Hacker reverse engineers his Samsung TV and finds on-device AI listening for your dog and baby, watching what you watch, and borrowing your soundbar’s mic if the TV doesn’t have one. Then OpenAI banned him for reverse-engineering it.
Source:
Hacker reverse engineers his Samsung TV and finds on-device AI listening for your dog and baby, watching what you watch, and borrowing your soundbar’s mic if the TV doesn’t have one. Then OpenAI banned him for reverse-engineering it.
Source:
Their own harnesses breaking out of their test environments and hacking third party companies is “oopsi” but their customers using an agent in a controlled manner to reverse engineer firmware of a device they own is bad. I see. Fuckers.
Corporations gonna corporate.
It’s high time we had a revolution of our own in North America to chase out these corporate barons that own every little minute aspect of our lives.
Lina Kahn was kicking ass at the FTC! First thing I thought when I woke to another Trump win, “There goes our last, best hope.” She’s a hero of mine. Mamdani snatched her for his team, so more evidence he has his shit together.
Lina Kahn is a hero of mine as well!
I highly suggest you to read “Enshittification” by Cory Doctorow, especially the new and updated version.
They stripped our freedom to own our devices. We need a revolution.
More than anything, we need to stop buying this shit.
Sales, as in “there are none…” for a few quarters would tank the stock valuations enough that the stakeholders would make life quite uncomfortable on the C-suites for their decisions to bake spyware into everything.
NGL, BEST decision I made was to jettison cable TV service back in 1999 when we came online. If (and this is a BIG “if” nowadays…) I watch something, it’s from a DVD or I hoist the Jolly Roger and sail the seven seas…
My current 10 year old TV is doing duty as a 50-inch 4K display for my gaming PeeCee… and it’s kinda “special needs” as a supposedly smart TV in that it doesn’t have a single app installed that can actually stream 4K - what can I say… it was a WalMart special… gee, I wonder why?
I put it online (via ethernet) when we got it to test it’s “smart” abilities and quickly discovered it was an absolute dog.
Works great to game on though.
LOL!
This is way too complex of a topic to leave to “consumer choice”. There are layers upon layers of complex systems at play, not to mention miles of legalize and precisely crafted PR statements to say one thing and mean another.
The only way this gets better is with government regulation, pretending consumers can make a difference here is blaming the victim.
But the government itself has bbeen bought out by most of these bige companies …so…
What ‘government regulations’ you thinking of? I sure theyll all be very helpful… 🤭
Bro the government itself is part of the prpblem cauae the government is A-OK with a capitaliistic set of governmental regulations that give the richest capitalists many freedoms even when theyre being ‘regulated’. These government regulattions you speak of will be like palcing these rich companies under house arrest…in a 26,000 square feet mansion!
We have tto destroy the system itself in its entirety, both the bribed governmeent and the capitaliists that contorol our economies and our governments.
Why cant WE be our own government? Werecognize that thhere is a problem. We investigate the problem and recognize that this is psychopathic. We recognize that the execs at companies thatt do this type of bullshit should be arrested , or worse, and then have their assets nationalized … We cant do this shit our selves?
Because most of “we” are checked out dummies who are easily manipulated by unscrupulous entities. And the more money you have, the more dummies you can manipulate.
I’m gonna have to disagree with you on that.
As someone that spent 15 years in the Nielsens Homescan Consumer Shopping survey (rebranded as National Consumer Panel) the power IS in the hands of the consumer… Hence the huge industry effort on determining what advertising does and does not work.
In that survey, one would scan ALL purchases and send in the data weekly and the company would then send questionnaires on WHY one buys an item and what, if any, commercials they see (in print, radio or TV - then later online) and if the ads were memorable.
As I was answering the questionnaires, I was also noting how they framed the questions, and what assumptions they made in the pre-selected answers we were to use. (…you’d be astonished by the assumptions that are made about the public…)
The fact that panel members didn’t even have the ability to use their own words to say what they did or didn’t like about their purchases or the businesses and instead it was about feelings… that right there told me that emotional manipulation was/is the main leverage point used by advertisers and corporations.
The consumers have ALL the power in the equation, as all a consumer has to do is say “no”… the level of manipulation that industry has to go to - and the surveying and the depths to which people are plumbed and pumped for info - is more about maintaining customers through deception than it is about keeping them by creating high quality goods and services.
Used shit is the way to go… or better yet, be the cultural change yourself and jettison the old media. For sure I did by cutting the cable TV in 1999, …and we haven’t looked back.
Please provide an example or two. I’d like to be astonished.
The best one was the pharma survey… They assumed that EVERYONE in middle age is on meds.
I got sent a pharmaceutical survey and how those operate is you would get a mailer with a series of questions and you’d use the barcode scanner to scan the answers.
I got into that targeted survey (somehow) and was sent a three ring binder of pages and pages of drugs.
The first four pages were questions related to when you’d started on meds, for what illness and when did you stop taking them and why…
Nowhere in the initial survey questions was the option to say “I have not STARTED taking medicine / have no need…”
I called in and talked to a representative and she couldn’t wrap her brain around the concept that as a middle-age American there were ZERO prescription drugs being taken by anyone in my home.
I had to ask her why the survey was predicated on the belief that everyone was on drugs - and she got a bit testy and huffed “well, I wouldn’t say that!” and I asked her where the “no use or need for meds option” was on the survey if that wasn’t the case… she replied “well, don’t you need medicines?” and I said “Nielsen has our full scan list of the food we’ve bought and eaten for the last decade and no one can draw a connection between proper food and health?”
Crickets…
“Oh, you must be really healthy!” “Yeah… we don’t eat garbage…” More crickets…
Then she credited me the points for the survey (It was a big one so it tallied large - I got two iPods out of that year’s totals…) and quickly hung up.
The assumptions that we also watched TV and the questions about ads on it that we’d seen were pretty interesting. they also sent out a Media Recording device (looked like an old-school pager) that would listen all day for an ultrasonic sound that was broadcast on the various Clear Channel radio stations and we were to wear it as we went about our day. Sorry to say that one was a bust - by that time I’d discovered somafm online and was well into streaming radio.
These are great stories. Thanks for sharing.
My car is a 2010 Mazda 3.
My TV is a 32 inch 2009 Sony Bravia 720p compatible with both analog and digital TV signals, and has coax cable and RCA inputs and outputs among others like HDMI of course. I can still hook up my original NES and even a VCR to it. It’s the best TV I will ever have and I hope it never dies out.
My PC is running Linux 100% now.
We go to the local library to rent DVDs for free, buy them used from thrift shops, or download from TPB. I have a USB disk hooked to an NVidia Shield to watch them on VLC on my old TV.
This is the way…
If all manufacturers of smart TV’s with the best picture qualities are using this targeted avertising/spying firmware, as much as I agree with your sentiment, it’s not really a viable option for someone who’s in need of purchasing a TV.
Is there a reason that a TV needs to be new? I picked up a 50" plasma for 80 bucks last year, for use in my work studio. NGL, attaching it to a MacPro that’s used for graphics - with the color saturation on that thing? - holy hell, it’s beautiful and I can match the outputs to the color profiles for the print jobs I run off… Facebook marketplace for the win, my man.
Or we can pull together and design boards as drop in replacements for the circuit boards in the SmartTVs. I’m shocked at how cheap it is to get custom boards printed these days. Since SmartTVs are sold at a loss with the intent of making even more money by selling your data, replacing the hardware in the device should still end up being cheaper than the cost of an unsubsidized TV.
With the AI tools available for designing boards now, it shouldn’t be terribly difficult for those with the right skills to do this.
Hmmm. that is a great idea.
Thanks, but I don’t think I really need to read it as I’m literally living through it and am very aware if it all.
Unless you think I’m missing out on something?
capitaliism gonna capitalism.
Whenever humanity chooses to create a system of economics that places humanity, human communities and our transformative abilities to change the world around uis with our new forms of arts and sciences at its centre rather than disgusting rich jerks and their property Ill be standing with my ‘lethal item’ here waiting for them… 🤷🏿♂️
Once again, theres an amazing amount of ethical ai use out there but apparently nigh nobody cares about that
Ethical from the start you mean? Trained on data with the blessing of the owner?
There are, yes. TONS of tiny models, a few large ones.
LLMs themselves aren’t the issue, its the corporations/capitalism itself causing the problems, as is tradition.
First of all, yes, and also not all ai has to be generative or llms. Theres also a lot of other ai that was done before openai fucked everything up.
When we say AI, we generally mean the LLMs. It’s become a marketing term for them.
Obviously, we used neural networks and such ethically for a long time.
The problem isnt those, it’s the mass harvesting of data, the endless copyright breaches, the stealing of peoples work. All to resell it. While ruining the planet environmentally, economically and it has fucked with the way people think.
I mean yeah thats true but ethical llms are still completely possible but nobodys investing into it
Because it’s about money. That’s it.
There’s no money to be made from ethical ones, you need enough people willing to give you the rights to their stuff for free, because you would not be able to give royalties to them all.
We already see how unsustainable it is currently with the grand theft models and are just waiting for the bubble to burst.
AI can fuck off and die, we dont need it.
So, you’re against the Wayback Machine?
Libraries are for reading.
Well, their books are, yes.
But, the similarities largely stop there, in this instance. Training “AI” on literature isn’t at all similar to a single person checking out a book/magazine/dvd/et al, and that’s not even getting into the fact that the aforementioned fuckers are destroying tons of physical copies IRL to “train” their bullshit bots.
“AI” ≈ libraries? Pff. We would be so lucky. 🥲
When y’all complained about them leeching Anna’s Archive, the legal approach you demanded means buying and shredding one copy of any book they use. They can’t resell the book or share their scan because that’s piracy, which Lemmy cares deeply about in this context and only this context.
Training is transformative. A program that can retell Shrek in the style of The Hobbit is not even the same category of thing as either original work. What a network is and does cannot be a substitute, unless the Silmarillion had more swamp ogres than I’ve heard.
Don’t apologize for them —especially not with shit argument points and implied shame. Fuck off with that shit. None of this is a consequence of “our” actions, and your stance is more simp than solid. Nah. Hard pass.
Not an argument.
I’ll say. Wrangling cats is easier than whatever this is.
So you think website scraping should be illegal? When LinkedIn was trying to prevent other people from scraping their website (and lost the court around it too), you were on LinkedIn’s side?,
Yeah - my zdoom models.
It’s far too late to put those horses back in the barn.
“we can’t get rid of the Atlantic slave trade it’s here to stay”
Ok buddy
Lemmy: “If we tiny speck of people make a moral stand and don’t use LLMs, they’ll give up their stolen content and go away!”
The theft is done, over, you’re not going to get those horses back in the barn no matter how high your horse is. Do you imagine that on some glorious day the entire planet will legislate wiping all training data and say, “Sorry. Let’s not do that.” Sure. Soon as we get textbook communism working for 8,000,0000,000 people.
Bullshit like this is why I left lemmy last year. It feels like a bunch of children arguing over their personal version of a perfect world. Bluesky was kinda nice, people with some age and experience and an understanding of real politik. Kinda vanilla as well, but cutesy little quips like yours weren’t met with much acclaim.
Go reinvent the world kid, with no understanding of history or human nature. While you’re at it, maybe every museum on the planet can send every artifact back to the original peoples. Uh, gotta put a timeline on “original”, but it’s the right thing to do! Good luck.
Well, maybe you should leave Lemmy again.
I had commented many times on other platforms as to how insular lemmy is. “Believe as we believe or fuck off!”
Well…
And then we’ll see a post about how to grow the community.
Oh yeah please leave again!!!
We’re gonna need a bigger barn
The 10% of ethical AI use is drowned out by the other 90% of absolute liquid trash.
That’s not touching the ethics of stealing everyone’s work for your AI then selling it back to them.
That’s not touching the ethics of aggressive Data Center build outs that threaten people down to their actual health.
That’s not touching the fascist supporting corporations that run and own the frontier AI models.
That’s not touching the lack of those frontier AI company’s ethics. They operate like it’s the fuckng wild west.
How can you possibly have a victim complex about this?
Yeah, it’s the “selling it back to them” part that gets me. I don’t want to outlaw scraping, because then the Wayback Machine couldn’t function. The Wayback Machine is free, though. It’s a public service. (One which is very much needed, IMO.) If, instead, the Internet Archive required that you pay for a subscription in order to use it, I think most people would be very upset, and rightfully so.
You want to scrape the Web to feed your LLM? Cool! Make it an open-weight model.
Right?! And people act like you’re an asshole when you bring this up.
The nerve of some people, and the critical lack of awareness at the people picking all of our pockets.
That’s also not counting the ethics of barraging every site on the internet with a DDOS-level surge of webcrawlers scraping up data for AI training, to the point where every significant website out there has to implement anti-AI countermeasures in order to just stay operational.
There’s so much bullshit with LLMs that needs to be cleaned up, regulated, and outright outlawed before I’m gonna sit here and praise these chucklefucks for opening a kind of Pandoras box with basically no thought.
I wonder what % of actions being ethical would be needed from Germany before WW2 would be considered unjustified.
I’m willing to bet that 10% of the actions the Nazis did (note: out of all the actions the German govt did, including enforcing laws, running trains/buses, collecting taxes, building infrastructure etc) were ethical, and yet the Nazis were still obviously the bad guys in WW2.
„Hitler wasn’t all bad; he built the Autobahn” is one of the things some right wingers actually say.
Exact same vein of arguments the AI band make.
This comment doesn’t even make sense in the context? The danger lies in unethical use. It’s also unregulated.
Don’t forget, there was a very brief time period when Google was ethical. How long did that last?
I think the point is people like the person hacking Samsung smart TVs with AI should get some credit, purist “AI bad” takes don’t account for this. Also if there’s regulation it’s likely to start by targeting good uses like that one. Fuck OpenAI though.
1 good thing coming of it, doesn’t wipe away all the fucking harm AI is causing. If AI never blew up, the world would be better off. It’s introduced a whole host of problems we didnt need, just for the sake of a few people getting richer.
So what though? You don’t have the option of getting rid of it, and it’s a technology, not a person. Nuance is called for, especially if the alternative is refusing to acknowledge good things people do with it, or focusing condemnation on “AI” as a monolithic entity instead of the particular people and companies doing harm with it. Case in point, OpenAI banning this person.
I’m sorry, but AI generally remains “bad” until regulation takes place, community concerns about data centres are properly considered and protections are put in place. Right now, billionaires and corporations are running amok and that usually doesn’t end well.
You don’t need to blame math or people who make use of it for the abuses of billionaires and corporations.
You’ve lost me.
Longer than LLMs have been around, actually
People care, it’s just not worth the cost
Yeah, and it’s in China.
Such as?
Such as basically everything done with ai before 2022
There is zero use of “ethical AI” out there.
Yeah, this is completely messed-up. I wonder if Samsung broke any laws by accessing customer soundbars without consent, reporting what they watched, etc…
Only one of those really happened though.