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Cybersecurity bounty hunter says Samsung TVs use AI to record audio and screenshots for ads — 'Finally found a company that truly listens to its customers,' says hacker (www.tomshardware.com)
submitted 5 days ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 54 points 5 days ago (16 children)

Could you go into more detail for those of us who don't want to brick their tv? I think you're over estimating some of our knowledge base.

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  • [–] 45 points 5 days ago (11 children)

    Was watching gamers nexus. Opened up codex. Gave it network permissions. It was able to fully take control of the TV in minutes. It even navigated to the admin panel and gave me the code to plug in. Very quickly had figured out some of the major API's. In a half hour, I was able to get a container/ program set up to just "send" any stream I wanted to the TV without having to use any Samsung services. Then, scramble/ poison telemetry data/ advertising data. Whatever you like. None of it is worth publishing. But I wanted to control the TV I bought. The one I own. In my house. That I paid for. And I think its royally fucked up the world we live in that there are any barriers to that.

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  • [–] 48 points 5 days ago* (8 children)

    Just don't use OpenAI or Anthropic cloud models for reverse engineering your TV's APIs. This guy got banned from OpenAI for doing this research on his Samsung TV, and there are reports of Anthropic models starting to refuse reverse engineering tasks, having been given new guidance. Apparently proles learning about the corporate surveillance they're under is a step too far.

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  • [–] 11 points 5 days ago (6 children)

    Hence the point about not fucking advertising it.

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  • [–] 14 points 4 days ago (2 children)

    They are saying that if you are using a cloud model, you are advertising it by default.

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  • [–] 9 points 4 days ago (1 child)

    So, this all sounds completely plausible, but at the same time it also sounds totally crazy right! I mean that anyone could do that without actually knowing a lot about the specific system being compromised... Nuts.

    I guess I'm just curious, how much experience do you have with writing software, reverse engineering or hacking? Because I just can't wrap my head around how a layman could accomplish this. The possibility of being able to un-enshitify the devices we purchase is really very exciting.

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  • [–] 5 points 4 days ago*

    I had the tv for ages and I basically never turned it on because it was so enshittified with their shit software anyways.

    I do have experience with software and reverse engineering but it's not what you think. It's mostly trying to reverse engineer pin outs for old scientific equipment or rat tailed sensors that come from China with no documentation. Check my post history.

    I didn't need to do shit for the TV thing. I just finished watching the episode of GN and was like " well I've got a Samsung that's basically a brick anyways because it's so enshittifed, worst that could happen is it stays a brick.

    What I found out is I don't need to rewrite the firmware to take control. There are basically APIs for most things.

    Just go try it.

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  • [–] 25 points 5 days ago (3 children)

    There’s a repo with ready-made APKs for many TV models: https://github.com/Gathin23/cleanyourtv

    And if your specific one isn’t supported, it has instructions how to do it with AI yourself

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