5 ms·

Okay. This is insane. First the monitor that uses a windows feature to automatically install a small helper tool with root permissions and then starts showing a

by spockz 26d ago

Okay. This is insane. First the monitor that uses a windows feature to automatically install a small helper tool with root permissions and then starts showing adds in certain regions. Now a tv that is actually actively snooping around on top of the known fingerprinting. What else is next? In the previous topic I got ridiculed for not wanting to buy LG anymore because I could use an agent to modify to strip out the offending bits. But there must be something better than just keeping to buy things that invade our privacy and homes further and further. Which brands aren’t doing this? Sony? They also announced a partnership for the lower end TVs IIRC.

Sharlin 26d ago
Well, it’s a smart TV. I would assume with extreme prejudice that every single one of them is doing stuff like this and worse until proven innocent. Based on everything I’ve read about these things it seems the most reasonable stance. > In the previous topic I got ridiculed for not wanting to buy LG anymore because I could use an agent to modify to strip out the offending bits. Jesus fucking Christ.
gizzlon 26d ago
Yeah, just keep buying the poisonous breakfast serial. It's easy to pick out the brown bits of rat poison /s
afarah1 26d ago
I think the insane part is that this is not criminal and the executives are not jailed for it.
- account42 26d ago
  That's exactly why this keeps happening. If I bug your house I'd be charged with all kinds of crimes. If LG does it at scale nothing happens.
  - ryandrake 26d ago
    We need to climb two very difficult hills for there to be any change here: 1. We need our governments to actually start charging companies with crimes, when what they are doing would be illegal for an individual to do, and 2. We need the penalties to be something other than fines, which are ultimately treated by companies as routine costs of business.
    - DPDmancul 26d ago
      > We need the penalties to be something other than fines, which are ultimately treated by companies as routine costs of business. It's true that fines are nothing more than predictable costs, so maybe an option would be fines in percentage of the incoming of the company: this way it could make a real impact. I know in some north Europe countries the speed limit fines are in percentage on the personal net worth.
      - rustcleaner 26d ago
        Income is too small, how about in terms of the highest market capitalization between deciding to do the bad thing and being convicted of the bad thing? Maybe some of these penalties should result in bankruptcies for the most egregious big players, and when I say bankruptcies I don't mean restructuring but actual corporate financial death: firesale auction the assets, debt holders lose much of their value, equity holders get squat, and all employees are out on their asses having been let go. Do it to a Microsoft or Google sized company, scare the piss out of the rest! Then implement protection policies to make it impossible to move headquarters out of the country without having product prices end up 2-4x higher, so domestic competition (which could be let to run tax free) can come up and fill the void. Also tax the hectomillionaires+ more heavily on assets, income, and capital gains!
      - selcuka 26d ago
        > maybe an option would be fines in percentage of the incoming of the company You are overengineering it. Just throw the CEOs in jail for a few months and observe how these practices disappear overnight.
- jdprgm 26d ago
  Seriously. This was my first thought too, the audacity to implement a system like this and the deterioration of a society that seems to give any fucks about privacy where this will be a minor news story that gets some buzz then disappears fairly quickly... I don't know what the fuck has happened. At the very least something like this should result in devastating class action lawsuits towards LG.
- jopsen 25d ago
  Who is to say they won't? For the record, it's not all the big corps that are this bad. Many are borderline paranoid about privacy, both for appearance and compliance perspectives.
colechristensen 26d ago
>But there must be something better than just keeping to buy things that invade our privacy and homes further and further. Which brands aren’t doing this? Sony? They also announced a partnership for the lower end TVs IIRC. Smart people need to band together to advocate their state governments to make commercial mass surveillance for any purpose a criminal offense (not just banning, making it a crime).
pixel_popping 26d ago
It's insane, but it's not like it's not known, personally, each time we have a party at home with friends, we always unplug the TV for this reason, it's out of doubt but it's normal to doubt as it's proprietary and has a microphone, so it's a bit obvious that it might be recording and processing data somewhere. The same as I would never trust an average phone around if I'm having a private conversation. Blackbox+Mic = Not private. To consider something secure software wise, it involves so many layers, and almost none of those are present with a Smart TV, so it IS considered insecure by anyone having privacy standards.
- nalekberov 26d ago
  First of all, your TV is not interested in random gibberish from loud parties. It’s just not economically viable. During the Soviet era, not everyone could afford to have a landline phone, but the system kept hunting down its dissidents one by one. If you are a person of interest (which I believe doesn’t apply to you), there are way more important signals to adversaries than your microphone. It's important to choose your threat model. If your plan is to resist surveillance capitalism or just a random Bob and his grandmother snooping on you online, luckily, there are some effective methods. Otherwise, I would say it’s always a question of time, not 'if' or 'how.'
  - anon7000 26d ago
    But as the video shows, the TV is doing text to speech and associating audio with a person. That text data is relatively very cheap to hang onto forever. The problem is really that this tracking is at an absurd scale. So while an individual attacker isn’t targeting you and buying your profile from LG, the data is out there, and once it’s out there, it’s probably easy to get on the dark web if someone did want to do something nefarious. So it’s not just the surveillance capitalism.
- xxs 26d ago
  A note => any speaker works as microphone. When I was a kid we used vacuum tube radio both as a passive speaker and a microphone... connected to the speakerphone of a telephone as a very poor man walkie-talkie. Using the speakers as microphone when there is no outgoing sounds is pretty trivial in that regard. I don't know how paranoid a person can be, though.
ungreased0675 26d ago
I would like to send vast amounts of garbage data to the LG servers. They aren’t being respectful of our bandwidth and data, we don’t need to be respectful of theirs. This also applies incentives in the correct direction. Their database of customer information becomes less valuable if there’s bad information in it. Disconnecting your TV from the internet doesn’t affect LG, feeding them bad data does.
- spockz 26d ago
  I like this enough to actually considering buying one to get it to identify the endpoints. Maybe better to see first if we can find it in the firmware update downloads.
  - toomuchtodo 25d ago
    Have Claude or Astra reverse engineer the firmware?
    - spockz 25d ago
      I started asking Astra and Terra about this, including the idea of spoofing the data that was mentioned in this thread and got slammed with a warning for Cyber Abuse on my account, the thread is here https://chatgpt.com/s/cx_6a9fc635825481918c84187765645d5c https://chatgpt.com/s/cx_6a9fc635825481918c84187765645d5c. I will be very careful going forward with what I use open ai for and what I phrase how.
      - toomuchtodo 25d ago
        Very strange, check out https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49577129 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49577129 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49599100 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49599100 when you have time on this topic.
- frantathefranta 26d ago
  How do you go about generating the garbage data? Bunch of ESP32s with rngs in the same subnet?
larodi 25d ago
perhaps choosing to stop watching TV in the 90s was a good choice. wonder if I can trust non of my Apple devices and ThinkBook laptops are listening. I'm most concerned about the Windows boxes, as they are easily hacked, somehow BSD-derivatives seemed more secure since day zero.

by spockz 26d ago

Sharlin 26d ago

Well, it’s a smart TV. I would assume with extreme prejudice that every single one of them is doing stuff like this and worse until proven innocent. Based on everything I’ve read about these things it seems the most reasonable stance. > In the previous topic I got ridiculed for not wanting to buy LG anymore because I could use an agent to modify to strip out the offending bits. Jesus fucking Christ.

gizzlon 26d ago

Yeah, just keep buying the poisonous breakfast serial. It's easy to pick out the brown bits of rat poison /s

afarah1 26d ago

I think the insane part is that this is not criminal and the executives are not jailed for it.

account42 26d ago
That's exactly why this keeps happening. If I bug your house I'd be charged with all kinds of crimes. If LG does it at scale nothing happens.
- ryandrake 26d ago
  We need to climb two very difficult hills for there to be any change here: 1. We need our governments to actually start charging companies with crimes, when what they are doing would be illegal for an individual to do, and 2. We need the penalties to be something other than fines, which are ultimately treated by companies as routine costs of business.
  - DPDmancul 26d ago
    > We need the penalties to be something other than fines, which are ultimately treated by companies as routine costs of business. It's true that fines are nothing more than predictable costs, so maybe an option would be fines in percentage of the incoming of the company: this way it could make a real impact. I know in some north Europe countries the speed limit fines are in percentage on the personal net worth.
    - rustcleaner 26d ago
      Income is too small, how about in terms of the highest market capitalization between deciding to do the bad thing and being convicted of the bad thing? Maybe some of these penalties should result in bankruptcies for the most egregious big players, and when I say bankruptcies I don't mean restructuring but actual corporate financial death: firesale auction the assets, debt holders lose much of their value, equity holders get squat, and all employees are out on their asses having been let go. Do it to a Microsoft or Google sized company, scare the piss out of the rest! Then implement protection policies to make it impossible to move headquarters out of the country without having product prices end up 2-4x higher, so domestic competition (which could be let to run tax free) can come up and fill the void. Also tax the hectomillionaires+ more heavily on assets, income, and capital gains!
    - selcuka 26d ago
      > maybe an option would be fines in percentage of the incoming of the company You are overengineering it. Just throw the CEOs in jail for a few months and observe how these practices disappear overnight.
jdprgm 26d ago
Seriously. This was my first thought too, the audacity to implement a system like this and the deterioration of a society that seems to give any fucks about privacy where this will be a minor news story that gets some buzz then disappears fairly quickly... I don't know what the fuck has happened. At the very least something like this should result in devastating class action lawsuits towards LG.
jopsen 25d ago
Who is to say they won't? For the record, it's not all the big corps that are this bad. Many are borderline paranoid about privacy, both for appearance and compliance perspectives.

colechristensen 26d ago

>But there must be something better than just keeping to buy things that invade our privacy and homes further and further. Which brands aren’t doing this? Sony? They also announced a partnership for the lower end TVs IIRC. Smart people need to band together to advocate their state governments to make commercial mass surveillance for any purpose a criminal offense (not just banning, making it a crime).

pixel_popping 26d ago

It's insane, but it's not like it's not known, personally, each time we have a party at home with friends, we always unplug the TV for this reason, it's out of doubt but it's normal to doubt as it's proprietary and has a microphone, so it's a bit obvious that it might be recording and processing data somewhere. The same as I would never trust an average phone around if I'm having a private conversation. Blackbox+Mic = Not private. To consider something secure software wise, it involves so many layers, and almost none of those are present with a Smart TV, so it IS considered insecure by anyone having privacy standards.

nalekberov 26d ago
First of all, your TV is not interested in random gibberish from loud parties. It’s just not economically viable. During the Soviet era, not everyone could afford to have a landline phone, but the system kept hunting down its dissidents one by one. If you are a person of interest (which I believe doesn’t apply to you), there are way more important signals to adversaries than your microphone. It's important to choose your threat model. If your plan is to resist surveillance capitalism or just a random Bob and his grandmother snooping on you online, luckily, there are some effective methods. Otherwise, I would say it’s always a question of time, not 'if' or 'how.'
- anon7000 26d ago
  But as the video shows, the TV is doing text to speech and associating audio with a person. That text data is relatively very cheap to hang onto forever. The problem is really that this tracking is at an absurd scale. So while an individual attacker isn’t targeting you and buying your profile from LG, the data is out there, and once it’s out there, it’s probably easy to get on the dark web if someone did want to do something nefarious. So it’s not just the surveillance capitalism.
xxs 26d ago
A note => any speaker works as microphone. When I was a kid we used vacuum tube radio both as a passive speaker and a microphone... connected to the speakerphone of a telephone as a very poor man walkie-talkie. Using the speakers as microphone when there is no outgoing sounds is pretty trivial in that regard. I don't know how paranoid a person can be, though.

ungreased0675 26d ago

I would like to send vast amounts of garbage data to the LG servers. They aren’t being respectful of our bandwidth and data, we don’t need to be respectful of theirs. This also applies incentives in the correct direction. Their database of customer information becomes less valuable if there’s bad information in it. Disconnecting your TV from the internet doesn’t affect LG, feeding them bad data does.

spockz 26d ago
I like this enough to actually considering buying one to get it to identify the endpoints. Maybe better to see first if we can find it in the firmware update downloads.
- toomuchtodo 25d ago
  Have Claude or Astra reverse engineer the firmware?
  - spockz 25d ago
    I started asking Astra and Terra about this, including the idea of spoofing the data that was mentioned in this thread and got slammed with a warning for Cyber Abuse on my account, the thread is here https://chatgpt.com/s/cx_6a9fc635825481918c84187765645d5c https://chatgpt.com/s/cx_6a9fc635825481918c84187765645d5c. I will be very careful going forward with what I use open ai for and what I phrase how.
    - toomuchtodo 25d ago
      Very strange, check out https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49577129 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49577129 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49599100 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49599100 when you have time on this topic.
frantathefranta 26d ago
How do you go about generating the garbage data? Bunch of ESP32s with rngs in the same subnet?

larodi 25d ago

perhaps choosing to stop watching TV in the 90s was a good choice. wonder if I can trust non of my Apple devices and ThinkBook laptops are listening. I'm most concerned about the Windows boxes, as they are easily hacked, somehow BSD-derivatives seemed more secure since day zero.