twitter.com
"Samsung running a TensorFlow lite model on 960x540 image to track you": https://twitter.com/mike64_t/status/2114150399406202896
"Samsung TVs look for microphones in your house via Bluetooth and then spy events": https://twitter.com/freddier/status/2114042326758867453
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.
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
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! ;-)
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.
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.
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.
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.
I look at the original comment and it doesn't say anything about gullibility. It expresses frustration that there's an influx of people interested in the field of Reverse Engineering but aren't digging deeper to where the answers are. I read the comment as being more similar to the complaints of the Eternal September, when an existing culture got permanently swamped by people who wanted to interact with the tools of the culture but didn't realise there was a process to learn first.
For myself, I'm glad there's an influx of people interested in technology and being able to grasp at the tools that can deliver outcomes. I don't love seeing people appearing that want to tell me that deeper understanding is dead, not because it does me any particular daily harm but because I think there's still a lot of value in understanding the details of a topic which summaries tend to gloss over. I've been feeling this for a long time, though, it's not related to LLMs but to a culture of knowledge more fixated on soundbites than on getting at the truth of things.
In this case, I see the original commenter reflecting my own concerns, but that's so often the way: we see things as we are, not as they are, which may be colouring my read.
Reasonable minds can disagree, of course, and I respect that we may just be reading the comment quite differently.
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'.
And on flock cameras they still do.
It's like this, once you have the data they will come for it.
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/
There have been countless reports of various malicious activity from these TVs (and not just Samsung).
(Joking or /sarcasm.)
1. taking screenshots of your screen 2. fingerpriting devices on your local network 3. connects to bluetooth mics in the room and recording audio without asking etc.
(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.
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.
Nitpick, but it would only make "showing others how to do that" a crime.
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.)
> 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.
...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"
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.
> 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.
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.
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'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.
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.
a) needing to redraw a full screen when you reach the end of the buffer/region "ring"
or
b) relying on VGA 64k address wrapping (fiddly, doesn't work the same with all cards, doesn't allow you to use a split screen for a stationary lower status bar).
You need two regions for double buffering, giving you more paint time for all those sprites and one more for the wrapping trick. As you move around these three regions swap roles.
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.
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".
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!"
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.
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.
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.)
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.
We're not limited to a bounded amount of blame to divvy out. We can blame the mob boss and the hitmen.
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.
You don't have to hide what's happening from people that work in ads. There are tons of people who willingly work at e.g. Facebook or Google knowing every single thing they will do is about ads. They might not use the word "spying," but only because they delude themselves into thinking people want the spying and propaganda (e.g. you don't have to look much to find people on this forum asking how else people would know what to buy. Nevermind that a significant portion of the population takes active steps to block them). Like they completely unironically think "you know, I am like a Big Brother. Why would anyone not want a Big Brother? "
Yeah definitely Cyberpunk moment here.
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.
"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.
Works very well.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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!"
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.
Very different from a single-player video game, or a website with a login form.
> 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.
(Not saying people should use bixby mind you)
But if you are talking TVs specifically, I expect they will get back to that too.
If you avoided downloading the app for whatever reason, you can be proud because it just saved you from potentially getting hacked.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Wiretapping is just illegal and should be treated as such.
Part of the problem is (uninformed, false) "consent" being buried in a lengthy and silently-mutating Terms of Service.
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.
I'm assuming, perhaps incorrectly, that if the TV had a crap connection it would stop nagging.
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.
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)
If blocking ads won't be possible anymore then I'll just pirate everything. And jailbreaking TVs and other hardware.
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.
I have been watching a bit of prime video and getting ads for cars, baby diapers and gambling sites, all things I have zero interest in buying lol. I've not had a car in 10 years and I'm single and don't even buy lottery tickets. I keep sites isolated a lot in Firefox containers but Amazon of course has my purchase history there (there aren't many other ecommerce options left around here) so I'm surprised they don't have me figured out. But I'm glad.
I'm not really sure about the legal system but I'm in Europe, it's a lot more restrictive for that kind of stuff.
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.
Shout "six seven" and look over the shoulder of the twelve-year-old who magically appears?
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.
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.
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.
Still infuriating.
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)
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
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...
And for "other uses like gaming" you are using an external computer over HDMI, not smart TV apps.
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.
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.
As a result I'm not upgrading my TV anytime soon, and when I do, I hope to find a dumb one.
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.
I'm not sure it's literal enough.
...... or do you???
Must we have to remind people that raising an arm (while saying “my heart goes out to you all”) does not make someone a Nazi, not matter how strenuously the leftwing media try to present it that way?
Like none of these TV's hooks to an Open Wifi Hotspot and abuse you.
I haven't managed to reproduce it.
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".
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.
> 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.
From what I heard these are especially awful, even by low IoT standards.
(no idea how likely is for someone trustworthy to publish one...)
How many years is it for 10 million devices?
Happy to post to github if you'd like.
Has this been quantified? Otherwise it's easy to fall for 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)
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?
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.
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.
A lot of info collected by 3 letter agencies is based on it.
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.
DeepSeek will break the binary into code and Claude will search for problems. Now you have most of exploitation chain.
Samsung was the single brand reviewed which actually stopped sending data after the user told it to do so.
Don't buy LG TVs.
We clearly need a whole new privacy framework where everything is optional and opt-in, plus open software to monitor this compliance.
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.
https://web.archive.org/web/20261024082057if_/https://www.re...
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...
```
+----------------------------------+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------+-----------------+-----------------+-----------------+
| 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.
Regarding Qwen3.8-Flash-Next only Alibaba matches the quality I get when run local inference.
Mind I run mxfp4 and int8 kv (before I run unsloth's q4_xl). And it is much more capable than providers that claim full precision. I have no idea what they do to mess it up, maybe they quantize the kv?
Either way the provider you choose matters a lot.
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.
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)
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.
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.
Monkeys on typewriters excuse only works for huge companies who can afford to buy opinions.
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.
> 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'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'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".
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.
That seems like a fraught way to live.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Well, maybe _you_ do.
This issue isn't black and white, and you're casting unearned aspersions. We should have this conversation, in actual good faith.
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?
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...
Are you seriously claiming that the untrained masses can start developing exploits on their devices?
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.
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.
It's just an adult human body, Michael, what could it cost? One('s) dignity?
Anthropic is a joke of a company.
That alone should disqualify it by itself.
I've run into both security and bio-refusals, it doesn't take much.
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
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.
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.
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
Also leading the frontier is much much harder than catching up to frontier.
This reflects horribly bad on Samsung!
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.
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.
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.
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 remember that being a problem in the past, that you were limited to lower resolutions.
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.
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...
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.
are we living in 2010 or something?
Are we living in 1990 or something?
Hopefully similar apps will come along for Samsung now that root on it can be achieved [1].
> “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.
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.
It cannot be regulated because we let dollar/capital rise above political authority.
Public awareness is step one.
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.
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...
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.
There's gigantic conflict of interest there.
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.
Is that a good law or is it a barnacle? Is it enforced in the UK?
Although it does appear to be true in London https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Vict/2-3/47/section/54
""" 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.
> 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
Wi-Fi on planes is truly astounding when you think for even a moment.
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.
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.
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.
> 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
As far as the censorship goes UK is trying hard. So follow the money?
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.
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.
> We used to regulate any minor thing that was annoying enough
Your example is a good reason why that approach was foolish.
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.
Are these fines ever paid? Or is it appeal upon appeal and 10 years later they pay a tenth of the fine?
[0] https://r2.community.samsung.com/t5/SmartThings/SmartThings-...
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.
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.
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.
What is the societal opportunity cost of a person not doing $this_thing_you_mentioned and applying it to just about anything else.
But also if you're working on a local device, any Chinese model will agree to it most of the time.
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?
Basically all Qwen models got un-neuthered.
Even the big ones (Deepseek, etc.) got their protection layer ablated.
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
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.
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.
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.
Not much different from playstore but that is also a problem.
Their smart TVs are a nightmare, and have been for the last 15 years (at least)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Samsung just needs you to buy a TV.
I guess I’m going to have to just write replacement firmware, aren’t I?
If this data is worth enough, they could be using IOT 4G service.
Not saying it isn’t happening, nor that it won’t ever happen.
Anyway - Faraday living room?
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.
I already use an Apple TV, but the Samsung’s firmware is annoying even as a dumb tv.
No idea why you'd even consider anything Samsung related.
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 ;)
I mean it is probably also used to collect data, but this sounds like it might be more than just that. Maybe?
just hack it right after purchase and own the glass
i remember going store to store in search of one.
gg me, that was a smart move.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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...
This is categorically false. I don't know what you're trying to allege here, but it's not 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.
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.
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.
Yet here you are with the "WELL AKSHUALLY..." brigade.
Do you work in bigtech?
[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.
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.
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)_/¯
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...
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.
OP did not say that, has clarified his intent. At this point I think you are the one willfully misinterpreting the discussion at hand, either so you can "win" at internet pedantry, or perhaps so you can feel better about the evil panopticon you have helped build.
Plus, this service requires that you trust Google to store that data which, for the third time, is not exactly great given their collusion with agencies like ICE (something you've ignored repeatedly now). In the age of NSPM-7, this is absolutely a concern worth agitating about: https://www.aclu.org/news/national-security/how-nspm-7-seeks...
Also, this service requires you to trust that Google spends enough money preventing intrusions which, if you've been following infosec news, is no longer even a modicum of a priority for them: https://x.com/loobeny/status/2049942398416122250
You had a strong reaction. Now you're digging a hole, ignoring points that detract from your reactionary thesis, and ignoring the wider context in order to focus on an accusation fully based on your specific interpretation of my writing, not the substance of the content. If you want rational discourse then you should do better than simple sophistry - just because you have some pet peeve that you globally accuse all HN commenters of having doesn't make it more true. Those who claim they have no confirmation bias are the ones who are the most likely to have it.
The original link was on HN two days ago with no traction.
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.
> 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.
Really? There’s no “spyware free” marketing angle? Even Amazon has always sold a Kindle variant with no ads for $20 more.
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.
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?
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.
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.
How dare they run a classifier locally on the TV, they should upload it uncut to Czechia like Amazon did with their ring cameras!
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
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.
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.
This isn’t happening.
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.
Dock repair is too random of a subject to be a coincidence.