Hacker reverse engineers his Samsung TV and finds on-device AI listening for your dog and baby, watching what you watch, and borrowing your soundbar’s mic if the TV doesn’t have one. Then OpenAI banned him for reverse-engineering it.
Source:
Their own harnesses breaking out of their test environments and hacking third party companies is “oopsi” but their customers using an agent in a controlled manner to reverse engineer firmware of a device they own is bad. I see. Fuckers.
Corporations gonna corporate.
It’s high time we had a revolution of our own in North America to chase out these corporate barons that own every little minute aspect of our lives.
I highly suggest you to read “Enshittification” by Cory Doctorow, especially the new and updated version.
They stripped our freedom to own our devices. We need a revolution.
More than anything, we need to stop buying this shit.
Sales, as in “there are none…” for a few quarters would tank the stock valuations enough that the stakeholders would make life quite uncomfortable on the C-suites for their decisions to bake spyware into everything.
NGL, BEST decision I made was to jettison cable TV service back in 1999 when we came online. If (and this is a BIG “if” nowadays…) I watch something, it’s from a DVD or I hoist the Jolly Roger and sail the seven seas…
My current 10 year old TV is doing duty as a 50-inch 4K display for my gaming PeeCee… and it’s kinda “special needs” as a supposedly smart TV in that it doesn’t have a single app installed that can actually stream 4K - what can I say… it was a WalMart special… gee, I wonder why?
I put it online (via ethernet) when we got it to test it’s “smart” abilities and quickly discovered it was an absolute dog.
Works great to game on though.
LOL!
This is way too complex of a topic to leave to “consumer choice”. There are layers upon layers of complex systems at play, not to mention miles of legalize and precisely crafted PR statements to say one thing and mean another.
The only way this gets better is with government regulation, pretending consumers can make a difference here is blaming the victim.
But the government itself has bbeen bought out by most of these bige companies …so…
What ‘government regulations’ you thinking of? I sure theyll all be very helpful… 🤭
Bro the government itself is part of the prpblem cauae the government is A-OK with a capitaliistic set of governmental regulations that give the richest capitalists many freedoms even when theyre being ‘regulated’. These government regulattions you speak of will be like palcing these rich companies under house arrest…in a 26,000 square feet mansion!
We have tto destroy the system itself in its entirety, both the bribed governmeent and the capitaliists that contorol our economies and our governments.
Why cant WE be our own government? Werecognize that thhere is a problem. We investigate the problem and recognize that this is psychopathic. We recognize that the execs at companies thatt do this type of bullshit should be arrested , or worse, and then have their assets nationalized … We cant do this shit our selves?
Why cant WE be our own government?
Because most of “we” are checked out dummies who are easily manipulated by unscrupulous entities. And the more money you have, the more dummies you can manipulate.
I’m gonna have to disagree with you on that.
As someone that spent 15 years in the Nielsens Homescan Consumer Shopping survey (rebranded as National Consumer Panel) the power IS in the hands of the consumer… Hence the huge industry effort on determining what advertising does and does not work.
In that survey, one would scan ALL purchases and send in the data weekly and the company would then send questionnaires on WHY one buys an item and what, if any, commercials they see (in print, radio or TV - then later online) and if the ads were memorable.
As I was answering the questionnaires, I was also noting how they framed the questions, and what assumptions they made in the pre-selected answers we were to use. (…you’d be astonished by the assumptions that are made about the public…)
The fact that panel members didn’t even have the ability to use their own words to say what they did or didn’t like about their purchases or the businesses and instead it was about feelings… that right there told me that emotional manipulation was/is the main leverage point used by advertisers and corporations.
The consumers have ALL the power in the equation, as all a consumer has to do is say “no”… the level of manipulation that industry has to go to - and the surveying and the depths to which people are plumbed and pumped for info - is more about maintaining customers through deception than it is about keeping them by creating high quality goods and services.
Used shit is the way to go… or better yet, be the cultural change yourself and jettison the old media. For sure I did by cutting the cable TV in 1999, …and we haven’t looked back.
you’d be astonished by the assumptions that are made about the public…
Please provide an example or two. I’d like to be astonished.
The best one was the pharma survey… They assumed that EVERYONE in middle age is on meds.
I got sent a pharmaceutical survey and how those operate is you would get a mailer with a series of questions and you’d use the barcode scanner to scan the answers.
I got into that targeted survey (somehow) and was sent a three ring binder of pages and pages of drugs.
The first four pages were questions related to when you’d started on meds, for what illness and when did you stop taking them and why…
Nowhere in the initial survey questions was the option to say “I have not STARTED taking medicine / have no need…”
I called in and talked to a representative and she couldn’t wrap her brain around the concept that as a middle-age American there were ZERO prescription drugs being taken by anyone in my home.
I had to ask her why the survey was predicated on the belief that everyone was on drugs - and she got a bit testy and huffed “well, I wouldn’t say that!” and I asked her where the “no use or need for meds option” was on the survey if that wasn’t the case… she replied “well, don’t you need medicines?” and I said “Nielsen has our full scan list of the food we’ve bought and eaten for the last decade and no one can draw a connection between proper food and health?”
Crickets…
“Oh, you must be really healthy!” “Yeah… we don’t eat garbage…” More crickets…
Then she credited me the points for the survey (It was a big one so it tallied large - I got two iPods out of that year’s totals…) and quickly hung up.
The assumptions that we also watched TV and the questions about ads on it that we’d seen were pretty interesting. they also sent out a Media Recording device (looked like an old-school pager) that would listen all day for an ultrasonic sound that was broadcast on the various Clear Channel radio stations and we were to wear it as we went about our day. Sorry to say that one was a bust - by that time I’d discovered somafm online and was well into streaming radio.
My car is a 2010 Mazda 3.
My TV is a 32 inch 2009 Sony Bravia 720p compatible with both analog and digital TV signals, and has coax cable and RCA inputs and outputs among others like HDMI of course. I can still hook up my original NES and even a VCR to it. It’s the best TV I will ever have and I hope it never dies out.
My PC is running Linux 100% now.
We go to the local library to rent DVDs for free, buy them used from thrift shops, or download from TPB. I have a USB disk hooked to an NVidia Shield to watch them on VLC on my old TV.
This is the way…
If all manufacturers of smart TV’s with the best picture qualities are using this targeted avertising/spying firmware, as much as I agree with your sentiment, it’s not really a viable option for someone who’s in need of purchasing a TV.
Is there a reason that a TV needs to be new? I picked up a 50" plasma for 80 bucks last year, for use in my work studio. NGL, attaching it to a MacPro that’s used for graphics - with the color saturation on that thing? - holy hell, it’s beautiful and I can match the outputs to the color profiles for the print jobs I run off… Facebook marketplace for the win, my man.
More than anything, we need to stop buying this shit.
Or we can pull together and design boards as drop in replacements for the circuit boards in the SmartTVs. I’m shocked at how cheap it is to get custom boards printed these days. Since SmartTVs are sold at a loss with the intent of making even more money by selling your data, replacing the hardware in the device should still end up being cheaper than the cost of an unsubsidized TV.
With the AI tools available for designing boards now, it shouldn’t be terribly difficult for those with the right skills to do this.
Hmmm. that is a great idea.
Thanks, but I don’t think I really need to read it as I’m literally living through it and am very aware if it all.
Unless you think I’m missing out on something?
capitaliism gonna capitalism.
Whenever humanity chooses to create a system of economics that places humanity, human communities and our transformative abilities to change the world around uis with our new forms of arts and sciences at its centre rather than disgusting rich jerks and their property Ill be standing with my ‘lethal item’ here waiting for them… 🤷🏿♂️
Once again, theres an amazing amount of ethical ai use out there but apparently nigh nobody cares about that
Ethical from the start you mean? Trained on data with the blessing of the owner?
First of all, yes, and also not all ai has to be generative or llms. Theres also a lot of other ai that was done before openai fucked everything up.
When we say AI, we generally mean the LLMs. It’s become a marketing term for them.
Obviously, we used neural networks and such ethically for a long time.
The problem isnt those, it’s the mass harvesting of data, the endless copyright breaches, the stealing of peoples work. All to resell it. While ruining the planet environmentally, economically and it has fucked with the way people think.
I mean yeah thats true but ethical llms are still completely possible but nobodys investing into it
Because it’s about money. That’s it.
There’s no money to be made from ethical ones, you need enough people willing to give you the rights to their stuff for free, because you would not be able to give royalties to them all.
We already see how unsustainable it is currently with the grand theft models and are just waiting for the bubble to burst.
AI can fuck off and die, we dont need it.
So, you’re against the Wayback Machine?
So you think website scraping should be illegal? When LinkedIn was trying to prevent other people from scraping their website (and lost the court around it too), you were on LinkedIn’s side?,
Yeah - my zdoom models.
The 10% of ethical AI use is drowned out by the other 90% of absolute liquid trash.
That’s not touching the ethics of stealing everyone’s work for your AI then selling it back to them.
That’s not touching the ethics of aggressive Data Center build outs that threaten people down to their actual health.
That’s not touching the fascist supporting corporations that run and own the frontier AI models.
That’s not touching the lack of those frontier AI company’s ethics. They operate like it’s the fuckng wild west.
How can you possibly have a victim complex about this?
That’s also not counting the ethics of barraging every site on the internet with a DDOS-level surge of webcrawlers scraping up data for AI training, to the point where every significant website out there has to implement anti-AI countermeasures in order to just stay operational.
There’s so much bullshit with LLMs that needs to be cleaned up, regulated, and outright outlawed before I’m gonna sit here and praise these chucklefucks for opening a kind of Pandoras box with basically no thought.
That’s not touching the ethics of stealing everyone’s work for your AI then selling it back to them.
Yeah, it’s the “selling it back to them” part that gets me. I don’t want to outlaw scraping, because then the Wayback Machine couldn’t function. The Wayback Machine is free, though. It’s a public service. (One which is very much needed, IMO.) If, instead, the Internet Archive required that you pay for a subscription in order to use it, I think most people would be very upset, and rightfully so.
You want to scrape the Web to feed your LLM? Cool! Make it an open-weight model.
Right?! And people act like you’re an asshole when you bring this up.
The nerve of some people, and the critical lack of awareness at the people picking all of our pockets.
I wonder what % of actions being ethical would be needed from Germany before WW2 would be considered unjustified.
I’m willing to bet that 10% of the actions the Nazis did (note: out of all the actions the German govt did, including enforcing laws, running trains/buses, collecting taxes, building infrastructure etc) were ethical, and yet the Nazis were still obviously the bad guys in WW2.
„Hitler wasn’t all bad; he built the Autobahn” is one of the things some right wingers actually say.
Exact same vein of arguments the AI band make.
This comment doesn’t even make sense in the context? The danger lies in unethical use. It’s also unregulated.
Don’t forget, there was a very brief time period when Google was ethical. How long did that last?
there was a very brief time period when Google was ethical. How long did that last?
Longer than LLMs have been around, actually
People care, it’s just not worth the cost
There is zero use of “ethical AI” out there.
Yeah, and it’s in China.
Such as?
Such as basically everything done with ai before 2022
to reverse engineer firmware of a device they own in order to show the additional privacy violations by Samsung.
Yeah, this is completely messed-up. I wonder if Samsung broke any laws by accessing customer soundbars without consent, reporting what they watched, etc…
Only one of those really happened though.
In case anyone was ever curious if AI could be used against our corporate masters, here’s your answer.
I suspect that if the AI industry ever gets any sort of regulation, it will be to wrench any kind of power that end users have that may threaten the capitalistic hegemony away from them. Can’t have people reverse engineering their tech to figure out how they are using it to spy on you, cuz THAT’S CYBER ABUSE! :/
that is why anthropoic got scared, afraid of deepseek and other free models.
Too little, too late. People like myaelf are already using DeepSeek among other open models & they’re widespread.
probably why they are scared.
Don’t worry. We’ll be able to run larger models locally soon and this kind of stuff will be need to be blocked on the device side, not the model side.
Just use a different website
wrench any kind of power that end users have that may threaten the capitalistic hegemony
Frog boiling.
That already happened when mobiles began to replace desktops.
Everybody declared me an idiot when I didn’t hook up my smart tv to the internet. This is why
These TVs can connect to open networks or other smart devices with Internet so that doesn’t necessarily save you
Alright this is the 4th time such a claim was given. Can someone please give us the actual truth or is it just parroting the same “fact” around.
Is it confirmed to be only smart TVs? I have a Sony Bravia from 2014, which I’m very fond of as it has no smart features. I would like to think it isn’t spying on me somehow. If it broke, I’m not sure what I’d do. Maybe buy a CRT or something. All TVs are smart these days.
If it broke, I’m not sure what I’d do.
Figure out how to fix it.
When our Samsung TV “broke” it was just the backlight. New one cost me $10 on AliExpress… and a bit more for fuses because I am a dumb idiot.
Though I must wonder how trustworthy those AliExpress fuses are. Louis Rossmann did review some crappy Amazon car fuses that were as good as nails. I don’t have a PSU to test them.Oh, and do something better to lift the panel. Even if it’s not too large to crack under its own weight, the LCD panel is still sharp. It WILL cut into your fingers. Again, I am a dumb idiot.
I love my 2010 Samsung tv and I too believe it’s not spying… does anyone know when the TVs went full predator mode?
Around 2018
This got me thinking about how smug I feel to have a clean tv but then I realize that my phone knows all and tells all to almost anyone. Hate it
Pawn Shop
Well good thing I don’t have any networks just left open.
Your neighbor might tho.
If you have a neighbor with an open wifi network then use it to torrent all the new movies from the most questionable sources without a VPN. I guarantee they will lock it down after they start getting letters from their ISP.
I’m not saying others aren’t screwed in that sense, but I don’t live within wifi range of anyone else.
Most have a small lte modem now. They WILL watch you
Pop open the back and chizel off the modem then.
Voids warranty.
Solder a resistor across the antenna pins.
No they don’t.
While plausible, I haven’t really figured any ways to test for this without cracking my Sony open.
That’s why you connect them to an isolated playpen with no access to anything else or the internet.
My tv has 2 cables plugged in, one is power the other is from the receiver. I have never connected it to WiFi and honestly I’m tempted to take it apart and pull that antenna out.
I declare you sane.
My display mode tv continues to serve me well. Need to access streaming content? that’s what the box is for.
It’s no surprise. They’re all in bed together.
Softbank invested $122 billion in Open AI: https://tracxn.com/d/companies/openai/__kElhSG7uVGeFk1i71Co9-nwFtmtyMVT7f-YHMn4TFBg/funding-and-investors
https://www.thelec.net/news/articleView.html?idxno=5132
The bosses of Samsung Electronics, OpenAI, and SoftBank held a three-way meeting in South Korea to discuss potential collaboration in AI. Samsung Electronics Executive Chairman Lee Jae-yong met OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son at Samsung’s office in Seoul on Tuesday.
One of the things that AI is actually useful for. Banned!
Hey guys, I am starting to think AI isn’t actually for us.
That’s not true. Anyone can access skills using AI.
And how do you make it to wealth?
You can’t make it to wealth without the rich deciding to whether or not AI exists.
Running advanced models has a cost. For now, there are freely accessible services (which are not as good as the ones requiring subscription), but this can and will change as soon as providers feel they can get away with it.
What the fuck is “cyber abuse?”
It’s when someone puts their flash drive inside your usb port without consent
The TV and Samsung are showing here what cyber abuse is
Mainly the provision that gets people is the “unauthorized access” part — or in this case, exceeding authorized access.
It can be a pretty silly provision, because in some cases that just means visiting a URL that the domain owner didn’t expect you to visit.
Edit: Just to be clear to whoever downvoted me, I am not in favor of this law. I think it’s a bad idea and poorly written too.
“Trolling/low effort content”
Yeah I used to think the whole “At home data center” guys were insane but personally I’m digging up my old GPU’s to get a small rig going. Nothing insane but enough to run some light weight models.
- The AI techies were right, this is a revolutionary technology and 2. The companies that own it are evil in a no-joke-actually-evil-like-comic-book-evil kind of way. they-will-destroy-the-climate-and-world-just-to-be-the-one-that-did-it kind of way. Humans-are-too-expensive-kill-them type of way.
Time to build your rigs and pull down some open source models before the criminals (openai, et al) stick telemetry in them to track your usage. Get your own wiki reader while you’re at it…
Time to build your rigs
Notably, even if you get a TV with smart features, there should be zero need to connect it to the internet. Just use it as a TV. Don’t buy any TV that violates that idea. I haven’t checked, but I’m guessing some shitty smart TV that refuses to work without a connection exists.
You can also build your own media center. It’s one of the more common things to build for yourself. That way, you can at least choose what sort of digital footprint you leave, instead of having everything you do stolen immediately by a smart appliance.
I haven’t checked, but I’m guessing some shitty smart TV that refuses to work without a connection exists.
I’m fairly sure Samsung TVs won’t work without a connection. If I remember right you get stuck on a network select screen so it can “check for updates” or some bullshit.
I’m all for self hosting but glm can be used with hosted providers and it costs peanuts. You can also pay z.ai directly, but of course one day they may turn off the ability to reverse engineer stuff.
You are only allowed to use ai for evil
Crazy that it’s log4j exposing an issue instead of being one
That’s a novelty Twitter account name probably not the actual log4j maintainers
I have a related question: how feasible is it that a smart TV with wifi turned off can access the wifi connection of connected devices? E.g. a firestick, in my case.
I’m a web developer by day, my gut says a TV probably shouldn’t be able to override a literal on/off setting, but I also know that a software setting is barely enforceable at all.
Who knows? Without the ability to audit that the software is doing by yourself, you just have to trust whatever it is that they say the switch does. Maybe it disables some minor functionality while still doing the majority of the privacy invasion stuff. Maybe it does absolutely nothing whatsoever.
This is the whole reason behind the Free Software movement and everything Richard Stallman has been preaching for the past 40 years. If you don’t have the ability to control the software on the devices you own, they will be used against you.
Gamers Nexus on YouTube made a whole series of videos on LG smart TVs and yea it’s that bad. Check them out if you get the chance.
Why assume the Firestick isn’t doing spying of its own?
A device like a Fire stick connects over HDMI and sees the TV as a monitor, so there’s no networking there.
The Fire stick could advertise a passwordless adhoc WiFi network that other devices could connect to, but that would only invite trouble.
It would be trivial for Amazon and Google to add HDMI HEC to their devices, and charge TV manufacturers for the privilege of plumbing TVs through them to their Internet connection as a reach around.
Is there any evidence they have done so?
I’m not aware of any.
My reasoning is the main barrier to its widespread use is the premium cost of HEC capable cables, but the sticks that connect directly into the HDMI port eliminate that, and make it much more feasible, technically, to extablish this standardised comms channel.
I’d be surprised if this isn’t already being explored and negotiated for newer models of both.
One counter to it would be a HDMI condom that prevented HEC from being established.
I would guesstimate that the connected device would have to expose and share the wifi connection first, then that would somehow need to be achieved over hdmi with a device such as the fire stick, so, hopefully unlikely
LoL
This “advanced tech” that’s based on stolen IP won’t even give you the lyrics to Happy Birthday to You.
Do the Happy Birthday people hire Disney lawyers?
Close… It was Warner…
Probably why they lost the copyright.
Because I find llm AI pretty vomit inducing I try to avoid it at all cost. And so in the back of my mind the past few months I’ve had this annoying feeling of “what if it is actually catching up?”.
Glad to read it’s still as dumb and useless as a sack of bricks on the bottom of the ocean.
Not to dishearten you, but this comment is screaming survivorship bias.
Im gonna to be brutally honest with you, I feel that you throughly have underestimated the capabilities of not AI but rather the capabilities of the wealthy parasites that order the programming of these AIs and the self learning processes of these AIs.
The problem isnt the AI. ALL FORMS of AI will only become as smmart , or genocidal, as the bourgeoisie orders us to program them to be
So ya AI is CURRENTLY as dumb as a pile of bricks ya ya I get it. Keyword hhere is CURRENTLY. …Who here wants to take a guess at how genocidally cunning AI will be in say the next 200 or 500 years?..
What I do know right now is that the people who run most societies are genocidal , deathly greedy, AND cunning so any technology that touuches their hands is bound to be twisted to become like them…
I feel you underestimate how much you’re reading into a throwaway remark.
Also about the future: ai in 200 - 500 years? How long do you think humanity has left?
actually ya . truthfully speaking I dont think humanity even has that much time left lol.
https://www.tomsguide.com/tvs/your-samsung-tv-is-watching-you-how-to-turn-off-data-collection
March 2nd btw, not that we haven’t known for years
Here’s Legal Eagle talking to Gamers Nexus about the LG TVs keeping their mics on when the TV is “turned off” and transcribing conversations in plaintext.
tl;dr LG says they’re not doing targeted ads or such with it.
The mics in theory stay on but not recording to detect the activation phrase, but because they’re really just listening for “Hi” they turn the recording system on and then it stays on as long as sound is being made, all because you greeted someone in your home.
No. LG says they’re not recording your private conversations continuously. Their lawyers didn’t have them add that qualifier for nothing. As long as they take a break a few minutes a day they can still claim they aren’t continuously recording. And they absolutely are recording you, the law be dawned.
Until people are imprisoned and the fines are large multipliers of the money made off this bullshit, it will keep getting worse.
Soon enough, I expect TVs to have built-in cellular modems so they can collect and transmit data even when you don’t connect them to your network.
That’s when you open the tv up and drop a blob of solder on the modem
And then they’ll make TVs that refuse to boot if they don’t detect a working modem.
Sadly, I think this is where we’re heading if the arms race heats up.
tl;dr LG says they’re not doing targeted ads or such with it.
Then what the fuck are they doing with it? Because ‘targeted ads’ are the relatively benign option. Any other use for spying on you is going to be darker and more harmful.
You will never be told what they do with it
Additionally, if they are collecting it, now they are sitting on a treasure trove of data. Someone else will want some of that. You think they give a shit about securing it? I’m sure these things aren’t even all that secure. If someone can vibe hack their TV, then someone else can too.
The only way this stops is if it becomes illegal or too expensive.
For anyone who wants to check the original source without signing into X, here’s the researcher’s original post via a Twitter viewer. It’s the source post, not a full technical write-up.
I’m getting a pop up
Wow pop up telling me to install a vpn.
now I wonder how much the Samsung phones are listening in
So gross. I hope this gets more recognition by big news outlets / investigations. And then eventually regulation
