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.

(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.

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.

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.

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.

Hopefully similar apps will come along for Samsung now that root on it can be achieved [1].

[0] https://github.com/rorygallagher2024/glasshouse

[1] https://smackernews.com/item/50218633 HN

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.

“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.

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?

DeepSeek will break the binary into code and Claude will search for problems. Now you have most of exploitation chain.

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.

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)

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.

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.

..its literally running.. ..It's literally called.. ..its literally AlexNet.. ..literally doesn't work..

I'm not sure it's literal enough.

Samsung just needs you to buy a TV.

I guess I’m going to have to just write replacement firmware, aren’t I?

[0] https://r2.community.samsung.com/t5/SmartThings/SmartThings-...

I was at the butcher one day and asked for "ossobuco" because I wanted some bones for my dog, then all of a sudden I got reels with ossobuco in it, recipes, sellers, nearby shops, etc and I said WTF? Who the fuck makes posts about ossobuco? Why all of a sudden after using social apps just for football and porn all I start getting is ossobuco ads everywhere? A word you will never see anywhere now popping up in all my social feeds.

Possibility of that being random? Zero, not in this probabilistic universe we live in

I 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.

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

https://web.archive.org/web/20261024082057if_/https://www.re...

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.

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.

i remember going store to store in search of one.

gg me, that was a smart move.

The original link was on HN two days ago with no traction.

https://twitter.com/log4j/status/2113014142600953868

https://xxcancel.com/freddier/status/2114042326758867453

How dare they run a classifier locally on the TV, they should upload it uncut to Czechia like Amazon did with their ring cameras!