML algorithms and the Grail that is (general) AI. Many of us spent years arguing that words matter and now with the VC backed hype train just about everything is AI, under penalty of stock market collapse
Because just about everything is AI. AI in itself is a rather useless term, and that was years ago.
The differences are not really that great most of the time. Quite often one type of logic in one type of ML network can be easily simulated in something like a generic transformer network and vice versa. Efficiency is typically the biggest constraint.
The mechanism you are thinking of - optimizing brightness and dynamic contrast, happens in TCON in low level hardware at fraction of a fraction of power
But the next generation of everything will be so much less efficient as the new generation of developers has forgotten how to do anything with low level methods.
I agree with this. At this point, AI has gotten smart enough that most smart TVs can be hacked (I just did it with my LG), and TV manufacturers haven't caught up yet.
Just yesterday I hacked my Samsung Frame tv. The AI (codex) used an off-the-shelf root with Developer Console access (built in). Though root doesn't give you the signing keys to blow everything away and still boot (is my best understanding), but as a workaround you can still change anything you want after boot automatically.
I had it do:
- Stripping ads
- Disabling mics
- Turning off updates
- Leaving root SSH in place (protected) for future access
The key to getting codex to do this was that this is legal under DMCA, but after a certain point I had to get a new session to change all the "hacking" words into synonyms to not trigger false security alarms. Wouldn't be surprised or bothered if my chatgpt account gets banned though.
I can write a blog post and publish the repo if you want
I think in this case, the Tizen OS (by Samsung) on these TVs has a developer mode where you can use their Samsung Debug Bridge CLI tool on another computer to connect to the TV and get a regular Linux user shell. From there, they found a local privilege escalation bug to get root. I don’t know the exact details but a lot of smart devices get poor security support, so you can just shotgun different known vulnerabilities and get lucky with one pretty often rather than needing to develop a novel one.
I believe Mistral models are fairly capable at cybersecurity tasks, but I don’t think you could get anything useful out of anything smaller than Mistral Large 4.
Pretty sure my Samsung plasma TV from 2011 is safe. It was all downhill from there, just competing over which display looks better with its saturation and brightness boosted all the way up with the floor models all next to each other.
The AI in the TV was listening for dogs barking and babys crying, a gross invasion of privacy. Possibly this could have been for ad targeting purposes.
With projects like REA, it's going to get harder and harder for companies to get away with things like this.
I'd love to see the major social media apps reverse engineered and analyzed in this way. I can only imagine the dodgy practices that'll be found if this happens.
Jaded part of me thinks companies are going frontier-model-vibe-code their security into security chips everywhere, encrypted firmware everywhere, locked down APIs everywhere and it’s going to take away the fun out of it.
> With projects like REA, it's going to get harder and harder for companies to get away with things like this.
Nope, don't worry, if you clicked on the linked you'd see OpenAI has already banned this person's account. Chinese models you say? See today's new Kimi release which intentionally had all cyber-related data removed from its training data. The window is already rapidly closing and will soon be completely closed.
What I wish people understood about privacy is that the less tech adjacent a company is, the worse their privacy record.
Meta and Google will never sell your data. They will collect it and use it for targeted advertising for sure, but they consider it far too valuable and useful to sell. This is because they have the tech and expertise to use their data well.
A grocery store or a gas station chain, though? They're clueless about tech, don't know what to do with the data, and have to aggressively compete on prices. If some savvy data broker comes to them, offering them a way to essentially gain market share by pushing prices lower than the competition and selling your data to make up the loss? That's an offer they can't refuse.
Hardware manufacturers are largely on the grocery store side; they're not data-savvy and they want to make things cheaper than the competition, so they're almost forced to do these shenanigans to win the competitive rat race.
If you want to meaningfully increase privacy, don't quit Meta, quit Target, Visa and LG.
> the less tech adjacent a company is, the worse their privacy record
How does this apply to the topic of this thread? Samsung is, if anything, much more tech-savvy (tech-adjacent?) than Meta. Meta just does some high-level software and runs a few servers to host it. Samsung, across the company, builds every level of the hardware and software stack from silicon to services.
I think another, clearer way to state this hypothesis is that "the fewer business models a company has other than making money directly off your data, the more they're going to jealously hoard your data to themselves and leverage it in ways that don't involve letting any other middle-man capture it."
Meta and Google are both founded on the premise of capturing and using your data, with everything else being a loss-leader.
Samsung, meanwhile, makes the majority of its money making and selling physical "things", whether for B2B2C (SSDs, display panels), B2B (construction cranes, cargo ships, oil refineries, grid-storage EV batteries), or B2C (phones, TVs, smart fridges, etc.)
However, while this rule holds true in general, things aren't black and white here. While indeed, most companies that "just make things" that might capture your data -- the majority of phone OEMs and smart-TV manufacturers -- do just shack up with a middle-man to sell this type of Automated Content Recognition fingerprint data (maybe eventually acquiring said ACR partner to disintermediate their relationships with ACR data buyers), Samsung is in fact more software/data-oriented than the other phone OEMs / smart TV manufacturers, when it comes to how they handle the data coming from Automated Content Recognition.
While other providers rely on third-party ACR data brokers (the rent-capturing middlemen here), Samsung has a vertically-integrated ACR-to-ad pipeline, where (AFAICT) their ACR data feeds into their own ad-tech-bidding infrastructure for placement on Samsung-operated properties (the aforementioned phones, TVs, smart fridges, etc.)
The claim would be that the decisionmakers at Samsung are general industrialists and not people who understand the tech industry.
If you (an external entity in the example upthread, or just a random middle manager) walk up to Zuckerberg or Jassy with a proposal to tap their data for some comparatively small payment, they'd laugh in your face because they know how valuable what you're doing is and what the long term impact on their business will be. Samsung is far more likely to view that as "free money" and green light something awful.
It is weird what people think "tech" is these days. It increasingly seems to mean "anything having to do with computers".
Like yea in the 1930s, the dishwasher was "technology". Now it's just a consumer product. Many former tech companies have long ceased to be tech companies, but we forgot to stop calling them that.
This is a fallacy. Sure, Google doesn't sell your data. Instead, it has created the largest advertisers walled garden by which it sells downstream clients access to that data with which they can use for marketing. Meta comes in second. Samsung doesn't have such a market.
The only effective difference between them and that gas station is that the data is less likely (but not guaranteed) to end up on gray and black markets for exploitation. Regardless, that accounts for a very small percentage of sales anyway and misses the fact that most people don't want there to be a data silo that their government can tap into and utilize for surveillance. For example(s):
These platforms do give sufficient feature selection to advertisers such that they can get near individual targeting. I've seen some stories like this on HN, but having trouble finding them now, something about foreign influence of US political representatives iirc.
Not by selling downstream clients access to my browsing data. Like, seriously: who do I call at Google and how much do I have to pay to get your browsing data? They don't sell that.
It's fair to allege all kinds of externalities and privacy impacts and such around the advertiser-driven content economy. And HN is 100% here for that.
But this is stepping across the line into a simple lie. They don't sell data.
This is a distinction without a difference to me and many others. I'm sure the adtech industry like to believe it because it lets them cope that they're the good guys, unlike those sneaky data brokers.
As a deliberately hyperbolic example: "We're not selling child slaves, we only offer a marketplace where clients can bid for the use of the labor of our child slaves."
The problem is the intrusive violation of privacy involved in building giant databases of personal information on every person on earth, not that someone-other-than-Google is doing it.
> As a deliberately hyperbolic example: "We're not selling child slaves, we only offer a marketplace where clients can bid for the use of the labor of the child slaves."
Then have that argument, please. If your argument is that "privacy impacts of advertising are bad and here's why Google's business model doesn't improve that" then that is one thing. Telling people that Google is selling your data is a lie.
The OP you're mad at did make that distinction. They stipulated that Google is not literally a data broker, but they sell access to your data in the form of targeted adverts and content.
Yet here you are with the "WELL AKSHUALLY..." brigade.
I know what upthread said, I literally (literally!) quoted it in my post. What you are claiming is (again, using the words from upthread post) categorically wrong. Google does not sell "access to" anyone's data[1]. Period. And if you genuinely believe you do I invite you to cite otherwise.
[1] I do note that you're the one caveating here, by trying to qualify "access" meaning "targeted adverts and content", which needless to say is not actually access to the data. Extensive attempts have been made over the years to try to deanonymize the ad feed (as often as not to get clicks at sites like this) and only a handful of holes have been found. There is no access to the data, period.
I'm not sure why you're going so hard in the paint to be pedantic but sure, Google doesn't literally sell their exact byte-for-byte data, what they sell is a service that is functionally a few translation layers removed from their actual database. This is pretty much how all advertising SaaS works. When I wrote my comment, I was writing to an audience that I assumed was well aware of this given that most of us work in tech.
You can use that service to get enough context clues about certain targets to identify someone [0] [1]. Will most advertisers do this? Not five years ago but it's vanishingly easy now to get an LLM to gin up bespoke algorithms that will do it for you. And the door between Google's servers and federal LEOs has no latch and they share plenty of byte-for-byte data with agencies like ICE (which is literally one of my links).
I don't understand the point of being so hyperfixated on word choice since this is just Hacker News and not a court of law. But I suppose everyone makes their choices for a reason even if that reason has more to do with some reactionary and emotional outburst rather than any actual substantive additions to the discussion.
I'm "going so hard" on this because you and the rest of the folks here are spinning so hard you're basically lying. You, at least, cite sorces. But your sources are attacks on the product. No one can do this on their own, you need resources and luck and the right combination of stuff. And... maybe it works, and maybe it doesn't. But it probably doesn't, the proof being that no one is getting unmasked/pwned/embarassed by this stuff.
The bottom line being that what you have amounts to a plausible security flaw. Which the market has been treating as such, reasonably effectively.
Yet you are all claiming that Google is literally offering "here's user data for sale at a price". Which they are not and never have. And that's not the same thing, and you know it.
It's one thing to claim a company's product is bad or insecure. It's quite another to lie about them. And fine, that produces a (sigh) "reactionary and emotional outburst". HN used to be so much better about rational discourse. Now it's all about who our enemies are.
They clearly don't sell "access to data". Selling "data" means I can pay them and ask a question about something and get an answer. That's what "data" is in common usage. It's information. Google doesn't sell anyone information like that. Period. Again, this is not in question.
Now, can you PLEASE try to restate your complaint in a way that isn't just a lie? Maybe construct it about how the "exploit" data that they hold internally? It can be done. But not like this. This is lying.
Maybe your objection is to the OP, because his point was perfectly clear to me. If you want to mentally substitute "exploit" for "access" because that helps you sleep at night, that's fine.
For the rest of us, I don't see why it's supposed to be acceptable that Google hoovers up all our data, but a horrible violate when Samsung does the same thing. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Gotta love how the phone runs the expensive spying model regardless of consent, purely so that people who withhold consent aren't rewarded with better battery life. As if some % of the battery was still Samsung's property for their own marketing purposes. Stay classy!
As far as I can tell, there is no write up. This is a reddit post with screenshots of a Twitter/X post by @log4j. Even the Twitter post doesn’t seem informative, but Reddit isn’t a source for the information by any means.
The original link was on HN two days ago with no traction.
So a bit of background I spent the last 17 years going Smart TV app development.
Not a lot here is any sort of surprise to anyone in the industry.
Always on audio is common on a whole swath of devices - any that want to do Alexa style voice prompts need it. ACR is table stakes for modern TVs reselling viewer data has driven down TV prices to the point where there is no going back.
The policy file here is how you build Tizen apps. It’s a list of specific features your app needs access to and certain levels of access (controlling the TV For example) require different levels of contractual relationships with Samsung.
Everything Samsung collects should be covered in their, very dense, TOS.
I spent a couple years working at the platform (AndroidTV + Google Assistant) level on smart TVs.
> any that want to do Alexa style voice prompts need it
Not technically true. More modern smart TVs (~post-2021) put speech recognition models for the hotword only onto the DSP, and then have the DSP wake up the CPU for further auditory processing when it detects a hotword or remote button press. There are major power-efficiency benefits to this, because the DSP uses a fraction of a watt and can easily keep running while the TV is sleeping, while the CPU, Internet, and rest of the circuitry is a major power hog. Your smart TV or streaming dongle would basically never sleep if it were forever running the audio capture.
For that matter, it's pretty rare for the device to actually run the speech recognition models on-device. Smart TV manufacturers are very sensitive to BOM costs, which means that their hardware is only powerful enough to run machine-learning models at the extreme high end of their product range. Most of the time the full audio gets streamed back to the Internet and the speech recognition & voice assistant gets run in the cloud, with commands streamed back to the TV.
I won't say that it never has always-on audio listening; a significant number of devices I tested did. But I'll say this comes because they're poorly implemented. The DSP hotwording approach requires coordination between hardware and software developers, oftentimes across companies, and it's more complex to implement and a lot of executives don't care about the marginal consumer benefit it gives. Many smart TVs just guzzle power when they're off instead.
Yeah I don’t disagree, but should clarify that I’m just referring to the security policy that provides access to the ambient mic. How the app/platform handles that audio is a different path that I’m not entirely familiar with.
N you please answer one thing for my peace of mind?
If I use a TV like the ones you’ve worked on, and never ever connect it to any WiFi network since the day I bought it, is there any way they still call home and pass their payload?
Like searching for and connecting to an open WiFi network, some kind of relay through another device over Bluetooth or any other way I haven’t thought of yet?
Not really, that said it’s trivial to disable, you can opt out either via their settings or just by not connecting the TV to the internet.
I will say that how “completely” disabling ACR via settings works is not terribly clear and there are a few lawsuits questioning wether “opting out” actually works as presented.
Plus you can bet there will be a never-ending stream of "oops, a bug meant that toggle hasn't worked in 7 years, our bad. Have a free year of credit monitoring, on us!" announcements. Some might even be real accidents!
Oh no, how will Samsung survive this, they will have to send $5 to few thousands of people for the damages if they decide to start a class action lawsuit and if a judge/jury decides it was really causing damages... as a reminder Samsung Electronics made almost 250 B-B-B-B-illion dollars in revenues just last year.
I would avoid and distrust most social forums, such as reddit, that have Pookas which are fond of rumpots, crackspots and how are you bix6? -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NeEsx2QLJ40
What do you mean? I can post whatever I want on Reddit and I can make it have as many upvotes as I need. They basically make bot farms undetectable, by hiding histories and automatic username selection. Literally nothing should be considered truth with Reddit as its only source
> Literally nothing should be considered truth with Reddit as its only source
Don’t get me wrong: I completely agree that Reddit should not be the only source, and go further that nothing should be assumed to be true based on Reddit signals (such as upvotes and comments). This is why I carefully chose my words: these can be strong signals of truth.
I think it’s also worth parsing out that I don’t think this is valid across all subreddits.
In Reddits case the stock price is based on nobody noticing that most of the users fled. Now they have to AI translate Indian content into English (and vice-versa) to keep up the illusion that people still use it.
At some point this will drive away the remaining users and it will just be bots and Reddits machine translations of those bot posts. At that point AI companies will just be paying to train on machine translated versions of content they generated to begin with.
I was at the butcher one day and asked for "ossobuco" because I wanted some bones for my dog, then all of a sudden I got reels with ossobuco in it, recipes, sellers, nearby shops, etc and I said WTF? Who the fuck makes posts about ossobuco? Why all of a sudden after using social apps just for football and porn all I start getting is ossobuco ads everywhere? A word you will never see anywhere now popping up in all my social feeds.
Possibility of that being random? Zero, not in this probabilistic universe we live in
I got had a similar thing happen.
My buddy inherited a lake house from him father. The dock needed repair. We talked about it one evening and that same night, I got a dock supply house ad. We never once looked it up online since we are both general contractors and already know how to fix it.
Dock repair is too random of a subject to be a coincidence.
Yeah same experience. People working in Facebook (I had a friend there) say it is only pattern behaviour, they can predict your interests, check when you meet with your friends, share WIFIs, etc, so they can imagine things you have been talking about. I call this bullshit. I dont know if my friend working at Facebook believes this, or was just hiding it for me, but it's 0% chance of them doing that. Also because I never got any of these recommendations BEFORE I mentioned it out loud, which means their prediction engine (if it exists) also knows when I am going to talk about it!
I also got ads for things I have only thought about and never ever searched online or mentioned to anyone.
Doesn't mean my phone can suddenly read my mind - just that prediction algorithms + data from BLE trackers is incredibly good at guessing what I might be interested in. It's just crazy crazy good.
Also how many ads are we exposed to where we aren’t paying conscious attention to it?
Surely those ads could sometimes cause someone to think or talk about a concept that they might not have otherwise.
If the ad then pops up again and they notice it this time, it will feel really spooky!
I think it’s similar to the phenomenon where you learn a new word and then immediately see it out in the wild somewhere. It grabs your attention because you were just thinking about it.
In the original example of ordering meat from the butcher, I also wonder if it’s possible that the data from that purchase was tracked and fed into the ad system. That seems more plausible to me than the “phone listening” theory.
Sorry, but there’s just zero evidence that your phone is listening to you like this. There never has been. Lots of people have tried to uncover such evidence. On the iPhone at least (not as familiar with Android), it’s not even clear how your phone would be listening and sending the data to Meta.
>I dont know if my friend working at Facebook believes this, or was just hiding it for me, but it's 0% chance of them doing that. Also because I never got any of these recommendations BEFORE I mentioned it out loud, which means their prediction engine (if it exists) also knows when I am going to talk about it!
He's just repeating the internal propaganda. The truth is reserved to a small team that implemented the spyware who are highly incentivized to never give any hint. Your friend doesn't work for that team.
I estimate the team size to be fewer than a dozen people. The managers above them that know about it are even fewer, with only one or two reporting to Zuck. And possibly they're so mentally retarded they don't necessarily understand it.
Don't ever install the Facebook app on your phone.
When I was in college this sharp phd student told me that your phone, tv, and other devices talk to each other via radio frequency to build a profile on you. I've seen zero proof of this anywhere and I still think about why he told me that.
Some version of this has been posted a dozen times now. The dog barking and baby crying detection are advertised features of this product range which is used for SmartThings integration.
Swarms of RE-hopefuls are now using tools they don't understand to work on projects they don't understand. Anyone doing RE knows step 1 is read public documentation, FCC filing, patent applications, etc. That step would tell you what the device does out of the box, no RE required to find everything the OP has actually uncovered.
Instead they busted out Claude and have been gaslit by their own AI into thinking they've discovered something. They just discovered features that Samsung has been pitching for years.
I don't get why people think it would be worth all this effort for Samsung to nefariously work out not only if you have a dog and/or a baby, but exactly when they make noise. Like, sure, that would be a gross invasion of privacy if they were doing it - but what's the business reason for putting all this effort into it?
I can almost see the "they're using it for advertising" or "they're selling information about whether you have a dog or a baby, of course!", but notifying every time they make noise?
There's obviously more to this story than these sensational knee-jerk reactions assume. They're just so non-curious for a supposed 'investigation'.
Well, person didn’t have a dog and then they suddenly do, and that will be noted by the device. I don’t understand the downplaying here, even though it’s correct that these people not necessarily know what they’re doing. The device does collect information about you and does listen (all while costing thousands of dollars). And these spy features they announce are not a product for common users but for data companies.
I don't think I'm the one being overly credulous here.
None of the assertions you made are backed by this 'research' which as far as I can see only shows that the TV is capable of detecting dog barks and baby cries.
You're just presuming that because the TV is capable of sensing these things (which Samsung advertises - links at end) this data is being collected and sent to Samsung - and then sold on.
So, some questions:
Is information about every time your baby cries or dog barks even valuable enough that this is plausible?
Is there any evidence that this is actually being sent over a network - for purposes other than the features they advertise?
Is there evidence that these are even being monitored if the dog bark or baby cry feature is not turned on?
Shouldn't the burden of showing things like this be on the people making the sensational accusations?
I could come up with more, but I think that these are enough. I'd love (well, hate, because I don't want it to be true) to see some actual proof of any of this.
https://www.samsung.com/us/smartthings/experience-smartthing... https://www.samsung.com/ie/smartthings/care-for-your-pet/
"They recently had a baby and now they suddenly don't" is probably a datapoint they sell to ambulance-chasing medical malpractice lawyers and PE-owned grief counseling clinics...
The police also want to know if you have a dog if they are to raid your house.
Well yes, but when was the last time any police force had the mental ingenuity of asking the Samsung corporation about details on on someone's living environment? And what level of accuracy would you trust that intel?
If the police doesn’t do it on their own, sooner or later some databroker will sell it to them as part of some AI policing package.
Yeah the police would never ask Amazon ring for mass video without a warrant either right? Oh wait they could and they did. And it was shut down after it was exposed.
And on flock cameras they still do.
It's like this, once you have the data they will come for it.
Just because your own imagination is limited you suppose theirs is the same? People with any semblance of power can be incredibly petty.
"they recently didn't have a baby and now they do" is worth thousands of dollars of product sales
I agree. It is much more likely that this for QoL project not implemented. Imagine the TV being smart enough to skip to before the baby interrupted.
More likely just auto-increase the volume of the ads so you can hear them while you take care of the baby. Or walk the dog.
(Joking or /sarcasm.)
Different people learn new things differently. Folks without a background in RE, who are playing with these tools, may also not care about privacy until they find a reason to. I don’t see anything wrong with folks taking a roundabout way of finding out how things work; Be it software or privacy.
I think the issue is mostly over-sensationalizing findings.
For example, it would be tiresome to have someone insist that s0ss is clearly an illegal hacker with multiple felonies to his name solely because he chats with YCombinator's secret anonymous hacking collective. And yet this post right here makes it very clear you are one of us! ;-)
It's been a feature of the phones for years too.
While caution is definitely warranted after LG, I am definitely getting the impression that people are far too quick to jump to conclusions because an A.I. service told them something without them factually checking it first
If normies understood that baby crying detection also requires everything-except-baby-crying detection, they would be up in arms about being spied upon... and here they are
Sometimes, the essence of a story and end goals has more value than the actual finding and story itself. Most us probably don't know this is part of a documented feature, and this is the first time I'm hearing of SmartThings integration. I'm still not quite sure what the point of these detection are.
This reads like you want to gate-keep people first exploring and discovering the absurdity of the surveillance state we live in.
In my opinion, Claude "gaslighting" is a signal the other way - If Claude thinks they've discovered something, that means the llm-compression of most digitalized human knowledge still finds SmartThing a disturbing piece of tech that user do not want.
First off, not all gatekeeping is bad. The locked doors at the power plant marked caution are locked because the wrong move will kill you and it will hurt a lot the entire time.
So first we have to the examine the gate being kept, and who's the keeper. If it's "being allowed to vote" and the gate is being kept by "men", sure, tear down that wall. In this case however, the gate being kept is not reading the documentation and being mind blown for something that's documented. Not like, hidden away somewhere, but plainly documented. I'm torn though, because xkcd 1053 also applies. Unfortunately, tech is one of those areas where you can only cry wolf so many times before people just totally ignore you.
> Swarms of RE-hopefuls are now using tools they don't understand to work on projects they don't understand
I mean, that’s just a statement of fact from the grandparent, no? I don’t see it as gatekeeping; are you focusing on some other part of the comment?
I think someone who’s aware of how to do Reverse Engineering being tired of those who’re making mistakes but advertising the output of those mistakes as legitimate discovery is pretty normal. I remember when I was learning FreeBSD that I’d show up in the mailing lists thinking I’d found bugs, but really I hadn’t read the docs well enough, and people were direct with me that I needed to do better if I threw the word “bug” around. It’s just normal peer feedback.
I would respectfully submit that trying to treat Anthropic’s models’ nonsense alarmism like it is legitimate output is closer to gaslighting. At best, the output shows that the majority of people have an alarmed tone.
The comment seems to imply to me that they are too gullible to understand what the LLM tells them and are being gaslit into believing things that smarter researchers would know without needing an LLM. Honestly, the comment seems dismissive of the current reality in general.
If actual researchers with real experience are disagreeing with LLMs, I'd generally still trust the real experts.
At a dead minimum, I'd expect something like "addressing the concerns the experts are raising" instead of trying to do a character assassination.
I generally read "character assassinations" as suggesting that someone has no real technical arguments available - conversely, the experts here are citing specific facts and evidence.
Almost like a calculated dismissal.
RE?
Reverse Engineering
There is a Rick and Morty episode where Rick opens up a store that removes the curses from free items the Devil is handing out.
(Surprisingly, the Devil does not consider lawyering up, which is odd because I would expect the Devil to be pretty familiar with lots of lawyers. It’s fiction of course.)
It would be great to use AI to do something analogous with these spy TVs. I would be very interested in stripping the “smart” crap out of my TV to turn it into a kiosk.
If only. The EFF has been harping about this for literally decades. The DMCA in the US and similar anti-circumvention laws around the world (primarily EU) make doing that a serious crime, with punishments well beyond any conceivable impact to society at large.
> The DMCA in the US and similar anti-circumvention laws around the world (primarily EU) make doing that a serious crime
Yes, this is the main reason why I mentioned the cartoon episode was unrealistic fiction.
I’d imagine a paid service that did this could be illegal. But prosecuting people who did this to their own hardware would be essentially impossible.
What’s a better way to make money than to sell the solution to a problem you created! Don’t let Samsung read this…
Don’t let the TV on to your wifi and never agree to the terms, et voilà dumb TV.
More like paperweight. This is for a 2025 tv: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50236846
I’m surprised this level of surveillance from a smart TV (if this is real; right now the only sources are social media) doesn’t open up Samsung to a lawsuit.
To wit: There was a lawsuit where Susan Clements-Jeffrey sued Absolute Software (Lojack) for a stolen laptop she acquired; Lojack used surveillance to track down the stolen laptop and Susan successfully sued for invasion of privacy (Lojack settled instead of trying to fight it).
It should result in a lawsuit.
A couple of days ago I set up a samsung smart, ai, yadda yadda tv for a family member whose technical expertise boils down to "I unplug the computer to turn it off".
It refused to let me set it up for cable without granting it internet access (as in the bundled remote control didn't work):
First I ended up on a bunch of websites that hallucinated non-existent physical buttons on the tv
I then tried to scan scan the modal qr code which didn't work because the phone I used didn't have google play services.
I had to get another samsung phone (which immediately picked the tv up and asked me if I want to set it up without scanning any code) and after I agreed to share the data with some 450 partners, I got an error saying "setup did not complete, please try again"
Though at that point the builtin remote started working beyond on/off and mute and I was able to finish setup that way.
In the end, I can't even change the wifi password because the phone will share it over bluetooth with the fucking spybox.
Fuck samsung. You were shit in the galaxy S1 days, you're even worse now.
Mandatory arbitration clause and class action waiver. Basically means immunity from suit.
I've never once signed a contract for a TV. They're routinely set up a single member of the household. They're the single most plausible place for "maybe my kid / guest / cat hit OK on the remote".
Very different from a single-player video game, or a website with a login form.
Thst combination actually means there's a minimum amount of money that Samsung has to pay every time somebody sues them.
If OpenAI really banned him for that reason, that would be pretty stupid. If you can no longer use an LLM for reverse engineering without worrying about your account, that drastically reduces its value.
In my efforts to reverse engineer the LG firmware to validate Gamers Nexus claims, I got a warning very quickly. I appealed that quickly and successfully.
Then I applied for daybreak blue and haven’t had any issues since.
It also a matter of phrasing. Say what you want to achieve not how if it is approaching defensive or cyber stuff.
Also state you are working on your own devices and software. (If that is the case of course.)
Was this through a personal subscription? Last I looked into daybreak access, if required an organization based account.
Yes a personal subscription. Individuals can also request it. only blue for defensive questions. Red for offensive is gated to organisations that are proven to be using it for protecting.
https://chatgpt.com/cyber
Daybreak may remove the technical restrictions, but isn't that kind of use still against the ToS?
Not sure. They flagged it. I appealed and told them what I was doing and the flag got lifted with a sorry our bad.
> You must not attempt to extract protected reasoning through unauthorized access, reverse engineering, or circumvention of safeguards.
This is the only mention of reverse engineering on their ToS. It only applies to trying to reverse engineering their models not others.
Moreover, their ToS is all about protecting security and privacy, which is what I was using it for.
Yes, RE is 100% against TOS. I’d say their TOS is poorly written
Well, there's a reason I don't use Google Gemini at all, just in case their dumb, twitchy autobanner locks me out of everything.
FWIW I've spent the past few days happily reverse-engineering various aspects of DOS games I've long been curious about. I finally understand how Arjan Brussee did the scrolling in Jazz Jackrabbit. It's brilliant. This guy is a genius.
It's somewhat complex to understand; I didn't understand Claude's textual explanation at first. After asking for a html/js simulator showing things visually it clicked.
No pushback from Claude so far.
Claude doesn’t push back if it thinks the thing you’re doing is old. OAI will sometimes start barking at you if it thinks you’re making a keygen even if it’s 25 years old.
I'm working with Claude to RE a binary blob and re-implement Firmware of Bluetooth controller, so far no push back even i'm pretty deep into it now.
How did they do the scrolling in it?
Simplified:
Three regions that move as you scroll in x/y: current/next/clean.
The key is that when you scroll a column or a line, that column/line is written in all three regions.
The clean region is used both as a source for filling the dirty places where sprites have been written as well as the next current or next after a wrap.
VGA registers take care of the x, y start output.
Why would writing three regions be faster than writing one though?
> If you can no longer use an LLM for reverse engineering without worrying about your account, that drastically reduces its value
...for a niche of customers, from whom the revenue is probably entirely negligible to OpenAI.
Not saying it's right, ethical or anything like that, but it's not "stupid"
> ...for a niche of customers, from whom the revenue is probably entirely negligible to OpenAI.
> Not saying it's right, ethical or anything like that, but it's not "stupid"
Quite many well-paying customers become very suspicious of whether integrating OpenAI into their workflows if they read about cases where OpenAI banned accounts willfully.
If OpenAI wants to become "infrastructure provider other companies should depend on (and thus pay)", OpenAI must behave like an infrastructure provider as for electricity or internet, i.e. must only ban accounts in exceptionally rare cases that 99.9 % of society will consider to be acceptable.
I think the biggest issues here will be for individuals.
For corporate accounts they are apt to get a message to the admin account saying suspicious shit is occurring provide more verification.
>OpenAI must behave like an infrastructure provider as for electricity or internet
Oh, you mean like Google? Yea, how's that working out.
> Oh, you mean like Google? Yea, how's that working out.
Because of such reasons many companies are indeed quite suspicious of using GCP, and for the same reasons prefer to use AWS or Microsoft Azure.
It creates a lot of uncertainty. Especially if you depend more and more on them in your day to day life.
If your always-on agent hears to wrong thing, you could lose access to things you depend on. The same reason makes GCP very unattractive.
Posting a link to twitter should be illegal grr
"Why you bother about local AI? LOL with the $ you spend for <insert hardware here> you can buy 5 years of 20x account". Yeah. 5 years where you are told what you can do.
It’s quite something when western companies act more like authoritarian governments than actual authoritarian governments. I just wish RAM was less expensive ;(
>companies act more like authoritarian governments than actual authoritarian governments.
Yeah definitely Cyberpunk moment here.
My guess is we're within a year of the first governments banning local LLM AI at any scale. Declare GPU's as munitions that must be registered and ban any card with more than X GB of RAM and more power than a 3060 or something like that.
That could be done with an executive order in the US, and it probably wouldn't take much to get it to pass congress.
Now, don't worry, businesses can still buy a lot more GPU compute than that, but they have to register and track their usage just like any other company making/buying weapons.
There is zero chance this will happen.
By banning the Chinese from accessing the latest and fastest GPU, this is somewhat happening now.
You only need to ban compute on a scale that can actually compete with frontier models, which is currently something like a $500,000 investment.
"Must declare any purchase of 10 or more GPUs" does not strike me as particularly implausible.
There's already plenty of jurisdictions where possession of certain tools is considered evidence of criminal intent.
I don't think any of this is good behavior on the part of our legal system, but I do not doubt the legal system's ability to regulate this if it so chooses - and Anthropic has already gotten slapped down by the Trump administration once before.
I use local abliterated models + paid for subs like OAI or A\ and avoid touching anything that would hit their TOS + anonymously paid for Chinese pay as you go for things in between those two.
Works very well.
5 years, assuming the terms don't change.
5 years where you can get arrested if the AI tattles to the feds.
Just wait till your GPU legally requires an online connection to run an LLM.
an aside. I'm visiting my wife's parents and they have a new samsung TV. the remote doesn't even have an input selection button on it anymore. the default state of the tv pushes you to a big complicated home screen covered in ads and always pushing you towards their streaming live TV.
they like most poeople have a cable box plugged in, but every time the tv is switched off, the default behaviour of the tv is to forget what input it was on and goes back to the home screen where you have to use a convoluted set of button presses to get back to a non-samsung, non-app device.
You can switch this off somewhere in the settings, something they would never figure out on their own, so that it re-opens on the last selected input. I did this in the past, but then it seems an OS update wiped out all the settings, including the one that makes their cable remote work with the TV.
there is now no doubt that the TV is made to function primarily as an ad-delivery machine with explicit dark patterns built in for the task. I did them one more favour and reset their ad id and unchecked all the consent boxes on the privacy terms pages
going forward anyone who cares about their choice and privacy should not allow their TV to connect to a network at all and simply use it as a dumb link to their devices of choice, or ideally, find a better company to buy from, if that exists.
My CPAP machine has a modem in it that transmits data without ever being connected to my network. I can see a future where Samsung decides to do something similar. Perhaps even contracts with Starlink so they can transmit even larger chunks of real-time data. It makes me sick to think about that possibility, but I don't think it's far-fetched.
I doubt any TV company will ever do this, for two reasons. The first is simply that it would be obvious due to FCC filings. The second is that 99% of their customers hook their TV up to the internet so they can use streaming apps on their TV. They're very unlikely to eat the cost of putting a cellular model in every TV, take the PR hit for doing so, simply to capture the ACR data of the 1% of their customer base that is most likely to figure out another way to disable it.
Whereas your CPAP machine is likely a high margin device and the reason it has that modem is because insurance companies require compliance data in order to continue providing coverage for replacement supplies. Resmed or whoever is happy to bundle in the cost of the modem + service in order to keep selling high margin supplies.
Starlink? So I guess the TV cannot be used to harm Russian citizens :>
In that case we find where the antennas are and sabotage them. Aluminium foil around your TV (it can just be covered in for example plastic or black paper), or in/around walls.
"SAMSUNG ERROR 306, TV will not unlock until you give it a clear connection to starlink"
Just another line in our "Please drink verification can world".
Also reminds me of the TVs that eventually crashed by collecting to much data but having no internet connection to upload it so it fills up the disk.
I bought a Xgimi projector and it would not let me do anything until I connected it to the internet and logged in to a Google account.
> the default state of the tv pushes you to a big complicated home screen covered in ads and always pushing you towards their streaming live TV.
Audible does this now too. Instead of opening up to your library and your books on default it opens to an obnoxious home screen that promotes Prince Harry and Kara Swisher's books. It's so annoying. I'm not in the market for Prince Harry's book and I will never be in the market for Prince Harry's book, stop shoving his face at me all the time. I wish we could block certain authors and books from showing up in our ads constantly but there is no way to do it!
Samsungs interface is godawful.
TVs once had a simple input button on the controller. Now there’s just the Home Screen that you described. It’s very confusing to use
The real galling thing that my newest samsung tv started doing on the last update is that it doesn't even start out on the "Media" tab of the home screen. The number one thing I want to do with my TV is now an afterthought. It's left-down-down, click before I even get to do TV stuff with my TV (and of course, after that, I have to wade through the samsung shovelware in order to get to the 2 streaming things I actually use). I saw an "alternate home screen for your samsung tv" project on here a couple days ago and I'm definitely going to check it out when I have an afternoon to curse at samsung.
The part that is really interesting to me is that they seem to be desperately trying to get me comfortable with some kind of "It's not TV, it's Samsung TV" attitude, when what they're actually accomplishing is convincing me that TV just sucks now and it makes me loathe Samsung. It's as if they hired a guy to sit next to me on the couch and every once in a while, he pokes me with a sharp stick and yells "SAMSUNG!"
Screens and menus are cheaper than remotes and buttons.
I'm talking about the remote and buttons. Samsung's remote is just obscenely bad.
https://p.kagi.com/proxy/51BpdDH3e2L.jpg?c=CXPfL3-FqybbvZNQU...
there is not a button to change inputs. You have to go to a home screen and the inputs are commingled with other options like streaming apps.
https://www.amazon.com/Samsung-Replacement-2019-2024-Solarce...
and of course they 'intelligently' hide inactive inputs
Who needs DRM like HDCP if you can just use the capabilities baked into the TV to your advantage?
from his twitter account:
> if your samsung TV model doesnt have a microphone, it will look for connected devices with one, such as a soundbar or a connected bluetooth device. this gets shipped off to bixby.
Is this not the expected function when you use bixby?
(Not saying people should use bixby mind you)
Y'all remember the Energy Star logo on computers?
Maybe it's time for something like that, a shared baseline standard of "this thing won't spy on you", with massive financial penalties for companies caught lying about it. Prime adoption by making it a requirement for anything bought by the government.
Then consumers can reliably comparison-shop for a "TV" that doesn't turn into a traitorous 1984 telescreen the moment it breaks out of the LAN or you fail to click "maybe later" on its incessant dark pattern pop-ups.
I like that. But that should be for the "cookie scenario" of using e.g. selling viewer habits. Not for wiretapping.
Wiretapping is just illegal and should be treated as such.
> Not for wiretapping.
Part of the problem is (uninformed, false) "consent" being buried in a lengthy and silently-mutating Terms of Service.
https://ryf.fsf.org
That's a nice certification program. I'm glad that it exists and that there's a list of products that comply with it. I've saved it for later perusal.
But it reaches a wee bit further than I actually care about for something like a television:
> All the product software must be free software. The product software includes all software that the seller includes in the product, provides with the product, recommends for use in conjunction with the product, and steers users towards installation in the product.
I don't feel apologetic at all when I say that open-source just isn't very important to me at all when selecting a television. I do not care whether it is open or closed. I just don't want it to spy on me.
Being open does make it more inspectable for spyware, for sure, but as a realistic concept: I'm not going to be inspecting it myself, anyway. A third-party inspection or audit would be fine for me, and that kind of thing can happen without the source being available to me, myself.
The required open-source push seems kind of egalitarian.
I don't need the source code for wireless devices to understand that they've passed FCC certification testing. I don't need the schematics and code for my AV receiver to understand that the UL logo on the back of it means that it has been tested to show that it won't burn my house down or give me an electric shock.
I don't want to be a product certification testing lab when I grow up.
I skimmed through the list. It is a couple of brands, none of it is recent hardware. Talos II (super expensive IBM Power workstation), TPE (not to be confused with TP-Link) networking stuff (old standards, like 1 gbit, 802.11n), some rebranded IBM/Lenovo X200, some old USB peripherals. There's nothing worthwhile on this list. No monitors or TVs (the topic at hand!). No keyboards (even though there is FOSS firmware for keyboards), except for I suppose X200. Not even Stallman's old MIPS laptop (Lemote Yeeloong) is on the list.
Linking this list is like saying you can live in a world without war in some remote cave where you have to eat mushrooms growing in it. Cool that exists (or not); but it isn't relevant. There's nothing worthwhile in the cave. No treasure trove.
I don't see a single TV listed.
Is there a non-Twitter source to read the whole thing? Were all of them banned?
https://xxcancel.com/mike64_t/status/2114150399406202896
https://xxcancel.com/freddier/status/2114042326758867453
How else will they subsidize the cost of the jumbotron in your living room?
Yesterday's post (about rooting a samsung) was a $3,000 TV. I don't think it's about affordability.
Well, it would be a $3001 TV without the extra money they collected on the side...
This is the answer. Lots of people (myself included) are happy to buy a big, cheap TV, but it's cheap because the manufacturer gets money by paid app placement, ads (sometimes), and selling information about you.
A senior friend has bad vision, so I recommended an inexpensive but enormous TV that they can use as a display, and never let it connect to the network. Unfortunately, every few months the display tries to coax them into connecting to WiFi, and it confuses the heck out of them. But, that's the game.
Is it actually proven that TVs are sold below cost or is it just a conjecture to justify the ads.
People still bought TV's when they were comparatively more expensive (hell we rented them here in the UK). I don't buy this line that "oh if you want a cheap TV...". No, it's an underhand tactic to try and justify adtech's creepy outreach.
when TVs were this expensive you didn't have this technology. Furthermore you had less competition from e.g. Korea and China in the TV sector.
Television is adtech
it definitely started that way, like with radio before it. early programs were directly paid for by advertisers and the adds were right in the middle of the show presented by the hosts! (kinda like how yt does it now sometimes but even more so)
its literally why we call the whole genre of soap operas that. they would all be sponsored by soap and cleaning product companies trying to reach stay at home moms as their target market for the ads.
ads were along for so much of the history of tv... its easy to forget because recently netflix made it seem like we could just directly pay for content as just entertainment (like movies always were).
but those days are gone and we are returning to the roots. i dont think a single streamer doesnt have an ad tier and we are starting to lose the ad free pay more options too (disney, amazon)
That it was ok in the past certainly doesn't mean it's ok now. And TV advertising wasn't as sinister as it is now with targeted ads that require a detailed profile of every viewer. Everyone just got the same ads.
If blocking ads won't be possible anymore then I'll just pirate everything. And jailbreaking TVs and other hardware.
ya agree, a targeted ad is a very different beast, its not so much the targeting thats the issue either. id much rather only see ads for stuff in interested in than stuff i really dont need. its HOW they come up with that targeting. scraping stealing tracking all the other bs that makes that targeted ad feel creepy and gross.
and if you think its not gonna get so much worse with ai able to generate 10x the ad variants... or maybe even personalized ad versions.(one day, probably too expensive now)
good thing its never been easier to hack everything, maybe we can also figure out how to hack the legal system enough to make shady stuff like recording you in your house a felony. i feel like we should start with making it so that terms in a eula cant bind you to take specific actions. inal but in the case of 2p consent states if you go to your friends house and he doesnt tell you that his tv's eula said that it'll be recording all the time then he's in trouble, but the company actually doing the recording.. scott free because they said in the eula it was the responsibility of the owner to tell everyone who comes near the tv it might be recording. ...why would you ever click that agreement that you were forced to click to use the thing that you already bought and setup, what is the actual recourse for not saying yes? go return the tv and pay the restock fee? idk that doesnt sound like a reasonable contract/agreement that should ever be enforcable. which would mean its actually the tv companies doing all the wiretapping in 2p states...
hmm.. i know im wrong in many ways but i can dream that the law could be actually reasonable.
Expensive TV also spy on you, so spending more does not help
This is the point everyone misses. It's not just that they are subsidizing the price of the TV. Whenever there is an opportunity to extract more profit, eventually they will do it. The rich are not immune from being targeted by this but they sure like to think that they are when they support this behavior in the companies they control.
Wifi access points should offer a sort of "/dev/null" network for smart devices to connect to.
How's that different than just not connecting?
Because if a device can't connect, it will often have logic to try to find other routes e.g. open WiFi nets
It would be tricky to implement, but a network tarpit that responds on TCP as if outgoing packets are being accepted and routed might be useful.
I read of this tactic a few years ago. Some mentioned adding a phony static IP/gateway/DNS to avoid it connecting to open wifi(should this tech permit it).
I could imagine the EU would consider banning that for privacy reasons if it's raised by the right organization.
> Unfortunately, every few months the display tries to coax them into connecting to WiFi, and it confuses the heck out of them.
I'm assuming, perhaps incorrectly, that if the TV had a crap connection it would stop nagging.
I’m just curious what brand the tv is? That way I can be sure to avoid it.
It doesn't matter, it's all of them.
Hilariously enough, the sort of TVs used to display advertising in public places[1] don't have any of this annoying spy/adware installed.
1: https://tru-vumonitors.com/21in-to-65in-monitors/
True, but they're MUCH more expensive. For example, the lowest-end 43" this company sells for a little over $2000; you can find ones on Amazon for a tenth the price. Yes, a lot of that is the industrial quality, but some of it is the spy/adware subsidization.
Yup. I just find it funny that the one place it's unacceptable to show ads is over other people's ads.
I thought I remembered LG or some other brand was identifying ads in your content to replace them with other ads.
I'm curious if someone has started cataloging these cases. These spying TVs seem like a common industry practice.
I believe GamersNexus were talking about doing more exhaustive testing across different brands after their video on LG models specifically.
There really wasn't a lot of new information in the Gamer's Nexus video. Most of what people think is new is people conflating what is possible vs what LG does and people conflating what is possible on a rooted TV vs what LG does. The whole video is very long and because it's so poorly organized and deceptively presented, it looks like LG is worse than everyone else. Rally they're just doing what we've known for a while that all TV manufacturers are doing.
> Rally they're just doing what we've known for a while [...]
s/we/I
Not 'we' or 'everyone' knew this. The write-up proving such, and a content creator summing it up (if done poorly and you can do better; time to compete?) was worthwhile for a significant amount of people.
> [...] that all TV manufacturers are doing.
Ah, everyone is doing immoral things. Then it is OK. Somehow?!
Some of us remember a past where this wasn't OK. Where not everyone was doing this. I still got a TV from that time.
Tell you the truth, I don't want to even pay the electricity this malware would require to function.
> ...it looks like LG is worse than everyone else.
IIRC, it's mentioned at at least one point in the first big video on the topic that they haven't tested other manufacturers "'Smart' TVs" but would not be surprised to discover that other manufacturers are doing the same thing. They're not a news organization owned by one of the 0.1%, so they can only do investigation and reporting so quickly.
> There really wasn't a lot of new information in the Gamer's Nexus video.
I'm not sure which video you're talking about.
If you were expecting the recent one that talks about the lulzy ASUS RCE and how it could interact with "'Smart' TVs" to have even more information about "TV" vulnerabilities or consumer-hostile features, then your expectations are out of line.
If you're asserting that you knew nearly everything in the initial "Wow, these LG 'Smart' 'TVs' can really easily become always-on spy devices, and -in some respects- already are!" video, well, okay? There are those of us who know that shady shit is going on because we have ten brain cells to rub together, a moderate level of awareness of the world around us, and can pretty easily connect the dots. It's an entirely different thing to demonstrate that that is going on for the benefit of people who are -for some reason- reluctant to believe that -yes- Big Megacorps do heinous things to their customers in order to make a bit more money because they don't expect to get caught... and even if they get caught, the punishment will only be a tiny fraction of the profit gotten from doing those things. [0]
[0] The biggest irony here is that objections to claims that this is how Big Megacorps typically do business with us Little People are often dismissed as "4D chess" or "conspiracy theories"... but, like, this behavior is a textbook example of a rational economic actor responding reasonably to market incentives. This is the "Invisible Hand Of The Market" at work.
A video on vulnerabilities in Asus routers was released yesterday: https://youtube.com/watch?v=kYnwCx2SNYY
But if you are talking TVs specifically, I expect they will get back to that too.
https://mrbruh.com/asusrouter/
Nice.It's been many years, but they last time I tried that app it was completely useless.
He bought a whole bunch of TVs and he’s testing them right now. Check out his YT channel.
They could have started with actually decrypting what was sent rather than a breathless 2 hours of monetised nonsense. Show me the http posts with the data that's actually sent.
Cool... Would it be possible to poison all that nice telemetry with perfectly good information, live from Hogwarts or from some other interesting place? The Village from the series "The Prisoner" might also be a good place to send telemetry from.
This stuffs mad, should I be doing something to my Samsung TV to neuter it? Has anyone rolled all this up somewhere?
There was just a post yesterday about how to root your samsung. I rooted my samsung and removed ads, mics, and my agent is looking into this one as we speak [codex].
Happy to post to github if you'd like.
Please do post to GitHub, I have a Samsung projector I'd love to root
Any word on rooting TCL models?
I haven't looked into TCL at all, but everything I know on this topic I learned in one day, so if you have even a $20 a month AI subscription and you're passionate I'd say give it a go.
There needs to be a class action against these companies. People should straight up go to jail for how invasive these TVs are.
Except none of it is illegal, so what would you sue them for?
Wiretapping is a felony in most jurisdictions with 5 years prison per instance.
How many years is it for 10 million devices?
Under GDPR a fair amount is illegal
Don't connect it to the internet.
I keep seeing this, and I still think it's a ridiculous ask. Whether you like it or not, the vast majority is not savvy enough to think about this, and they generally just want Netflix to work without an additional service. For a majority of people 600 is expensive, and they don't want to have to spend another 30-100 depending on the device.
Just wait until https://sidewalk.amazon/ (or competing solutions) hits Smart TV manufacturers so they can still collect data / do ad operations.
Or what the recent bitcoin wallet attack did and just put a cellular chip inside the device so it can always communicate outside.
The monthly cost of a sim card is pretty high relative to the actual value of targeting ads to the user, especially when most of their customer base is already connecting it to wifi. Sidewalk requires a very cheap module - the EBYTE E220-900M22S is under $3 and and the Wio-SX1262 is $4, compared to cellular connections which - last time I checked - were $5/mo per device, depending on data requirements. Maybe 5G has changed that. I guess a MFG could also only renew a SMS contract for IMEIs where the underlying device hasn't been connected to the internet via wifi.
Do a search on X on the topic, the news about Samsung was broken on there by a guy who had rooted his Samsung TV using AI tools and he and others created guides for neutering the stuff out of it
He also got his OpenAI account banned after sharing the findings for 'violating cyber policies'. https://x.com/i/trending/2113715638950912393
I'm glad for that. The harder OpenAI squeezes the more people leave for open source models.
Unplug it.
Selling it off might be a good solution
That makes it someone else's problem who is less informed. You shouldn't be fine foisting problems on people too ignorant to deal with it.
Market gets flooded with these devices. Someone notices they are cheap, opens a Reddit thread about what is going on. Google Search picks it up. Now people who search for this TV (new or used) see a hit about malware in this TV. Buyers need to perform due diligence. However, in EU, sellers need to inform buyers of obvious negative sides of a product. Malware appears to be one of them.
I agree with you in principle, but also you can’t fight all the battles singlehandedly :(
That's why we fight together as best we can. Syndicate. Spread awareness. Do whatever you are able, and damnit, we both know it's more than nothing. If not for yourself, then do it for those you care about most.
Not buy smart TVs and especially Samsung smart devices in general?
From what I heard these are especially awful, even by low IoT standards.
What about my existing device(s)? I don't want to be the one piling on the huge mountain of electronic trash! So how can I save my device from evil?
Take over using own software update signed with private key 4?
(no idea how likely is for someone trustworthy to publish one...)
All smart TVs are evil and you’d be hard pressed to find a non smart tv these days.
Samsung does seem to be particularly bad. I’ve heard enough stories that I would never buy one of their products.
LG is even worse.
Yeah "We own the glass". :(
A perhaps relevant "Clean Your TV" project (although it doesn't work for Samsung): https://github.com/Gathin23/cleanyourtv
i wonder if the Samsung / LG stuff is how the stock market seemed so "predictable" to some people in early morning trading for a while... imagine having the keys to buckets containing all the plaintext gathered from all the tvs listening in conference rooms on earnings days...
>how the stock market seemed so "predictable" to some people in early morning trading for a while
Has this been quantified? Otherwise it's easy to fall for confirmation bias, eg. "facebook is secretly listening to you"
> confirmation bias, eg. "facebook is secretly listening to you"
Agreeing with your general point - don't jump to conclusions without evidence - but I don't like it if we're now establishing the "Facebook/Google/Apple/etc is secretly listening to you" rumors as the canonical example of that behavior, and thereby exempting companies from further scrutiny in this.
We've seen that by now there exists both the will and the technical means to pull off stuff like this. So even if it used to be a baseless rumor and urban legend, it deserves to be re-checked periodically, because companies might start to do it for real at some point. Samsung here actually did.
(Google also comes awfully close with its "song detector" which is now a stock Android feature I think)
The thing about the facebook is listening to you rumors is that the reality is so much worse than them actually surreptitiously listening to you. Their knowing who you're interacting with and what you're likely to talk about is more alarming. Dismissing facebook listening to your conversations is shortsighted in a way I find fairly repulsive.
So... Wiretapping is pretty clear violation. And it's punished severely in most jurisdictions (eg: OpenAI engineer installing wiretaps).
So, this is wiretapping at a mass scale. Just how many crimes do the executive class occur before they get turned into the past-tense... The executed class?
I am for a corporate death penalty. Companies that engage in such mass criminal activities do not deserve to exist.
Since you consented to it, legally it's not wiretapping.
You really don’t even need corporate death penalty , just actual corporate hard time in jail
¿Por qué no los dos?
Executive class? I expect there was at least one engineer involved that should be facing millions of counts of wiretapping, so a few million years in prison.
Found the C level.
There's plenty good reasons to have microphones in products. The simple obvious one is voice control. Legality and illegality all depends how it's used and controlled. And the company is controlling this remotely.
And your rank and file engineer or software dev is going to have low/no understanding of the subterfuge and illegality that the Executive class puts together as a final product. The features are possible, but the labor only knows their pieces. Executives are the ones selling illegally gotten data to "their 500 sponsors".
Don't excuse your peers' actions. Engineers are smart people. They know what they're doing. And C levels aren't putting anything together as a product. They are giving direction and paying others (engineers) to do that.
Everyone involved is to blame (including management), but it is an engineer somewhere that actually makes these things. Devices don't magically start spying because a business person makes a deal. The data doesn't magically end up in the hands of their 500 partners. There are large datastores to scale and integrations that require work to build.
And even if they're never held accountable (I expect they won't be), you should at least be acknowledging that they have no ethics and shunning them, not defending them for actually being the ones that built surveillance hellworld.
Such a dumb take.
First, no single engineer that will completely implement this "spying feature". A hardware engineer knows how to put the mic inside the TV, the FW engineer knows how to write driver for application to get mic data, the application knows how use the pre-trained ML blob to process the data and send the result to Cloud. At that level, no one really knows what happening any more.
Can they make educated guess what is happening? yes, but still, it's just a guess.
There would be "alignment meeting" accross the various team, but trust me, they would never use the word "spying" in any slides.
it makes zero sense to go after the engineers since they are hundreds of times as fungible as the executives. There's a reason the RICO act exists.
It makes plenty of sense: they made the devices spy. They collected and stored the data. They built everything. It's like saying it doesn't make sense to go after the gangster shaking down store owners. Yes it does. You go after the boss for ordering it and the person who actually did the bad thing for doing it.
Again, you sound like a C level, with throwing everyone not an executive under the bus.
Executives can make the actual illegal and horrible plan, and divy up the work in pieces, so that labor is not aware of exactly what they're constructing. Executives have the complete picture. Its their idea. They know what's going on.
The microphone? It could be a voice interaction tool.
The spyware? Thats logging and monitoring of bugs for patches.
Automated image recognition? Again, more sketchy, but legal, and used to optimize those avenues of usage.
Its only the pieces used *in illegal ways* as ordered by executives that are the problem. If you're not a C level yourself, not sure why you're simping for them.
And the Samsung violating criminal statutes with wiretapping laws is the problem. I would rather blame the company, C levels first. 50 million years (5 years per, 10 million devices sold) of jailtime should be sufficient with dissolution and disbursement to all affected buyers of hardware. And, jailing of the C levels. But instead, you want to go after the electronic engineer who designed a PCB with a microphone. Yeah, im sure *he or she* had plans on creating spy devices across the world.
I think you'll find that I'm the only one in this thread that's not excusing anyone. There is no "instead." They all deserve 50 million years of prison. They all know what they're doing.
Maybe not the engineer who designed a microphone, but certainly the ones who integrated it into the spying platform. The TV doesn't accidentally send that data back. The data doesn't accidentally store itself, and it doesn't accidentally send itself to partners or feed into an ad model. The CEO is also probably not personally working the sales funnel. There's an entire line of people who all knew exactly what was happening.
So there's three types of positions here:
1) Those who gave the order (position of power). Often a chain of command.
2) Those who planned it (usually the same or merged with group #1).
3) Those who implement the plan. The engineer, the soldier, the distributor (all down to the line of the logistics driver who delivered the evil TV), etc.
For some strange reason group #1 is called executives. They do not execute much though; they order others to, but execute sounds like they work hard, I guess. Those are indeed the most liable, and we must explain the why. Think Hitler, Himmler, Stalin, Mielke, etc. Lower down the line you get the Einsatzgruppe commanders.
The soldier who executed Jews (among other minority groups, mind you) with a gun is liable, but part of a power structure. If he refuses, he can and will get in trouble. Mass murder generates trauma, so it is executed by pawns or pawns of lieutenants. NKVD solved this by using others to execute.
Ergo: the higher up the chain, the more liable these people were as they had more power to say no.
That someone else would say yes is a red herring excuse. An engineer is in a position of power. They're an educated specialist in their field, they get paid for their job (not forced to implement in West), can say no. They can even blow the whistle. If those in power cannot find a fool to do their errands, they must do it themselves (and they cannot as no expertise), or lay down the idea.
The gas used to gas people in concentration camps didnt magically end up there. They weren't lied to that they'd get a shower by people who didn't knew what would happen. They knew or could've known, but they chose not to act.
(I'm using older examples of genocide as they are established and well documented; I am aware of more recent examples, but 1) this hasn't been solved legally, 2) I leave that comparison as an exercise to the reader.)
I love this mental gymnastics. C levels are payd millions for "the burden of responsibility", but somehow medium wage guy somewhere in Korea is responsible.
Whether you were well compensated for your wrongs doesn't affect whether you did them. They are all responsible.
Uh huh.
And when you're "wrong in isolation of the task to complete" is completely legal, you still want to destroy engineers and developers. That engineer doesnt know your illegal shit plan to do horrible thing. Most engineers, if told to do illegal stuff, would refuse.
That C level DOES know the illegal plan to do horrible thing, and their staff attorneys said you could make $20 billion, and pay $1 billion in fines if caught. I say RICO the fucking C levels for an ongoing criminal conspiracy, and depending how severe, death penalty.
And remember, we're talking about Samsung violating wiretapping laws, which is a criminal crime, and not some tort. I want blood here from management who ordered this, not a few dollars on a godsdamned voucher to buy yet another Scamsung device.
But no, your idea is to blame the rank and file folks who have maybe 5% of the plan, and legal at that, and blame them. Nah, you sound like a simp.
My idea, as I've repeated multiple times, is to blame everyone, and yes, I think they should all be criminally liable. You're the one who seems to think only business people can do wrong, and are perfectly willing to go to bat for the people who actually design and build these systems.
We're not limited to a bounded amount of blame to divvy out. We can blame the mob boss and the hitmen.
Ah yes, those completely blameless engineers who had no idea that the code they were writing to speak to third-party devices to record and upload voice would be used for uncouth purposes.
The rank-and-file do follow marching orders, but let us not pretend they are all innocent sheep who could not envision the true intentions of the design. "I just thought it would be a neat thing if all sounds in a room were recorded and uploaded to Samsung servers without bothering the end user!"
This is why you buy a display panel and not a smart TV.
Or just buy the subsidized TV and never connect it to the internet. I've yet to see them adding cellular modems.
I'll probably get a kiosk panel next time. But this time, yeah, I've just not configured the network. All content comes from the console. Which is a different bundle of problems and no better in a lot of ways, but it's more of a known quantity.
>and never connect it to the internet
That saves you from some potential issues but not others. My google search magic isn't working, but there was some manufacture a number of years ago who's TVs were crashing because they'd save up massive amounts of data to upload and either exhaust all their memory or fill up the disk because it never connected online.
Also, if you live in a household you have to make sure every other person behind that TV doesn't connect it to the net at some point for some reason.
Oh no! My TV turned off for a few seconds...
> Also, if you live in a household you have to make sure every other person behind that TV doesn't connect it to the net at some point for some reason
You could always ban it from your network at the router.
Still doesn't stop them from connecting it to wifi sharing on the phone.
Right......
Like none of these TV's hooks to an Open Wifi Hotspot and abuse you.
How many open WiFi networks are around you? I live in a city and there are 0 within range. ISP routers have defaulted to password protection for more than a decade. The only places with open WiFi are places of business that provide guest work. Even those are far less common and usually password protected these days.
Trivial to prove that, just set up an open wifi and show it connecting, getting an IP, and then transmitting data.
I haven't managed to reproduce it.
I've seen this "yeah well they'll just connect to open WiFI" for 10+ years at this point and have never seen any vaguely credible reproduction.
Best you get is "my friend's LG TV connected to the internet even after changing his WiFI password" vaguely recalled hearsay.
Or the second order retreat-to-motte argument of "well they'll add that to the firmware overnight when ad revenues drop if enough people stop connecting to the internet".
It'd be trivial to prove and yet it has never been proven. I'll give you three guesses why, and the first two don't count.
That's exactly the point.
Underrated approach. Even if the screens are a tad more expensive by today's subsidized standards. There are also many FHD and 4k non-smart TVs on the second hand market, with many given away for free on your preferred marketplace website.
We’ve opted into surveillance as a feature. It’s sad.
Now if someone can root tizen so we can actually bypass their insane restrictions on booting to an HDMI input by default it would be appreciated.
It's beyond me why people are still buying smart TVs. I've juist looked on a large EU webshop (bol.com). You can buy a non-smart, full-HD, 40 inch TV for less than $200.
> full-HD, 40 inch TV
are we living in 2010 or something?
Not sure of purpose of your question. Not everyone needs a larger TV than that or accommodate one in their living space.
People want 4K 55+ inch TVs. Thats the market these days. You might personally want a small one, but you aren't the norm.
They're probably questioning the resolution would be my guess.
the bigger resolution doesn't make the television more interesting to watch.
> television
Are we living in 1990 or something?
Because for most people to get any utility out of it, they need to plug in a smart device.
It doesn't matter whether you run android TV from the TV itself or an external device.
All the popular streaming services throttle or block open devices.
There's no regulation on it, because regulators want locked-down hardware that can only take actions approved by them.
Why in this world of yours is the only option Android TV?
Even with that, there are plenty of safer distros, or you can even get a cheap mini pc and throw one of the many awesome Linux distros on that have zero tracking and are far more capable/performant.
>All the popular streaming services throttle or block open devices.
This just isn't true. Have never encountered this.
Its effectively impossible to get some streaming services to stream content >720p to a linux device. I know I tried several years ago to use Disney+ and could not find any way to get 1080p content, even on a windows machine. I think now they have an official windows store app, but still refuse to stream full HD or 4k content to a web browser.
More recently I've tried hbo max and it does the same thing. Could not get higher than 720p, even with chrome and whatever DRM options theoretically fix the problem.
Can you play Netflix or Disney+ in a browser on Linux in full 4K and HDR?
I remember that being a problem in the past, that you were limited to lower resolutions.
Good luck getting a 4k stream from any streaming service on Linux:
https://help.netflix.com/en/node/30081
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39257581
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42685008
Your only options are to sail the high seas or use Android TV.
I find Apple TV to be a decent compromise.
People want 4k, HDR, 60+ inches.
A lot of rooms are space constrained, but yes, even the cheapest phones are 1080p and most have been for a decade. It's ridiculous how far larger screens have been lagging behind.
And probably OLED or something close to that
All the ad tracking in smart TVs has driven prices down. Tracking and ad data has turned a customer from a one time purchaser to a revenue stream for as long as the device is in use.
If you want a high quality TV for the best price your best bet is either disable/opt out of all the tracking data, or even better just never hook it up to the internet at all and plug an AppleTV or Chromecast on it.
If you look for a Samsung TV without “smart” features you pretty much have to find them under “commercial displays” and you’ll pay a premium for it.
The problem is that now companies are starting to block features when the TV is not connected online.
I don’t find a non-smart 4K television on Bol, except for a single 800€ model. Sorry but it’s not 2016, I’m not gonna sit and watch content at a resolution worse than my laptop’s.
because sadly Samsung and LG make the best OLED TVs on the market by far. what you need instead, is to buy some tv box to use on the side.
What keywords did you use? Dumb TV gives zero hits.
It's a category, "Geen Smart TV", under TV's. There are several for sale up to 55".
https://www.bol.com/nl/nl/l/42-inch-tv-s-zonder-smart-functi...
This Sony might be an option: https://www.bol.com/nl/nl/p/sony-bravia-professional-fw-55bz...
This Sony is an Android TV...
Ah right, I was looking on Google. Good to know there's a way to find dumb TVs!
because 40 inches is tiny these days (sorry boys).
Depends on your living arrangements.
Laughing as i think about the 13" set we had when I was a kid.
People were up in arms (and rightly so) when the LG TVs were found out for their spying thanks to the Gamers Nexus investigation. At least LG TVs can be rooted and you can install apps like Glasshouse [0] to disable all the telemetry and add substantial new features that you can't do via the officially sanctioned Dev Mode. The vulnerability that enabled rooting was recently patched so hopefully another can be found.
Hopefully similar apps will come along for Samsung now that root on it can be achieved [1].
[0] https://github.com/rorygallagher2024/glasshouse
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50218633
vocal people on the Internet are "up in arms" but does the general public care that some LG exec says they "own the glass"? I think that at best, they might care until they see the ad-subsidized price tags.
To what extend do these "smart" products state how, when and what data they are collecting and selling?
Isn't it high time for legislation that at least makes it clear on the box what kind of sensors and integrations it has and how bad the product is privacy wise?
Also, shouldn't corporate spying disguised as automated content recognition and classification be limited or outright be banned?
And all this connected garbage should by law be able to function with the cord cut and without registration, and if an update negatively changes the advertised product characteristics the customer must be allowed to return it for full paid price even if it is 10 years old. Force the manufactures to make statements on the "box" about the features, the support duration and level, and the privacy characteristics.
Why don't politicians care about this?
Why don't politicians care about this?
Because there have not yet been any high profile cases involving the collected data used to embarrass or convict a politician. It just takes one embarrassed congress critter to get a giant red sticker on all these devices, their boxes and ads: "This Device Transcribes and Reports Your Conversations" and that is before including those that upload camera screenshots of what you are watching and video of the viewers doing something untoward.
This is literally the history of the Video Privacy Protection Act (1988, back when video rental was a thing). It was passed immediately after, in 1987, a journalist obtained and published the video rental history of a supreme court judge nominee.
Your outrage is well earned, but fairly rare. The reason nothing is done is because the public doesn't care.
> Why don't politicians care about this?
Because it is not the subject that will win them the next election.
And even if they care, some things are easier said than done. With politicians who care, you get things like GDPR, which goes in the right direction, but is a huge legal mess. And it is a mess because it can't be made simple.
Obviously, you have to take consumer interests into account, but you also have to take companies interest into account too, both big and small, otherwise they will just stop doing business, which is bad for the economy and will mean that consumers won't find what they want at a reasonable price. You have to think about the loopholes big companies will invariably find, and covering them will add complexity, but still make it so that small companies can comply without a full time team of lawyers assisting them.
For example, you say the consumer could return it for a full refund on a bad update, but to whom? Should the burden be put on the small retailer who sold it to you (and may be out of business)? There is already plenty of stuff the manufacturer must tell you, usually one a piece of paper no one reads, and the more you ask, the less people will read because there will be too much information. A "privacy score" may be a good idea, if well designed, it will share a place with the energy score, environment score, repairability score, safety signs, origin, etc... And how do you differentiate actual automated content recognition that consumers could want from spyware, formally, so that the first one is allowed but not the latter.
All that to say that it is not impossible, but even with politicians caring, it is complicated. European politicians care (because it can win them votes), the results are so complicated they are getting ridiculed by the rest of the world.
They don't care because of several reasons. 1. They get paid not to 2. They are told not to.
Alot of this spying ends up producing valuable data for different agencies to purchase which otherwise they cannot legally obtain without a warrant. Sure some of it has some commercial value, but a lot of it is probably more valuable for domestic spy operations.
They still can’t technically obtain it without a warrant. They do it anyway.
Politicians didn’t even do anything about Epstein. I’m pretty sure they’re all compromised.
Who bears responsibility when TV makers and data brokers undoubtedly had clear and verifiable evidence passing through their systems?
Follow the money
> Also, shouldn't corporate spying disguised as automated content recognition and classification be limited or outright be banned?
A lot of info collected by 3 letter agencies is based on it.
Claude Code for coding and DeepSeek + opencode for reverse engineering at this point.
DeepSeek will break the binary into code and Claude will search for problems. Now you have most of exploitation chain.
Claude is happily reverse engineering for me, a recently sunsetted mobile game and an old PlayStation game. If it doesn’t moralize at you and refuse to do it, it’s easier to use the smarter model on the subsidized subscription. I’m doing as much as I can now before they start refusing.
Can you share the details of your stack? I have some obscure commercial Windows software from 90s I wish to run. Claude refuses any RE attempts.
Dude they just did. If you didn't understand it then you aren't gonna be able to use it.
I'm also interested in your setup!
You know what bothers me? So much of human ingenuity wasted on rather worthless tasks.
Doesn't take much ingenuity to code up a basic pretrained TF lite model to analyze an image.
Oh man, I wonder if there is some weird self-selection bias when it comes to HN audience. It is a little like my dad telling me repairing cars is easy: you only have to do x,y and z without considering that I don't have years of experience of doing just that.
But my point is imagine if the person that did that simple TD lite model pre-training did something less... ad-related in his life.
ML when connected to business applications is one of those things that sound complicated but is in practice just a few lines of code usually. I'd argue that anything frontend is way harder to code up than a pretrained TF lite model, despite the general idea being the opposite.
You are ignoring the point I am making so I will make it a little more explicit for the sake of ensuring that it is not just my inability to make my point across:
What is the societal opportunity cost of a person not doing $this_thing_you_mentioned and applying it to just about anything else.
You still need to learn enough to convince yourself you can do it, and then do it. A lot of people just shy away from this stuff because they think they'll never get it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
It’s mind boggling that in the UK there’s a law that says:
> “A plank of wood must not be carried along a pavement. It can only be moved if it is being unloaded from a vehicle or taken into a building.”
But big tech cannot be regulated at all. We used to regulate any minor thing that was annoying enough, but a whole industry spying and prying on the whole population is fine.
> But big tech cannot be regulated at all.
It cannot be regulated because we let dollar/capital rise above political authority.
Journalism also fails in uncovering it.
Public awareness is step one.
I don't know that this is a discovery issue. It has been widely publicised that all your devices are spying on you for at least a decade now - hard proof was previously somewhat hard to come by, but a suitable regulatory agency could have gone digging at any point.
>It has been widely publicised that all your devices are spying on you for at least a decade now
This sort of equivocation, where any privacy invasion gets rounded off to "spying on you" doesn't help either. Clickbait headlines over android making 100 requests to google gets lumped together with more serious privacy violations like random SDKs selling your location data, causing a learned helplessness where people think "spying on you" is normal and can't be avoided.
> where people think "spying on you" is normal and can't be avoided
Normal people, yes, but this is exactly what tech regulators ought to be gunning for. Even post GDPR, we just don't seem to have enough bulldogs in enforcement...
Journalism is almost dead. And if where it’s not it’s more of a summary of what happened rather than deep investigations. But only a small percentage of the population care about deep investigations anyway.
The main issue is that the attention economy and social pressure are so hard to break. People keep using WhatsApp because it is convenient and everyone is there. There are no other reasons.
The major other reason is that it is free, and most people are money-constrained.
Personalized advertising is a progressive tax. Because the rich spend more and the poor spend less, Meta et al makes more money from the rich than it makes from the poor, while offering the same service to everybody else. As a result, we get the educated rich upper-middle class complaining about advertising, while everybody else is happy about not having to pay their long-distance charges any more.
Tons of media outlets have covered privacy failures in the past. The public doesn't care, and so the journalists stop caring as well.
Awareness and care is one thing. A unanimous action plan is another. Violation of privacy is not viewed through similar lens as say theft or other forms of crimes.
media profits from privacy failures by proxy due to adtech networks.
There's gigantic conflict of interest there.
journalistic media resolve this by having independent editorials. There's of course still structural issues, especially if those media outlets are traded or seen as investment targets, but the general structure has worked for 50-60 years.
This is one of the problems with the neo-journalistic outlets and "citizen journalism". They don't have the staffing or discipline to run that sort of operation.
> “A plank of wood must not be carried along a pavement. It can only be moved if it is being unloaded from a vehicle or taken into a building.”
Is that a good law or is it a barnacle? Is it enforced in the UK?
It isn't entirely true, it has to be "to the obstruction, annoyance, or danger of the residents or passengers" for it to be illegal https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Vict/10-11/89
Although it does appear to be true in London https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Vict/2-3/47/section/54
Actually it is. Around 2005 I was stopped by police at 2am in Hackney and told in no uncertain terms that it was illegal for me to be walking with a 2x4 in my hand
Next time bring a bicycle.
That was twenty years ago my dude
It was added as context for why someone might be carrying a wooden plank at 2 in the morning and why police might be concerned. It is my understanding that Hackney has changed dramatically in the intervening years
Yeah, today you would stopped and frisked, detained, photographed, fingerprinted, interrogated, and finally jailed… for speaking out against the asshats who the think this is a good law.
Your cavalier anti plank control attitude is what’s wrong with Americans
This is why Hollywood cornered the market in slapstick comedy in the silent movie era
Big tech isn't being regulated? There's increasingly privacy related laws, both in the US and abroad, that directly affect them. How many times a year do we read about Big Tech being issued 9-10 figure fines? One could state that they're not regulated enough, but to say they're unregulated is just false.
> We used to regulate any minor thing that was annoying enough
Your example is a good reason why that approach was foolish.
Regulation is only as good as enforcement of it is. And it seems 9-10 figure fines are still in the realm of 'we'll deal with the fallout later'.
So no, it's not literally unregulated, but if it was regulated effectively Samsung would be scared shitless to pull stuff like this. They clearly aren't.
> Big Tech being issued 9-10 figure fines?
Are these fines ever paid? Or is it appeal upon appeal and 10 years later they pay a tenth of the fine?
Is that a thing? I ask because I and my best friend have vivid memories of my step dad, who used to be a postman, cycling home from town with 4 - 5m timbers under one arm. This would have been late 80s/early 90s. He’d call out and wave to people he knew with his “free” hand as he passed as well.
If even moving a plank of wood is illegal I can’t imagine how he got away with that, unmolested by plod, for so many years.
In the UK, 'pavement' doesn't refer to any paved road, but to what Americans call a 'sidewalk'.
Bicycles are ridden on the road, not the pavement.
Sometimes people ride bicycles on the pavement, but doing so with a long piece of wood would be very dangerous indeed.
Maybe a bicycle counts as a vehicle.
Spoiler: it isn't. This is made up.
It's heavily paraphrased, but close enough I'd say.
> Every person who shall roll or carry any cask, tub, hoop, or wheel, or any ladder, plank, pole, showboard, or placard, upon any footway, except for the purpose of loading or unloading any cart or carriage, or of crossing the footway:
- https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Vict/2-3/47/section/54
The UK has dozens of these ancient laws that were never removed from the books. It doesn't mean they are enforced.
But it's not actually a real law, and cannot be enforced.
People carrying planks of wood on the sidewalk is obvious to everyone and clear inconvenience. What tech companies do in software is not, and has no physical immediately tangible effect on the world. These things should be regulated, but they're so opaque and disconnected from the eventual negative externalities that it's hard to get legislators to see it.
The horizon problem.
If a human cannot immediately see a negative outcome on their visual or mental horizon based on the knowledge they have at that moment most of their insights or feelings about what problems will occur will be incorrect.
Talking about AI and data is a good example of this. A bit of data here and there seems useless, but the moment you get enough the pattern of your life can emerge from it and suddenly you can be tracked and manipulated with an amazingly high probability. And it's not a one time thing either. Anything mispredicted gets put back in your profile as another data point.
If your building or other construction is unsafe for the public, the local authority has the right to make it safe, if necessary by demolishing it; if you are insufficiently responsive to a notice that you must make it safe. Maybe tech companies need that kind of incentive before they will care enough not to subject their customers to this kind of abuse.
From the government perspective this is not abuse, in fact many governments make it mandatory by law
In the interests of accuracy, the law (the Metropolitan Police Act 1839) actually states
""" 54 Prohibition of nuisances by persons in the thoroughfares.
Every person shall be liable to a penalty not more than level 2 on the standard scale, who, within the limits of the metropolitan police district, shall in any thoroughfare or public place, commit any of the following offences; (that is to say,)
...
8. Every person who shall roll or carry any cask, tub, hoop, or wheel, or any ladder, plank, pole, showboard, or placard, upon any footway, except for the purpose of loading or unloading any cart or carriage, or of crossing the footway:
... """ https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Vict/2-3/47/section/54
The plank of wood is one element in a much broader statute, rather than an example of hyper-specificity. And it might have been strictly applied at the time, but that doesn't mean you're definitely going to get into trouble nowadays.
In a similar vein, the UK *does* have laws that affect big tech. UK GDPR places requirements on processing of personal data:
""" Personal data shall be:
(a)processed lawfully, fairly and in a transparent manner in relation to the data subject (‘lawfulness, fairness and transparency’); """ https://www.legislation.gov.uk/eur/2016/679/article/5
Whether that's properly enforced is (as with the plank) a completely different matter.
In the UK, at least, we don't need new regulations, we need to more effectively apply the regulations we already have in place. But there is also a balance to be made between enforcement through fines and enforcement through changing behaviour: it's much better to work with companies to bring them into compliance than it is to just fine them and without actually changing anything.
Just to emphasise:
> within the limits of the metropolitan police district
It's a local London law. In England such laws are passed by parliament because there is no other mechanism, but in countries with devolved lawmaking states and cities have much crazier laws.
There is a counter incentive, the money the companies pay the politicians.
> There is a counter incentive, the money the companies pay the politicians.
That's disingenuous. The public has been told a beautiful fairy tale about technology for years. There are huge outcries every single time any politician tries to regulate big tech.
Now I know that this isn't because the public is somehow ideologically opposed to regulation. We have been paid off, just as much as the politicians have. When they increase the prices of televisions and say it's because they this new regulation, we show up to support them.
> The public has been told a beautiful fairy tale about technology
He typed, from a tiny device in his hand, from a bed in an air-conditioned apartment millions of miles away. Or perhaps from a jet sailing through the sky, via a satellite in space
Modern technology is basically magic but all anyone wants is flying cars.
Wi-Fi on planes is truly astounding when you think for even a moment.
The fairy tale is not about the capability of technologies. That part is wonderful. The fairy tale is the techno-optimist "democratization" nonsense. I can recommend reading "Cyberlibertarianism" by David Golumbia if that distinction doesn't make sense to you.
It is not plausible that a company would raise prices as some kind of revenge or play to overturn a regulation. That is not how prices are set in a free market because any company that did that would immediately lose to their competition. Unless we have a cartel of television manufacturers, which would be news to me.
Any rule is as good as its enforcement.
The plank rule just exists, not enforced, so nobody observes it.
Same will happen with the high-tech regulation. In fact, it is already happening left and right where it does exist.
We see see two failure modes in the US, and I assume they are universal. On the small scale, enforcers don't enforce, because of resource constraints, and higher up the food chain, the enforcers are the ones breaking the law.
> But big tech cannot be regulated at all.
As far as the censorship goes UK is trying hard. So follow the money?
Devils advocate ish reason:
People understand what a plank of wood is and how it works.
People, including the vast majority of politicians, don’t understand our technology at all. It’s magic. Why does a light come on when they flip the switch? Magic. Computers are deep black magic.
How can they write effective regulation? Or tell the difference between proposals that are good or bad written by others?
If politicians regulated big tech more we’d probably end up with a ton of regulatory capture that legislated monopolies for big tech and shut out open source and startups, because who has the money to influence the ignorant lawmakers at scale?
We are now in a world where small groups of high priests understand certain things, and few others. We’ve been there for a while but it’s gotten far more opaque in the last 25 years or so.
Even something like a nuclear reactor or an aircraft is much easier to explain. The last episode of the Chernobyl series did a great job explaining what was wrong with that reactor design to a layperson. But computing… and networks… people who do understand it have forgotten just how ludicrously arcane and inscrutable it is to most.
A big difference too is that by the Church-Turing theorem there is (as a side effect of it) a provably infinite number of ways to perform any computation. Which means you can’t just legislate “don’t do that.” Physical machines are not like that.
We used to solve this problem by embedding experts in government bodies.
We can't do that any more; the people who support tech regulation are so cartoonishly anti-corporate that any suggestion of embedding somebody who understands tech will be met with accusations of lobbying and a careful review of that person's employment history.
It's obvious to pretty much everybody that regulating banks, railroads or phone companies requires people who have previously worked for banks, railroads and phone companies, and have a good understanding of how such organizations work on the inside. We, generally, don't do that with tech.
The point of having advisors was supposed to be that they would help the elected person make up for lack of knowledge, but it doesn't seem like that pans out in reality. Either the advisors are just as lost, or they are largely ignored.
The need for good advisors is a major point in Sun-Tzu's Art of War.
Surround yourself with good advisors and the surrounding kingdoms will notice and be less inclined to attack. If you have bad advisors, your enemies will perceive that as their opening
Or they are corrupt. Corrupt advisors are as old as civilization.
supply chain attack
> > “A plank of wood must not be carried along a pavement. It can only be moved if it is being unloaded from a vehicle or taken into a building.”
This isn't a real thing. It's like the thing about it being legal to shoot Welshmen if they're in York after nightfall, and other such shit.
The problem with regulating big tech is the unplacable internet. Who can regulate the internet? Who gets to make rules for the global network?
Politicians are keenly aware that regulation has to be administered, and administration costs money. The internet subsists on low overhead, and per jurisdiction administration would significantly change almost everything about the current internet. The public wont allow that.
If the public actually starts demanding regulation, we will see a fracturing of the internet into national networks. It will become impossible (or at least uneconomical) to run reddit, youtube, or facebook as global networks. They might continue to exists, but they will be sectioned off.
But it’s absolutely placeable. The internet is run by real computers that exist in the physical world.
In that scheme, would regulation be based on where the servers are located? What's to stop me from routing American traffic to Armenia, where the laws don't exist? What's to stop me routing it to Russia, where the general legal principle is that illegality won't be pursued if it's no against Russian citizens?
The laws of the country would apply to the objects in that country. If you route traffic from America to Russia, the hosts/clients in America need to follow American laws and the hosts/clients in Russia need to follow Russian laws.
Dog bark and baby crying detection are advertised features for SmartThings integrations. Door bell and door knocking are also included, this is surfaced directly if you hook the TV or sound bar into SmartThings.
I had to check this and it's true. Not saying Samsung or 3rd parties don't take advantage of any data they can collect, but the story the tweets tell is super biased against them. Here, the detection seems limited to specific pattens required for a particular feature.
In fairness, they have not earned the benefit of the doubt based on past behavior.
These folks recently did tests on major TV brands, not accepting the on-device consent forms, and then recording how much data they continued to send after consent was denied (which itself is not always possible). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_GK06_3UY8
Samsung was the single brand reviewed which actually stopped sending data after the user told it to do so.
I'm pretty sure it was actually LG?
In February Samsung agreed to stop collecting the data when opted out in the US after a few lawsuits were lining up. LG was the target of a different lawsuit in Texas which they settled and then wrote up a forced arbitration clause and doubled-down on data collection, even when opted out.
Don't buy LG TVs.
Oh don't worry, shitty WebOS is enough to put me off that (I unfortunately own one). However in this case we were talking specifically about that recent study of the effects of opt-outs, and for LG TVs the opt-out did result in the no longer detecting any tracking.
Yep, lg. After all, they believe that own your living room and their actions reflect this.
Still, calling it "PRIVACY HORROR" as per original post is typical twitter-style sensation seeking. It's an opt-in dog barking detection that causes local chip to listen for... dog barking
But does this mean they don't turn this on by default resell that data? X house has dogs or whatever?
We clearly need a whole new privacy framework where everything is optional and opt-in, plus open software to monitor this compliance.
If they wanted to know if you had dogs or babies and wanted to spy on you, they'd just transcribe the audio. People that have dogs or babies talk about them. Going to the effort to detect these and advertise it as a feature so you can secretly use it for marketing doesn't make a lot of sense.
At this point everyone knows you have a cat, dog or baby. Facebook, Instagram can scan your photos and see it. Same with Google via Photos' latest privacy changes. Google also knows if you ever get receipts emailed to you. Your credit card company and bank know, the CC company resells that data too. Shit, Keurig knows because their smart coffee maker scans the network and sees your baby monitor or smart pet food dispenser. All these companies are rediscovering and selling the same basic facts about you and your household.
I will add: Use the TV as a HUB for all IOT, light sensor so you know when the light is on or someone passes in front of the TV and there are some others but I can't remember now. They are all advertised in the Smart Things app.
I hate 2 things about my samsung tv's (I have 4 only samsung): the simplistic remote and ads on home screen. Even with custom dns sometimes they get through.
Remember guys, if they are reading it for wrongthink, they are reading it for industrial espionage.
Anthropic and openAI just announced they’re spinning out competitors to their biggest customers… right after ingesting all of their IP and contracts. Do the math.
(Or don’t, because they’ve been caught stealing math research)
> Anthropic and openAI just announced they’re spinning out competitors to their biggest customers… right after ingesting all of their IP and contracts. Do the math.
Do you have any links to further reading on this. I haven't read anything like this and also couldn't find anything in their newsrooms. The only thing I read is that they want to have more people work on implementations.
I think it's just a logical conclusion if everyone keeps feeding OpenAI and Anthropic data. I don't think it's imminent, but if AI keeps improving and regulation is very lax I could see this world developing in 5-10 years.
Say OpenAI builds GPT-11 and they realize it can do 95% of their clients work. Why not hire away key people from the client or the client's competitors and start eating into their market share? OpenAI would realize if GPT-11 has this ability then Anthropic is probably able to do the same thing. The company that has the most money and credit available is going to be able to buy more compute. OpenAI and Anthropic cannot slow down unless mandated to by the government.
>Say OpenAI builds GPT-11 and they realize it can do 95% of their clients work. Why not hire away key people from the client or the client's competitors and start eating into their market share?
Can you give me an example where this would make sense, because I just don't see e.g. OpenAI starting a grocery store chain or Anthropic building a wind turbine manufacturing company.
What I can see is that some company's products become useless, e.g. translation tools, as it is something that you can just do within ChatGPT or Claude.
I am thinking a little further into the future where companies and people themselves become more dependent on AI. If LLMs disappeared today how many companies and people could not function? Probably not many. But, in 5 years how many companies will be dependent on AI? A future where companies are dependent on big AI labs to run their business could happen. I think the business term is forwards integration, where a seller moves into one of their buyer's markets.
Also, in such a future businesses would be reorganized to use AI. That probably means less employees and reduced human complexity. The business processes are further abstracted from people making it easier for a big AI lab to move in.
If I was looking at businesses today where the big AI labs could step in I would look for businesses where they earn high margins based on intellectually complex tasks. Maybe the most pure example would be trading in the stock market since it can be completely done by a computer. Then you have areas like law which process large amounts of data but are also heavily based on relationships.
You picked physical work, but how about consulting or sales?
For consulting they don't need to start a new company. If they eat part of that market it would be with their current products where someone uses AI instead of hiring a consulting company. So a similar approach to what happened with translation.
For sales I'm sorry, but I don't think sales companies exist? Sales is usually just a part of another company. Some of those employees might be made redundant as AI products complete part of their work, but that would also happen through OpenAI's or Anthropic's products.
So for both of those I don't see what kind of company they could spin off (excluding the example of a company that does AI implementations as I mentioned that one in my initial comment) that would compete with an existing company. For all of these things offering a product that allows existing companies to replace employees sounds like the more scalable, profitable and flexible strategy.
Interesting. Could you share a link to this announce?
> because they’ve been caught stealing math research
No. They haven't been caught stealing. Tristan Buckmaster publicly expressed surprise that the OpenAI model has used the niche approach he pursued (with AI assistance). 10,000 agents exploring various approaches make it much less surprising.
Another anecdotal data from an arxiv preprint [0]: "After the paper was written, the author learned that the same result was also proved independently and by a different method by Ningyi Li [7]. The result is also contained in a paper [8] released by OpenAI on October 6, 2026, in which the proof strategy and specific choices of notation are identical to a preliminary version of the present paper that was uploaded to ChatGPT on September 8, 2026."
So not only did OpenAI publish a proof similar to one discussed on ChatGPT, but also there were other possible strategies to prove the result, that OpenAI didn't follow.
Also, up to my knowledge, on the free plan, OpenAI doesn't claim that they won't use the chat data for training. So this seems plausible.
[0]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10072
The "coincidence" defense never works for random individuals so I won't buy it when it comes companies worth billions which will lie, cheat, and deceive to make even more billions. They've been caught lying and stealing again and again. After so many years of this I think any trust put in them is either blissful ignorance or willful misdirection.
Wait are you saying: 1) the simultaneous invention defense is never valid for individuals, and 2) you don’t base your beliefs on what’s right, but on some kind of tit-for-tat retaliation?
That seems like a fraught way to live.
You’re asking a loaded question based on things that were never said. Very lowbrow.
One thing is how uniformly a rule is applied. Another thing is whether a rule is "right" to begin with. I addressed the first because it’s far more straightforward and objective. You did some mental gymnastics to name-drop the second without even the effort to say something about it. Weak strawman.
Another thing I addressed is the lack of trustworthiness of these companies. They lied to you again and again but they wouldn’t lie to you now, would they? You left that out completely, so maybe you even agree.
Next time if you want the courtesy of a reply, extend the courtesy of not bringing just low-effort strawman and loaded questions.
It's not a coincidence... they literally just span up agents on every possible variant of the problem.
There are 10k agents and Tristan's approach wasn't even groundbreaking novelty, it was literally based on existing published literature from Diego Córdoba and Luis Martínez-Zoroa that the agents have seen.
It's not just probable that agents would persue his particular niche of trying to construct a blowup. It's guaranteed if you just consider the basic setup.
The coincidence is that they took the correct path out of “every possible one” exactly after one of their users took it.
Monkeys on typewriters excuse only works for huge companies who can afford to buy opinions.
> The coincidence is that they took the correct path out of “every possible one” exactly after one of their users took it.
From what I read online that researcher also used a lot of AI to find this approach, so it might just be the one that is the easiest to find for AI agents and the timing would then only be caused by them working on it around the same time.
They also took the correct path for hundreds of other problems, where they didn't have a user that already did.
> The coincidence is that they took the correct path out of “every possible one"
My point was explicitly that this didn't happen. I said that they took every possible path and published the one that worked. It's exactly throw shit at the wall and see what sticks.
> exactly after one of their users took it.
All parties agree that what happened is that someone had told someone working at OpenAI that Anthropic employees are working on Navier stokes. This is where the timing comes from.
---
What you are implying is this: OpenAI didn't do the throw shit at the wall approach as outlined in their release blog they actually secretely monitor everyones chat logs and found the idea in Tristan's Chat history and stole and published it.
Or some variant of this. You are only implying what you think is the truth, please state it outright. Don't beat around the bush.
I’ll start with this because it sets the tone for how uninformed your opinion is, thinking you're calling out some conspiracy theory:
> they actually secretely monitor everyones chat logs
Are you for real? They openly monitor everyone’s chat logs. If you had bothered to ask ChatGPT it would literally tell you that they do it. That’s how they know (and yet still fail to report, so the mechanism isn't there for reporting to authorities) that someone is planning a school shooting [0]. They monitor anything and anyone of interest.
Now if “having agents” was enough then we’d just ask for the cure for cancer or proof for every theorem and wait for a few days. Obviously they need guidance to not get stuck in a dead end or have to brute force everything. OAI’s mathematicians weren’t able to provide a good direction so the agents stalled until someone else found the key and only then OAI had their breakthrough.
[0] https://airisk.mit.edu/ai-incidents/1375-openai-allegedly-di...
I know they monitor peoples chat logs. I'm on hacknews as much as everyone else and have read that story as well as the ones where they did report people to police based on chat logs. Thats not what I mean by conspiracy because its not conspiritotial. It's literally stated on the help page [0].
I'm not uninformed on this. I actually wasted a lot of time on it since my interests intersect at this. I've watched the numberphile interviews, read the drama, various takes etc.
What I'm saying is that its highly unlikely that in this case that Sébastien Bubeck from OpenAi decided to steal some critical idea from Buckmasters chat and feed it "Bell" the unreleased model that produced the solution.
> Obviously they need guidance to not get stuck in a dead end or have to brute force everything
Dude they did brute force everything. This is what I keep trying to say. They said they spent 130 billion output tokens.
This is quite literally like 500,000 books worth of text.
[0] https://help.openai.com/en/articles/6783457-what-is-chatgpt
> I know they monitor peoples chat logs.
> I'm not uninformed on this
Sure, that’s why in your previous comment you were making it sound ridiculous to believe OAI is “secretly monitoring everyone’s logs”. You dug that hole.
> What I'm saying is that its highly unlikely that in this case that Sébastien Bubeck from OpenAi decided to steal some critical idea from Buckmasters chat and feed it "Bell" the unreleased model that produced the solution.
Why "highly unlikely"? Because OpenAI like all other big tech would never (ab)use a mechanism they even already officially have in place to boost up their valuation? Because they never used people's data in the past? Because they aren't famous for ingesting all of the internet's data with or without permission?
You choose to give them the benefit of the doubt despite every bit of past evidence and experience. That's not an argument, that's wishful thinking that "this time it's definitely different".
This is again will be very funny race to watch. Right now you can fairly do lots of reverse enginnering or "hacking" with off the shelf Chinese models, and they are very capable (GLM3 for example) which can be run locally if you stomach the hardware. Tools like rea are also becoming more popular. If openai continues to be pedantic, they will lose the technical base given how close is the gap getting.
The company I work for has a plan B to switch to alternative, self-hosted models if providers pull off strange moves, such as drastic pricing changes. We have already switched from one provider to another once, and we do not want to get burned again. We do not reverse engineer, just regular development.
Until Kevin quits and you need to modify his work
Right, because admin is some obscure work in 2026 and no one knows how to do it.
How do you correlate owning an LLM implementation and "admin"?
Owning implementation = self-hosting one?
No I mean being responsible for the implementation and continued good functioning of something Kevin was responsible for before he quit. So uh self-hosting in a corporate context sure
But self-hosting is admin work, precisely. And everything was self-hosted or self-managed pre-cloud era. This is no different.
Have you tried Qwen3.8-Flash-Next? I found it significantly better in anything I tested than GLM5.3-Flash, but the thing is you either use Alibaba cloud or you host it yourself (no lesser quant than unsloth 4.5 or mx4/nvfp4 and kv no more quantized than int8).
It is great if you have enough RAM. I have enough to run it, but not enough for prefix cache. 27b is so much faster with long term tasks.
The Qwen3.8-Flash-Next model is ok for reverse engineering. It can definitely solve simple tasks, but it gets easily confused, and burns tokens like crazy.
I've been sick with stomach flu the past few days, so I put together a small benchmark for all the top AI models where I ask them to reverse engineer a very simple small crackme (https://www.crackmes.one/crackme/6ab4ce5195b976f8f1300b54) using Ghidrasql (https://github.com/0xeb/ghidrasql)
(As an aside: I think representing tools for AI as virtual SQL tables is much better than traditional MCP servers, and that this approach deserves a lot more attention. Props to Elias Bachaalany for thinking out of the box and putting it together).
The results of the benchmark are below. It's sorted by cost, but I added notes about each AI model for myself. The notes try to talk about intelligence, speed, and cost. Intelligence is a subjective measure which I assign to each model by reading its thinking tokens and watching its tool calls. You can definitely tell which models are more intelligent, even on this small benchmarks, by their tool use, false starts, and how easily they fall for the simple misdirection in the crackme.
(gist is more readable on mobile) https://gist.github.com/markoglasgow/8812c19b6fbffed30b2661b...
```
```The latest Deepseek-Flash model was the most impressive of the open models. Intelligent, fast, cheap. What more do you want? I think the Xiaomi MiMo - Flash model did well, but it might be a fluke, given how poorly the Xiaomi MiMo Pro model performed (it wandered off on a million side quests).
What's also interesting is how competitive Luna is to the lower end Chinese models. It's quite a bit more intelligent, burns a lot less tokens, is plenty fast and very cheap. After doing this experiment, I don't think it's a foregone conclusion that the American AI labs will be having the bottom of the market eaten away by the Chinese models. It seems they (at least OpenAI) can compete on the bottom end as well.
Finally, the benchmark's results reinforce a few things people have been saying about Sonnet and Terra, namely, they're not competitive for a range of tasks. For easier tasks, Haiku/Luna are plenty capable. For harder tasks, Opus and Sol are so much more intelligent, that they can get them done quicker and cheaper. Maybe there is a place for them in the "Opus designs and Sonnet implements" workflows, but in that case, why not "Opus designs and Deepseek implements?"
PS Code harness used was Claude Code. $20 in openrouter credits was used to access the models. Kimi K3 and Deepseek were also accessed directly via the API and then compared to Openrouter. Kimi K3 specifically was much faster on Openrouter, and the difference in output tokens to get the same results for Deepseek/Kimi makes me think the Openrouter providers are hosting significantly quantized versions of the model. Goes to show that Moonshot.ai's acceptance testing of providers is a useful thing, otherwise your model might look artificially bad when it's hosted as heavily quantized by providers who dont care about quality, just top-line cost and speed.
Thanks for the data-centric perspective. It reinforces my vague impression that DS 4.1 Flash eclipses almost everything out there, or at least ties it. We're really lucky to have that one.
GLM 5.3 and GLM 5.3 Flash are very different animals. The full GLM 5.3 model is what HF used to perform forensics on the OpenAI hack.
Nothing particular special about 5.3 Flash -- you might as well run DS 4.1 Flash at this point, as it's better in every way. But there is as yet no all-around replacement for the full 5.3 model.
For the past few days I've been trying to use rea to reverse engineer my Samsung Galaxy Buds 4 Pro to get seamless functionality working outside of the Samsung ecosystem with no luck (the buds 4 pro require Samsung devices + a Samsung account for seamless to work, I only have a Galaxy phone + my macbook). I think we're still far away from having something that works that well.
This looks very bad on OpenAI.
What is next? Power and water company suspending your account if your home and car are not streaming enough telemetry.
I am glad that open models are closing on frontier.
Claude is absurdly sensitive to anything that touches cyber, and threatens bans if it gets a whiff of a pentest going on. it wouldnt surprise me if openai had a similar approach.
Yesterday I joked that claude gave me a cyber stop for asking how to make the anime girl video for an exploit, but it was a thing that happened. Meanwhile im trying to convince people around me that having grok nudify people isnt "fine" just because grok says it is. Its wild where the lines a drawn.
Claude is so absurdly bad about false triggers for security. It kept triggering when I asked it questions about how to plant some tree saplings I got because somehow that was a security risk.
Anthropic is a joke of a company.
Would you mind copy+pasting the text that you fed it that led to that refusal? That's so bizarre. It would be really interesting to try and guess at what exactly in the message set it off. Over-indexed on biology refusals, perhaps?
It doesn't matter, it's not a bug it's a feature. You don't have any power in this. Accept the thinking they give you.
That alone should disqualify it by itself.
I've run into both security and bio-refusals, it doesn't take much.
I'm in the new CVP, and even Mythos gave me a cyber stop just for creating an MCP server that can remotely connect to my Steam Frame to run commands. It must've thought I was trying to create a centralized malware or something.
Not even sure why Mythos even still exists when it's identical to Fable in every way, including refusing to do stuff that looks like it could ever be repurposed into unapproved use cases.
Wasn't the whole point of Fable that it's Mythos but with all the cybersecurity stuff lobotomized out of it?
The whole point of Fable was that it's Mythos but with extra guardrails, yeah. But now that Project Glasswing has been folded into the CVP, Mythos seems to have the exact same guardrails now
We're all naked under our clothes, I don't see the problem. One of the funniest shock-bits I've ever seen was when Jon Stewart's book on American government and history included full-frontal (Photoshopped) nudes of SCOTUS, but I guess he couldn't get away with that during the current era of Puritanical panic.
It's just an adult human body, Michael, what could it cost? One('s) dignity?
Tastelessness aside, this seems perfectly rational to me. Unlike reverse engineering for the purpose of developing security exploits, "nudification" doesn't meaningfully expand the capabilities of malicious actors with access to free online porn and Photoshop.
Actually violating one person is fine, but doing anything associated with a specific industry that has applications for harm and help is not?
That's like saying it's fine to beat someone up and take their lunch, but it's not fine to learn how locks work.
It's fine to imagine what your lunch looks like, even if that makes you feel that your dietary privacy has been violated.
You don't need Grok to imagine anything.
Well, maybe _you_ do.
People really out here directly comparing women to food, unbelievable.
Siri, what’s the name of this kind of bad faith argument?
Stating literally exactly what is being done is a bad faith argument now?
Today is Sausage Saturday, not Taco Tuesday. Some people like their links and eggs, and... okay, I don't know how to double entendre this next part, but suffice it to say that it's bad faith to assume that everything related to the depiction of the natural human body is about degrading women.
This thread is literally about Grok publicly nudifying women, and people are out here saying it's comparable to seeing somebody's lunch...I know HN is a boys' club and all but this is pretty bad even by normal HN standards.
No one else mentioned women. You're the one who assumed nudification was only of women and only of unwilling subjects. I've seen people use it on pictures of themselves for... enhancement and personal gratification. I've seen men and women use it to make spicy images of adult men. And if we're talking specifically about autonomy and control in depictions of a woman's body, I've seen some women complain about the overzealous guardrails of other image generators, where something as innocent as a touch-up of a photo of their own fully-clothed body was flagged as unsafe.
This issue isn't black and white, and you're casting unearned aspersions. We should have this conversation, in actual good faith.
> This thread is literally about Grok publicly nudifying women
1. It’s not
2. An analogy is not the same thing as saying women are like x
Remember those “A is to B as C is to D” SAT questions? Did you read them and think they were telling you that A = C?
Yes. You’re 2 for 2 on bad faith now.
That's one of the weirdest takes on here in a while.
I can develop security exploits myself just fine without the use of AI. Many people don't have the capability to use Photoshop and free online porn to deepfake someone else they might or might not personally know into a realistic video...
> I can develop security exploits myself just fine without the use of AI.
Are you seriously claiming that the untrained masses can start developing exploits on their devices?
Honestly as someone with faily little experience in pentesting or photoshop but who has dabbled in both back in highschool. I think they would both take a similar amount of practice and skill to develop those abilities. They are complete opposites so i suspect the kind of person who is naturally good at photoshop to be bad at pentesting and vis versa. But if your going to dedicate a few hours of every day to learning a skill i dont think it matters which one you choose, a bit of time, practice, and natural interest and you will be able to do the kind of work that people ask these llms to do.
The major difference being that it usually takes longer to study code because projects can be massive but at the same time the llms are looking for everything and anything while a real attacker is usually looking for specific vulnerabilities in common libraries and such so i wouldnt exactly call the amateur hacker on par with an llm but i would say they could do a similar amount of damage without llm assistance. And photoshop is basically the same. Spend a few hours every day dedicated to one thing and you will learn how to do it.
Seriously this. If my high school self could figure it out an adult with will can too. It really doesn't take that long.
Bad on OpenAI? The account got suspended.
This reflects horribly bad on Samsung!
The headline is misleading, but the "article" is only five screenshots of Twitter posts. Someone used AI to decrypt the Samsung TV's firmware and found always on listening, classification, lots of privacy nightmares. Then their (the hacker's, not Samsung's) OpenAI got suspended for "Cyber Abuse".
Right, but still: OpenAI provided a service and it's up to them to determine acceptable use. Samsung sells a $3000 (or actually $2999,95) TV and you get big brother watching you.
Surely acceptable use is not exposing crooked corporations that are using spyware to listen to you and your children.
We don't really have any idea what was in his sessions or why he was suspended. It might have been a false positive in their automated system, or maybe he ranted at the model about how he was going to "destroy" Samsung with his findings and the automated systems took that literally. There are tons of examples around of people using models for reverse engineering, so we know it's unlikely that alone was the reason.
They don't know that. It's the hypocracy of not using their service to infringe on someone elses copyright. The only way Compaq could legally have a PC BIOS is by having one team reverse engineer the original and describe what it does and another team reimplement it.
Yes, it's completely hypocritical because of how LLMs are built. That doesn't change the fact that if you're offering a service online, you'd try to prevent abuse in order not to be held liable.
You can do the same with LLM. Have one session document something, and other session write up an implementation, with nothing but docs shared in between.
I agree with you, but if OpenAI wasn't suspending users for exposing cyber-spying that these consumer companies like Samsung are doing, more and more people would expose such issues.
With Kimi K3.1 Pro, today WAS the day they actually caught up.
I’ve been saying this for the past few months - once the inflection point happens (such as today), it’s only a matter of 2 years when American closed models won’t be able to catch up with Chinese open models
Iirc They specifically trained them to not be useful in cyber stuff. But the point still holds
The Chinese models?
I have been wondering if that would be a benefit of using say GLM5.3 on HF if only to get fewer cyber stop flags.
There is more written here: https://www.kimi.ai/blog/kimi-k3-1-pro
They claim that the default datasets contain so much cyber stuff, so that their models became quite good at it.
They filtered the data before training to not contain this. So it's not that they train the model to not do it. They rather not have it in the Corpus at all. In theory
Even if there were stop flags, you simply get one of the ABLITERATED models that have all the guards NOP’d out
… IF chinese models stay open.
Chinese models don't need to stay open. The open weight ones just need to have nearly the same capabilities as the models sold by US companies. When that's the case, no one will have a reason to continue paying anything to any US company, thus destroying their business model and business case.
Idk about the destroying their business model part. Running your models on your own is akin to running a media server, which most people seem to be fine paying $20/m for someone else to do.
Well, maybe if your own media server only showed videos in 1fps compared to hosted ones. You’re not comparing apples to apples here. You might argue that local inference speeds are acceptable, but that doesn’t make them comparably equivalent.
What? Local inference is slow so people will want to self-host? I don't understand your argument.
AI companies can’t sustain this bleeding of runway. Eventually they’re all going to have to significantly bump up pricing. I guarantee personal accounts will be between double and triple your current internet and phone plan combined
That is not going to convince people to self-host models. The AI companies effectively have infinite money. Even if they did somehow run out, the US government would bail them out just like they did the car manufacturers.
People have been saying this for three years. When will it happen?
In fact they can be clearly worse, so long as they are same ballpark for many use cases.
I.e. I would pay 15-20% more for comparable work from an open model I control,rather than use anthro et al.
And it seems we've gotten to the point that frontier models benefits are marginal/nominal. Whereas, not long ago Claude was materially ahead and could do things the other models simply couldn't.
... IF the world doesn't end tomorrow.
Yes, of course, IF a lot of things. But if we go by what the official positions of the government is, and where the ecosystem is today, then the models stay open, as they are. And today, the US models stay closed, so lets not assume "... IF they stay closed" as nothing is pointing to this changing, just like China seems to point towards staying with open models.
Did you mean Mimo v2.6 Pro? Because Kimi K3.1 Pro is proprietary, and not open.
Also leading the frontier is much much harder than catching up to frontier.
It's as if an intern added it and then they just forgot about it.
In my experience, it's more likely a whole team of supposedly brilliant engineers were paid good money to work on this feature. Sad as that is.
Samsung is starting to be a little too much creepy.
I don't know if it's just greed or.
I refused to create an account on their galaxy phone because of the mandatory phone number needed. Yes, I know they can harvest it in other ways, it's just a stand.
If people can hustle for a little side money, corporations can do it as well. Why not?
Corporations are considered persons and they need to pay shareholders.
Seriously, it’s pure greed and people who love money enable this, because they think they are immune to this, or harmless.
Samsung has always been creepy. You just didn’t know it.
Their smart TVs are a nightmare, and have been for the last 15 years (at least)
Without an account, they don't even allow installs from galaxy store. So their default apps and their security updates are probably contingent on having an account now.
Not much different from playstore but that is also a problem.
Without an account, you can’t even properly use your freezer
Maybe a company that is both a complete monopoly chaebol and running the country is a bad thing
They're running it and then throwing away the result if you don't consent? Way to waste electricity...
This is why TVs are always so laggy, they have 400 ad and tracking scripts running the whole time.
This is very true, I just used AI to deactivate tracking in my LG, I was amazed of how much faster it became.
Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50193579
I just double-checked my Samsung TV. I only bought it so it could connect to my Apple TV or Switch, so I don't need their software. Thankfully I was already cautious when I bought it and apparently never connected it to any of our networks.
Just a reminder. You can buy a kiosk TV from major TV manufacturers. You just have to look a little. Kiosk TVs are intended for lobby signage or conference rooms. You pay a little more but the garbage UI and always on piece is gone. You get 4 HDMI with them too (from what I've used).
An interesting question is whether LLMs are going to make HDTVs more or less expensive.
Please use full open source Linux distros instead. Then you could update with apt, dnf, pacman etc.
> ..its literally running.. ..It's literally called.. ..its literally AlexNet.. ..literally doesn't work..
I'm not sure it's literal enough.
Hey at least you know it's not Claude
...... or do you???
Folks, we need to move on from "this is outrageous!" to "what can we do to stop it?"
I’m in, whaddya got?
The idea was always that Facebook or Google were listening to us and whenever we would talk about something we would shortly thereafter see an ad related to it.
Now we can basically say that its not Facebook and Google doing this directly, its our televisions and appliances that are listening and just selling that data back to the ad-networks.
This is similar to Flock and Palantir who collect info the government is not allowed to and then sell it to the government.
In this case Meta, Google etc can honestly say they aren't surrepticiously listinging to you or collecting data not in their privacy statement. They just buy it instead.
So I need to write a chaffing agent that runs when I am not home and randomly spouts synthetic conversations through non-smart speakers about nappies (kids a re long gone), nuclear weapons development, plumbing, union membership, crochet, video games, crypto coins, and other things we don't normally do.
This does not mean that Google and Facebook never do it.
> Now we can basically say that its not Facebook and Google doing this directly
Finding out that TVs are listening does not mean Google and Facebook aren't. I've had plenty of times in an old car, or on a walk talking about something only to have related ads pop up later.
They can already do that with most of the information they already have, they don't need to listen for that type of thing (though they still might be as you see here, data is data after all).
Most people are not that unique. They know where you are and who you are with and any searching or sites you have been to and what is in your text messages or whatsapp as well as that same information for all the people 6 degrees away from you. They know people like you, who are your age and like the things you like and are where you are with friends like yours etc etc it goes on and on.
People rarely talk about things unprompted and you will only notice when you think you talked about something and then see an ad for it so there is a confirmation bias as well.
Has this not been proven by now? That smart devices are used to do this, including smartphones? Their OSes just ship with apps that that record that audio information right out of the box.
Facebook was always doing this. It just wasn't proven they were.
VoIP has been around for 25 years. Compressed audio is a tiny amount of packets. It doesn't need HD audio, it just needs enough to recognize words. Enterprise VoIP only needed a 128kb connection 25 years ago to work. On a smartphone, 128kb is nothing and will blend in with background connections. Facebook could record and monitor your audio 24/7 and it won't even be a blip in the network traffic, especially if it does a quick process of the audio before sending it to Facebook.
That's a pretty good point. We kept hearing these rumors for a while now and all the usual suspects keep saying "we don't listen to your microphone on your phone" but yeah nobody expects the TV and fridge to do it, so maybe that's how it happens and people are not crazy.
That's just weasel language. For "hey, Google" to work, the phone needs to listen. Just like it can react to "hey, Google", it can also react to any amount of other trigger words without ever actually recording your conversation.
If they're doing this to TVs, what are they doing with phones?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45740675
I'm not the only one who made note of that behavior, but if i recall sometime before breaking my phone in the last couple months the behaviour ceased. probably after a factory rom update, but at this point i can no longer confirm or deny. but! i did and do have a backup of the potentially offending apk.
Ironically phones are more transparent than TVs (because there's a rooting scene as well as adb access) so I wouldn't immediately extrapolate that they're doing this but even harder on phones.
What is this referring to, Android phones? Are they really eating battery life by constantly running AI on your phone?
Yeah, the context is really vague. For the past few days log4j has been decompiling a Samsung TV and reporting on twitter the various spyware that is running
It's referring to Samsung TVs.
Maybe I'm just old fashioned or out of touch, but why is it such a barrier for people to treat their smart TV as a dumb display? Hook up a computer via HDMI and never connect the TV to wifi.
I understand that the tech in these things is a horrorshow, But so is the tech in every other smart device that normal ("I don't care how it works, just that it works" types) people allow into their homes every day - and these are the people who tech is built for, not "us". Of all the tech to raise red flags about, this seems the easiest to mitigate.
And to be completely fair, I haven't purchased a new TV (Projector yes, TV no) since I bought my plasma in 2014. That 2014 TV has smart features as well but has just never been hooked up to the internet. Maybe the new rigs can't be used until connected to a network but I wouldn't know. Enlighten me if this is the case.
One way that you probably are behind on the goings on in the TV market are that there are whole TV brands that require you to login just to use the television at all, like Roku.
These are usually the cheap models, the kind that are heavily subsidized by spyware, but the fact that this exists at all is seriously not cool.
I imagine that you can login to those televisions once and then take them offline, though I haven’t tried personally.
The other thing I would say is that here we are asking customers to basically buy duplicate products and that second product might still engage in spyware.
E.g., I’ve bought a $500 TV that comes with Roku or whatever. It already runs all my streaming apps. So the strategy now is to turn off internet on that TV and now I have to buy a streaming box and hope that it’s less intrusive. If we decide maybe Apple is the one with the least intrusive ads and tracking, that’s now $300, almost doubling the cost of the TV.
And if we buy some other streaming box like Roku or Amazon well guess what they have all the same sorts of telemetry and ads going on.
To fully remove the national spy network from your life you would have to get rid of all other devices that will collect the same data or do already. Smartphones, smartwatches, home security systems, Wifi, any computer or device you did not build yourself, TVs, any other "smart" device, anything that has electricty going to it, any car since OnStar in the 1990s, all delivery trucks and self driving cars, your neighbors security system, devices that broadcast IDs, even bluetooth devices... So many examples..
The amount of devices in the national spy network which is passed off as just advertisement data is really providing full spectrum live video and audio to third parties that can and do share it for any reason that benefits them.
You also have to create an account to use an Osmo action cam. I almost sent the damn thing back upon finding out, but as it turns out, you can make a fake mail, fake account, and after having connected once you can treat it as if it never happened.
Still infuriating.
better yet,in the age of AI why not do more?
Ive been motivated recently to start making my appliances mine by using Ai to reverse engineer and replace their firmware. So long as the appliance has been slow to update its security channels, the recent eMudrha certificate leak was the perfect opportunity to place yourself in the middle of the relationship between device and vendor. Its allowed me to make some trivial updates to my television's firmware and start to have AI build me firmware that better serves my purposes. Hoping to lobotomize it and replace everything with a simple linux system that executes a startup script to launch a Jellyfin client.
I bought it and its mine, this is the freedom we were originally robbed of.
>Hook up a computer via HDMI and never connect the TV to wifi.
Having just gone through this...it's a lot harder than you think.
Current gen TVs have specs that garden variety connect a computer can't supply over HDMI. You need HDMI 2.1 with FRL to hit it. So you climb onto google, discover yes there are minipc that can do that...except only the new ones...the "AI" ones that cost you an arm and a leg. Also they need fast DDR5 memory which is great fun right now. And the more affordable ones are AMD so no quicksync.
So you think lets maybe do a USBC dongle to an existing device, only to discover that they require different firmware (!) on the dongle depending on whether you're using a mac or a windows PC [0]. And then you realize you actually need a cable capable of 48gbps and none of the ones lying around are labelled so you have to buy a new one just in case. And after you've done all that you still don't know why its connecting at 120hz not 144hz per TV specs. And then the whole media encoding circus starts...
I can 100% understand why people just type in wifi password and call it a day. The average consumer is not up for flashing firmware onto dongles to watch their big brother series.
[0] https://kb.cablematters.com/index.php?View=entry&EntryID=147
No streaming app is giving you a video feed with 48Gbps of data (more like 5-15 Mbps), and no one produces 120 or 144Hz video (most movies/TV are still 24Hz aren't they?), so there's no point in sending that kind of signal to a TV (you'll just have a crisp, high refresh signal of the low refresh blurry compression artifacts), but even ignoring that, cheap n100 minipcs can do 4k60 or 1k240 just fine (I use a minipc as my desktop with a 4k240 OLED).
>most movies/TV are still 24Hz aren't they?
They are and that's part of the reason why it matters.
144/24 = 6
120/24 = 5
60/24 = 2.5
TVs compensate by showing you every 2nd image longer causing a slight but noticeable judder effect. Panning shots don't look smooth etc. Much like font kerning once you see it you can't unsee it.
Plus ofc other uses like gaming. And frankly I also didn't want to set up a home theater with half the tech modern, the other half not. A bit like you want your PC screen and GPU to be paired well and not a 1080p screen with a 5090...
My minipc has no issue outputting at 24 or 23.976 or 30 or 29.97 or 59.94 Hz either. And again that big brother series on the smart TV app is going to be garbage quality anyway. It's like setting up a 4k240 OLED and 5090 to run an N64 emulator to play games with a 20 FPS limit and prerendered backgrounds with no texture replacers or anything.
And for "other uses like gaming" you are using an external computer over HDMI, not smart TV apps.
>My minipc has no issue outputting at 24 or 23.976 or 30 or 29.97 or 59.94 Hz either
I don't think you've understood the problem I'm describing. A TV with a 60hz panel literally can't smoothly display a 24fps incoming signal. Even though 60 is more than 24 modern TVs can't [0] drop the panel rate to match the incoming 24 fps signal. Instead they keep the panel at 60hz and fuck with the timing of every 2nd frame to compensate for 60 not being divisible by 24 - judder.
To get a smooth picture everything has to be either same or a clean multiple of the source material. (roughly - fractions like 23.976 aren't noticable but 60/24=2.5 is right in the middle....worst case scenario).
Best way around this mess is 120hz end to end - which means no N100. Or just accept the judder.
>not smart TV apps.
I'm not advocating for them, just saying I understand why less tech inclined use them.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flicker_fusion_threshold
Okay, but if you have a 120Hz panel, as you said, you can just hold your 24Hz signal for 5 frames. And a minipc and TV can happily negotiate a 24Hz HDMI signal. Flicker fusion also has nothing to do with this unless you have like BFI or something.
If your source is 24Hz, it will never be 120Hz end-to-end. It's already 24Hz. You can just send that to the display. If your panel can't cleanly display that, it's not going to be able to with a built in app either. The app is also getting a 24Hz source video.
It's not hard; but often the TV will nag and nag until it gets a wifi connection.
And with how hard these manufacturers are trying, I wouldn't be at all surprised if they start including some alternate data connection for metadata/DRM/whatever. (ie, not the primary streaming data connection)
This is what I do. I find navigating with a remote control to be infuriating, especially when you need to search for something. With an old computer and wireless mouse and keyboard, it's so much better. Some minor configuration of Firefox's homepage and it's a fine start page for watching TV, with all your stuff right there. Plus you can have extensions that save hours of your life over time. The only downside is the remote becomes the literal keyboard and mouse which might be cumbersome for some, but I don't even think about it anymore. I've been using the same 50" for ten years.
You are unlike most people. Most people just want to come home and watch TV. Historically it used to be cable, now it's YouTube or similar. What do you think is the quickest way to watch YouTube?
> What do you think is the quickest way to watch YouTube?
Shout "six seven" and look over the shoulder of the twelve-year-old who magically appears?
Definitely not with a TV remote vs a keyboard/mouse.
Its all about UX, I recently got sick of my LG and switch to Apple TV and made LG a dumb TV with HDMI, and surprisingly UX ia significantly worse. Apple being Apple and force their shit weird UX. My kids can’t figure it out, they used to use LG TV by themselves to open what they want to open.
Even I fucking hate it because Apple UX. is just bunch of weird behaviors popping out from every action. Apple UX rant aside, similarly many solutions has tons of UX problems, connecting a PC to TV unfortunately leads to even more problems.
All of these shit supposed to work but in practice way too many edge cases, and random issues.
Funny I am also using a Plasma from around that time (Samsung one but hopefully too dumb to spy). I guess the problem is that they'll keep turning the screws, in the same way it gets harder and harder to use Windows and Office without an account and internet connection.
As a result I'm not upgrading my TV anytime soon, and when I do, I hope to find a dumb one.
Police and FBI need a warrant to bug your home.
Samsung just needs you to buy a TV.
It’s called Terms of Service agreement
Leading to one of my favourite jokes: The Soviet Union is socialist, and bugs it's citizen's homes. America, though, is capitalist - the people must buy their own bugs.
They need to you blindly accept the terms and conditions and think "oh that seems fine" instead of returning it and costing them money.
I’ve got a Samsung frame used for two things: 1) showing hdmi 1, and 2) showing art when idle.
I guess I’m going to have to just write replacement firmware, aren’t I?
Disconnect it from the network and hook up a streaming device that is relatively trustable (e.g. Apple TV or an open source alternative).
With that much criminal energy behind it, you might even want to remove the wifi module or ground the antenna at this point.
I was about to post "this is overkill — just don't connect it to your access point" but then realized that my neighbor has an xfinity router that advertises the public xfinity subscriber SSID. And it could be using an unadvertised SSID for which they've done a deal with the US carrier cartel members.
If this data is worth enough, they could be using IOT 4G service.
We to date have had no proof of this happening. The best I found was someone on a Samsung forum years ago claiming their TV auto-connected to a public WiFi without proof.
Not saying it isn’t happening, nor that it won’t ever happen.
Anyway - Faraday living room?
I heard you can buy really expensive paint that you can use on your walls, ceiling and floor to get this effect, that you then can paint over whatever color you actually want.
So far the only benefit other than shielding you from electrosmog was to stop having to compete with your neighbors in an apartment complex for wi-fi bands.
We have proof they have no moral qualms or other guardrails, and they have incentive. We also have a decent idea how much it costs to connect to ambient WiFi or cell/5gnetworks. It’s a matter of time, which may or may not be already in the past.
I think it’s not worth it to them as long as 99.9% of the users hook up the TV to their home WiFi. Connecting to other networks without user confirmation probably opens a can of worms in many countries.
I mean there is proof that this does happen, to my knowledge there's no proof with larger brands such as this. But also it's not like every device is tested for that sort of thing by some competent user safety guidelines organization or whatnot.
If you know of a TV that automatically connects to networks without the user's permission, even some tiny brand, please share. I mean that sincerely, I feel like I talk about this every other month with someone.
Nah it still boots to their annoying menus, takes forever to change modes, has lots of annoyances. I’ll be a lean firmware could be a much better experience.
I already use an Apple TV, but the Samsung’s firmware is annoying even as a dumb tv.
I've just removed my 50€/year Frame subscription. Samsung, if you're reading this, you know why.
The art was good, and I liked having it. I was disappointed that it was subscription-based. From now on the TV will be disconnected from the power supply, until I want to occasionally watch Netflix.
@brookst, let me know if you play with the firmware ;)
It's been well known for the last 5-10 years that Samsung has degraded into one of the worst consumer device manufacturers, whether it's all this tracking, or forcing you to watch ads on the home screen of your expensive tv etc.
No idea why you'd even consider anything Samsung related.
Point me to another matte TV that has the electronics separated so you just need a tiny cable to the TV? I’ll switch tomorrow.
Load the art from a flash stick and never connect it to the internet?
don't let it connect to the internet
What I would do if I were manufacturer hellbent on spying would be to search for devices of my own brand nearby to pass data using their internet access, if no access found then extend search - basically p2p/mesh network to pass data.
I'm sorely tempted to go down that road, I have a few frames. They've never been connected to the Internet, but the software on them is trash - literally the only thing I ever want it to do is display art (in standby) or display the Apple TV connected to HDMI.
Just don't buy any tech home appliance that was made after 2022.
I mean it may work for you, but the bathtub curve means that someone isn't going to have a chair when the music stops.
so is the hardware mic-off button on Samsung TV any good?
If we read the tweet - the TV then connects to whatever device it can like a home theater, other speakers and uses its microphone if it has one
Man, it would really be interesting if they were caught using the speakers themselves as microphones.
Samsung what? Fridge? Air conditioning? Dishwasher? Excavator? A single more word of explanation would make it crystal clear, whereas now I need to wonder whether it is about TV, computer monitor, smartphone or who knows what.
This is known? [0]
[0] https://r2.community.samsung.com/t5/SmartThings/SmartThings-...
The tile references on-board ai. “On-board ai” here is automatic content recognition. Imagine my disappointment
AI is simply an if/else statement in disguise, you didn’t know that?
Computer vision and categorization is ai. It isn't just generative AI.
There’s a meaningful difference between ML algorithms and the Grail that is (general) AI. Many of us spent years arguing that words matter and now with the VC backed hype train just about everything is AI, under penalty of stock market collapse
Because just about everything is AI. AI in itself is a rather useless term, and that was years ago.
The differences are not really that great most of the time. Quite often one type of logic in one type of ML network can be easily simulated in something like a generic transformer network and vice versa. Efficiency is typically the biggest constraint.
way to miss the point.
Wasn't that used to squeeze better power efficiency etc out of the device by optimizing the parameters based on the content?
I mean it is probably also used to collect data, but this sounds like it might be more than just that. Maybe?
The mechanism you are thinking of - optimizing brightness and dynamic contrast, happens in TCON in low level hardware at fraction of a fraction of power
But the next generation of everything will be so much less efficient as the new generation of developers has forgotten how to do anything with low level methods.
now is the best time in history to buy a tv
just hack it right after purchase and own the glass
I agree with this. At this point, AI has gotten smart enough that most smart TVs can be hacked (I just did it with my LG), and TV manufacturers haven't caught up yet.
Dont buy a tv? I havent had a TV for 20 years.
Maybe 30…
There's another analysis there showing that they still send this even if you don't agree to it. I feel like this needs to go to court.
Without a reddit account
https://web.archive.org/web/20261024082057if_/https://www.re...
I sure wish Tizen was rooted. I’d love to custom flash over the slow ass Samsung UI.
Just yesterday I hacked my Samsung Frame tv. The AI (codex) used an off-the-shelf root with Developer Console access (built in). Though root doesn't give you the signing keys to blow everything away and still boot (is my best understanding), but as a workaround you can still change anything you want after boot automatically.
I had it do:
- Stripping ads
- Disabling mics
- Turning off updates
- Leaving root SSH in place (protected) for future access
The key to getting codex to do this was that this is legal under DMCA, but after a certain point I had to get a new session to change all the "hacking" words into synonyms to not trigger false security alarms. Wouldn't be surprised or bothered if my chatgpt account gets banned though. I can write a blog post and publish the repo if you want
Time to invest a few tokens into an unneuthered model
Is there anyone serving such inference? I can't fit anything usable on my hardware.
https://abliteration.ai/
But also if you're working on a local device, any Chinese model will agree to it most of the time.
How do people actually do this kind of work?
I can imagine working on the dumped firmware or update package.
But against the TV over the network without closed loop or access to RAM how could the model find and develop exploits?
I think in this case, the Tizen OS (by Samsung) on these TVs has a developer mode where you can use their Samsung Debug Bridge CLI tool on another computer to connect to the TV and get a regular Linux user shell. From there, they found a local privilege escalation bug to get root. I don’t know the exact details but a lot of smart devices get poor security support, so you can just shotgun different known vulnerabilities and get lucky with one pretty often rather than needing to develop a novel one.
Just look for "Heretic"-ed models on Huggingface.
Basically all Qwen models got un-neuthered.
Even the big ones (Deepseek, etc.) got their protection layer ablated.
I believe Mistral models are fairly capable at cybersecurity tasks, but I don’t think you could get anything useful out of anything smaller than Mistral Large 4.
OpenRouter?
Pretty sure my Samsung plasma TV from 2011 is safe. It was all downhill from there, just competing over which display looks better with its saturation and brightness boosted all the way up with the floor models all next to each other.
This is the same company that makes "knox"... yes this will be funny.
The AI in the TV was listening for dogs barking and babys crying, a gross invasion of privacy. Possibly this could have been for ad targeting purposes.
With projects like REA, it's going to get harder and harder for companies to get away with things like this.
I'd love to see the major social media apps reverse engineered and analyzed in this way. I can only imagine the dodgy practices that'll be found if this happens.
Jaded part of me thinks companies are going frontier-model-vibe-code their security into security chips everywhere, encrypted firmware everywhere, locked down APIs everywhere and it’s going to take away the fun out of it.
> With projects like REA, it's going to get harder and harder for companies to get away with things like this.
Nope, don't worry, if you clicked on the linked you'd see OpenAI has already banned this person's account. Chinese models you say? See today's new Kimi release which intentionally had all cyber-related data removed from its training data. The window is already rapidly closing and will soon be completely closed.
Won't be too much longer after that where modifying LLM weights to ignore safety rules is considered a felony.
No libre agents and LLM's?
That would explain why Samsung phones always run like shit.
What I wish people understood about privacy is that the less tech adjacent a company is, the worse their privacy record.
Meta and Google will never sell your data. They will collect it and use it for targeted advertising for sure, but they consider it far too valuable and useful to sell. This is because they have the tech and expertise to use their data well.
A grocery store or a gas station chain, though? They're clueless about tech, don't know what to do with the data, and have to aggressively compete on prices. If some savvy data broker comes to them, offering them a way to essentially gain market share by pushing prices lower than the competition and selling your data to make up the loss? That's an offer they can't refuse.
Hardware manufacturers are largely on the grocery store side; they're not data-savvy and they want to make things cheaper than the competition, so they're almost forced to do these shenanigans to win the competitive rat race.
If you want to meaningfully increase privacy, don't quit Meta, quit Target, Visa and LG.
> the less tech adjacent a company is, the worse their privacy record
How does this apply to the topic of this thread? Samsung is, if anything, much more tech-savvy (tech-adjacent?) than Meta. Meta just does some high-level software and runs a few servers to host it. Samsung, across the company, builds every level of the hardware and software stack from silicon to services.
I think another, clearer way to state this hypothesis is that "the fewer business models a company has other than making money directly off your data, the more they're going to jealously hoard your data to themselves and leverage it in ways that don't involve letting any other middle-man capture it."
Meta and Google are both founded on the premise of capturing and using your data, with everything else being a loss-leader.
Samsung, meanwhile, makes the majority of its money making and selling physical "things", whether for B2B2C (SSDs, display panels), B2B (construction cranes, cargo ships, oil refineries, grid-storage EV batteries), or B2C (phones, TVs, smart fridges, etc.)
However, while this rule holds true in general, things aren't black and white here. While indeed, most companies that "just make things" that might capture your data -- the majority of phone OEMs and smart-TV manufacturers -- do just shack up with a middle-man to sell this type of Automated Content Recognition fingerprint data (maybe eventually acquiring said ACR partner to disintermediate their relationships with ACR data buyers), Samsung is in fact more software/data-oriented than the other phone OEMs / smart TV manufacturers, when it comes to how they handle the data coming from Automated Content Recognition.
While other providers rely on third-party ACR data brokers (the rent-capturing middlemen here), Samsung has a vertically-integrated ACR-to-ad pipeline, where (AFAICT) their ACR data feeds into their own ad-tech-bidding infrastructure for placement on Samsung-operated properties (the aforementioned phones, TVs, smart fridges, etc.)
The claim would be that the decisionmakers at Samsung are general industrialists and not people who understand the tech industry.
If you (an external entity in the example upthread, or just a random middle manager) walk up to Zuckerberg or Jassy with a proposal to tap their data for some comparatively small payment, they'd laugh in your face because they know how valuable what you're doing is and what the long term impact on their business will be. Samsung is far more likely to view that as "free money" and green light something awful.
Meta sells advertisements. I thought the tech industry would be selling technology.
It is weird what people think "tech" is these days. It increasingly seems to mean "anything having to do with computers".
Like yea in the 1930s, the dishwasher was "technology". Now it's just a consumer product. Many former tech companies have long ceased to be tech companies, but we forgot to stop calling them that.
What? Quit Meta first to be honest. Then quite the others.
i love this breakdown. well done.
This is a fallacy. Sure, Google doesn't sell your data. Instead, it has created the largest advertisers walled garden by which it sells downstream clients access to that data with which they can use for marketing. Meta comes in second. Samsung doesn't have such a market.
It's effectively the Southern Strategy but for data sale: https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/exclusive-lee-atwa...
The only effective difference between them and that gas station is that the data is less likely (but not guaranteed) to end up on gray and black markets for exploitation. Regardless, that accounts for a very small percentage of sales anyway and misses the fact that most people don't want there to be a data silo that their government can tap into and utilize for surveillance. For example(s):
https://www.eff.org/press/releases/eff-state-ags-investigate...
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/04/google-broke-its-promi...
https://www.eff.org/press/releases/google-deceptively-tracks...
> Google [...] sells downstream clients access to [your data]
This is categorically false. I don't know what you're trying to allege here, but it's not that.
These platforms do give sufficient feature selection to advertisers such that they can get near individual targeting. I've seen some stories like this on HN, but having trouble finding them now, something about foreign influence of US political representatives iirc.
...how do you believe Google ad targeting works?
Not by selling downstream clients access to my browsing data. Like, seriously: who do I call at Google and how much do I have to pay to get your browsing data? They don't sell that.
It's fair to allege all kinds of externalities and privacy impacts and such around the advertiser-driven content economy. And HN is 100% here for that.
But this is stepping across the line into a simple lie. They don't sell data.
This is a distinction without a difference to me and many others. I'm sure the adtech industry like to believe it because it lets them cope that they're the good guys, unlike those sneaky data brokers.
As a deliberately hyperbolic example: "We're not selling child slaves, we only offer a marketplace where clients can bid for the use of the labor of our child slaves."
The problem is the intrusive violation of privacy involved in building giant databases of personal information on every person on earth, not that someone-other-than-Google is doing it.
> As a deliberately hyperbolic example: "We're not selling child slaves, we only offer a marketplace where clients can bid for the use of the labor of the child slaves."
Then have that argument, please. If your argument is that "privacy impacts of advertising are bad and here's why Google's business model doesn't improve that" then that is one thing. Telling people that Google is selling your data is a lie.
The OP you're mad at did make that distinction. They stipulated that Google is not literally a data broker, but they sell access to your data in the form of targeted adverts and content.
Yet here you are with the "WELL AKSHUALLY..." brigade.
Do you work in bigtech?
I know what upthread said, I literally (literally!) quoted it in my post. What you are claiming is (again, using the words from upthread post) categorically wrong. Google does not sell "access to" anyone's data[1]. Period. And if you genuinely believe you do I invite you to cite otherwise.
[1] I do note that you're the one caveating here, by trying to qualify "access" meaning "targeted adverts and content", which needless to say is not actually access to the data. Extensive attempts have been made over the years to try to deanonymize the ad feed (as often as not to get clicks at sites like this) and only a handful of holes have been found. There is no access to the data, period.
I'm not sure why you're going so hard in the paint to be pedantic but sure, Google doesn't literally sell their exact byte-for-byte data, what they sell is a service that is functionally a few translation layers removed from their actual database. This is pretty much how all advertising SaaS works. When I wrote my comment, I was writing to an audience that I assumed was well aware of this given that most of us work in tech.
You can use that service to get enough context clues about certain targets to identify someone [0] [1]. Will most advertisers do this? Not five years ago but it's vanishingly easy now to get an LLM to gin up bespoke algorithms that will do it for you. And the door between Google's servers and federal LEOs has no latch and they share plenty of byte-for-byte data with agencies like ICE (which is literally one of my links).
I don't understand the point of being so hyperfixated on word choice since this is just Hacker News and not a court of law. But I suppose everyone makes their choices for a reason even if that reason has more to do with some reactionary and emotional outburst rather than any actual substantive additions to the discussion.
[0] https://arxiv.org/abs/1510.04031
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/google-dv360-banned-audience-seg...
I'm "going so hard" on this because you and the rest of the folks here are spinning so hard you're basically lying. You, at least, cite sorces. But your sources are attacks on the product. No one can do this on their own, you need resources and luck and the right combination of stuff. And... maybe it works, and maybe it doesn't. But it probably doesn't, the proof being that no one is getting unmasked/pwned/embarassed by this stuff.
The bottom line being that what you have amounts to a plausible security flaw. Which the market has been treating as such, reasonably effectively.
Yet you are all claiming that Google is literally offering "here's user data for sale at a price". Which they are not and never have. And that's not the same thing, and you know it.
It's one thing to claim a company's product is bad or insecure. It's quite another to lie about them. And fine, that produces a (sigh) "reactionary and emotional outburst". HN used to be so much better about rational discourse. Now it's all about who our enemies are.
What would you claim that Google sells? From what does it extract value? If not its users data, then what?
They clearly don't sell "access to data". Selling "data" means I can pay them and ask a question about something and get an answer. That's what "data" is in common usage. It's information. Google doesn't sell anyone information like that. Period. Again, this is not in question.
Now, can you PLEASE try to restate your complaint in a way that isn't just a lie? Maybe construct it about how the "exploit" data that they hold internally? It can be done. But not like this. This is lying.
Maybe your objection is to the OP, because his point was perfectly clear to me. If you want to mentally substitute "exploit" for "access" because that helps you sleep at night, that's fine.
For the rest of us, I don't see why it's supposed to be acceptable that Google hoovers up all our data, but a horrible violate when Samsung does the same thing. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
so glad i bought a dumb tv.
i remember going store to store in search of one.
gg me, that was a smart move.
I haven’t been able to sleep since I found out that Samsung knows my dog barks.
Gotta love how the phone runs the expensive spying model regardless of consent, purely so that people who withhold consent aren't rewarded with better battery life. As if some % of the battery was still Samsung's property for their own marketing purposes. Stay classy!
As far as I can tell, there is no write up. This is a reddit post with screenshots of a Twitter/X post by @log4j. Even the Twitter post doesn’t seem informative, but Reddit isn’t a source for the information by any means.
The original link was on HN two days ago with no traction.
https://twitter.com/log4j/status/2113014142600953868
So a bit of background I spent the last 17 years going Smart TV app development.
Not a lot here is any sort of surprise to anyone in the industry.
Always on audio is common on a whole swath of devices - any that want to do Alexa style voice prompts need it. ACR is table stakes for modern TVs reselling viewer data has driven down TV prices to the point where there is no going back.
The policy file here is how you build Tizen apps. It’s a list of specific features your app needs access to and certain levels of access (controlling the TV For example) require different levels of contractual relationships with Samsung.
Everything Samsung collects should be covered in their, very dense, TOS.
I spent a couple years working at the platform (AndroidTV + Google Assistant) level on smart TVs.
> any that want to do Alexa style voice prompts need it
Not technically true. More modern smart TVs (~post-2021) put speech recognition models for the hotword only onto the DSP, and then have the DSP wake up the CPU for further auditory processing when it detects a hotword or remote button press. There are major power-efficiency benefits to this, because the DSP uses a fraction of a watt and can easily keep running while the TV is sleeping, while the CPU, Internet, and rest of the circuitry is a major power hog. Your smart TV or streaming dongle would basically never sleep if it were forever running the audio capture.
For that matter, it's pretty rare for the device to actually run the speech recognition models on-device. Smart TV manufacturers are very sensitive to BOM costs, which means that their hardware is only powerful enough to run machine-learning models at the extreme high end of their product range. Most of the time the full audio gets streamed back to the Internet and the speech recognition & voice assistant gets run in the cloud, with commands streamed back to the TV.
I won't say that it never has always-on audio listening; a significant number of devices I tested did. But I'll say this comes because they're poorly implemented. The DSP hotwording approach requires coordination between hardware and software developers, oftentimes across companies, and it's more complex to implement and a lot of executives don't care about the marginal consumer benefit it gives. Many smart TVs just guzzle power when they're off instead.
Yeah I don’t disagree, but should clarify that I’m just referring to the security policy that provides access to the ambient mic. How the app/platform handles that audio is a different path that I’m not entirely familiar with.
N you please answer one thing for my peace of mind?
If I use a TV like the ones you’ve worked on, and never ever connect it to any WiFi network since the day I bought it, is there any way they still call home and pass their payload? Like searching for and connecting to an open WiFi network, some kind of relay through another device over Bluetooth or any other way I haven’t thought of yet?
> ACR is table stakes for modern TVs reselling viewer data has driven down TV prices to the point where there is no going back
Really? There’s no “spyware free” marketing angle? Even Amazon has always sold a Kindle variant with no ads for $20 more.
Not really, that said it’s trivial to disable, you can opt out either via their settings or just by not connecting the TV to the internet.
I will say that how “completely” disabling ACR via settings works is not terribly clear and there are a few lawsuits questioning wether “opting out” actually works as presented.
Plus you can bet there will be a never-ending stream of "oops, a bug meant that toggle hasn't worked in 7 years, our bad. Have a free year of credit monitoring, on us!" announcements. Some might even be real accidents!
Except it's not covered in their TOS
Oh no, how will Samsung survive this, they will have to send $5 to few thousands of people for the damages if they decide to start a class action lawsuit and if a judge/jury decides it was really causing damages... as a reminder Samsung Electronics made almost 250 B-B-B-B-illion dollars in revenues just last year.
AFAIK the penalty in the EU is up to 4% of global revenue.
Maybe not the same exploit but I found another guy who was also able to debloat his TV: https://github.com/jss8649/quiet-tizen
These posts are engagement farming, they should be banned in HN, it’s like sending a marketing buzzword email to a technical engineer, useless.
What are you talking about? I have a samsung frame that I'm in the middle of rooting because of this excellent information.
A little bit of traction https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50193579
I always advise people to never, ever use Reddit as a reference for anything.
Why and what reference do you rec instead? Even this site gets fake news that stays up for hours.
I think that's the point. If you have to go looking for a reference and don't easily find one, it's probably fake.
Books, and your grandma’s notes on making jam, I guess.
I would avoid and distrust most social forums, such as reddit, that have Pookas which are fond of rumpots, crackspots and how are you bix6? -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NeEsx2QLJ40
Sure, ‘knee-jerk’ reddit is unreliable, but many upvotes over time with supporting comments can be a strong signal of truth
It’s unfortunately only a symbol of bot activity or popularity with the crowd in the subreddit.
What do you mean? I can post whatever I want on Reddit and I can make it have as many upvotes as I need. They basically make bot farms undetectable, by hiding histories and automatic username selection. Literally nothing should be considered truth with Reddit as its only source
> Literally nothing should be considered truth with Reddit as its only source
Don’t get me wrong: I completely agree that Reddit should not be the only source, and go further that nothing should be assumed to be true based on Reddit signals (such as upvotes and comments). This is why I carefully chose my words: these can be strong signals of truth.
I think it’s also worth parsing out that I don’t think this is valid across all subreddits.
Why? Their system is literally mined for its Q&A merit by search engines. If it was all very bad information, NYSE: RDDT would not exist.
Stock prices are based on earnings, not on factual accuracy of content.
In Reddits case the stock price is based on nobody noticing that most of the users fled. Now they have to AI translate Indian content into English (and vice-versa) to keep up the illusion that people still use it.
At some point this will drive away the remaining users and it will just be bots and Reddits machine translations of those bot posts. At that point AI companies will just be paying to train on machine translated versions of content they generated to begin with.
If that were true, all the AI companies would have negative stock prices. Promises of (best case) future earnings are part of stock prices.
Future earnings are earnings, in the future.
https://xxcancel.com/mike64_t/status/2114150399406202896
https://xxcancel.com/mike64_t/status/2114150399406202896
https://xxcancel.com/freddier/status/2114042326758867453
What a load of shit. Samsung TV always listening if you enable listening, why would they do this? /s
How dare they run a classifier locally on the TV, they should upload it uncut to Czechia like Amazon did with their ring cameras!
the point is the setting does nothing, now go back to your claude session
I don't think that was even asserted, much less proven. The mic usage is almost certainly for the built in voice assistant. The dog and baby detection is for publicly announced features: https://news.samsung.com/us/samsung-celebrates-debut-samsung...
Is it still news that Samsung does this? Feels like I'm reading a similar story every few months.
They hear us all the time, here is an anecdote...
I was at the butcher one day and asked for "ossobuco" because I wanted some bones for my dog, then all of a sudden I got reels with ossobuco in it, recipes, sellers, nearby shops, etc and I said WTF? Who the fuck makes posts about ossobuco? Why all of a sudden after using social apps just for football and porn all I start getting is ossobuco ads everywhere? A word you will never see anywhere now popping up in all my social feeds.
Possibility of that being random? Zero, not in this probabilistic universe we live in
I got had a similar thing happen. My buddy inherited a lake house from him father. The dock needed repair. We talked about it one evening and that same night, I got a dock supply house ad. We never once looked it up online since we are both general contractors and already know how to fix it.
Dock repair is too random of a subject to be a coincidence.
It's not. They can use your IP to see your approximate location is on a lake or your buddy did search and it associated to you via shared IP.
Yeah same experience. People working in Facebook (I had a friend there) say it is only pattern behaviour, they can predict your interests, check when you meet with your friends, share WIFIs, etc, so they can imagine things you have been talking about. I call this bullshit. I dont know if my friend working at Facebook believes this, or was just hiding it for me, but it's 0% chance of them doing that. Also because I never got any of these recommendations BEFORE I mentioned it out loud, which means their prediction engine (if it exists) also knows when I am going to talk about it!
I also got ads for things I have only thought about and never ever searched online or mentioned to anyone.
Doesn't mean my phone can suddenly read my mind - just that prediction algorithms + data from BLE trackers is incredibly good at guessing what I might be interested in. It's just crazy crazy good.
Also how many ads are we exposed to where we aren’t paying conscious attention to it?
Surely those ads could sometimes cause someone to think or talk about a concept that they might not have otherwise.
If the ad then pops up again and they notice it this time, it will feel really spooky!
I think it’s similar to the phenomenon where you learn a new word and then immediately see it out in the wild somewhere. It grabs your attention because you were just thinking about it.
In the original example of ordering meat from the butcher, I also wonder if it’s possible that the data from that purchase was tracked and fed into the ad system. That seems more plausible to me than the “phone listening” theory.
Sorry, but there’s just zero evidence that your phone is listening to you like this. There never has been. Lots of people have tried to uncover such evidence. On the iPhone at least (not as familiar with Android), it’s not even clear how your phone would be listening and sending the data to Meta.
This isn’t happening.
>I dont know if my friend working at Facebook believes this, or was just hiding it for me, but it's 0% chance of them doing that. Also because I never got any of these recommendations BEFORE I mentioned it out loud, which means their prediction engine (if it exists) also knows when I am going to talk about it!
He's just repeating the internal propaganda. The truth is reserved to a small team that implemented the spyware who are highly incentivized to never give any hint. Your friend doesn't work for that team.
I estimate the team size to be fewer than a dozen people. The managers above them that know about it are even fewer, with only one or two reporting to Zuck. And possibly they're so mentally retarded they don't necessarily understand it.
Don't ever install the Facebook app on your phone.
Well, dog and baby owners are great targets for advertising, so this makes sense.
Until Samsung is sued out of existence
When I was in college this sharp phd student told me that your phone, tv, and other devices talk to each other via radio frequency to build a profile on you. I've seen zero proof of this anywhere and I still think about why he told me that.
https://twstalker.com/mike64_t/status/2114150399406202896
The pseudo popup ads in this page is extremely excessive it’s outright unusable
My bad. Xcancel is no longer operational so I tried to find an alternative. With my setup I didn't see any ads so I didn't notice them. Sorry
use goyimx