Was this through a personal subscription? Last I looked into daybreak access, if required an organization based account.

Daybreak may remove the technical restrictions, but isn't that kind of use still against the ToS?

It creates a lot of uncertainty. Especially if you depend more and more on them in your day to day life.

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.

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.

Claude doesn’t push back if it thinks the thing you’re doing is old. OAI will sometimes start barking at you if it thinks you’re making a keygen even if it’s 25 years old.

How did they do the scrolling in it?

Tastelessness aside, this seems perfectly rational to me. Unlike reverse engineering for the purpose of developing security exploits, "nudification" doesn't meaningfully expand the capabilities of malicious actors with access to free online porn and Photoshop.

I'm in the new CVP, and even Mythos gave me a cyber stop just for creating an MCP server that can remotely connect to my Steam Frame to run commands. It must've thought I was trying to create a centralized malware or something.

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.

We're all naked under our clothes, I don't see the problem. One of the funniest shock-bits I've ever seen was when Jon Stewart's book on American government and history included full-frontal (Photoshopped) nudes of SCOTUS, but I guess he couldn't get away with that during the current era of Puritanical panic.

It's just an adult human body, Michael, what could it cost? One('s) dignity?

Claude is so absurdly bad about false triggers for security. It kept triggering when I asked it questions about how to plant some tree saplings I got because somehow that was a security risk.

Anthropic is a joke of a company.

… IF chinese models stay open.

Iirc They specifically trained them to not be useful in cyber stuff. But the point still holds

Did you mean Mimo v2.6 Pro? Because Kimi K3.1 Pro is proprietary, and not open.

Also leading the frontier is much much harder than catching up to frontier.

The headline is misleading, but the "article" is only five screenshots of Twitter posts. Someone used AI to decrypt the Samsung TV's firmware and found always on listening, classification, lots of privacy nightmares. Then their (the hacker's, not Samsung's) OpenAI got suspended for "Cyber Abuse".

I agree with you, but if OpenAI wasn't suspending users for exposing cyber-spying that these consumer companies like Samsung are doing, more and more people would expose such issues.

Until Kevin quits and you need to modify his work

It is great if you have enough RAM. I have enough to run it, but not enough for prefix cache. 27b is so much faster with long term tasks.

The Qwen3.8-Flash-Next model is ok for reverse engineering. It can definitely solve simple tasks, but it gets easily confused, and burns tokens like crazy.

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.

GLM 5.3 and GLM 5.3 Flash are very different animals. The full GLM 5.3 model is what HF used to perform forensics on the OpenAI hack.

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.

A video on vulnerabilities in Asus routers was released yesterday: https://youtube.com/watch?v=kYnwCx2SNYY

But if you are talking TVs specifically, I expect they will get back to that too.

He bought a whole bunch of TVs and he’s testing them right now. Check out his YT channel.

They could have started with actually decrypting what was sent rather than a breathless 2 hours of monetised nonsense. Show me the http posts with the data that's actually sent.

There really wasn't a lot of new information in the Gamer's Nexus video. Most of what people think is new is people conflating what is possible vs what LG does and people conflating what is possible on a rooted TV vs what LG does. The whole video is very long and because it's so poorly organized and deceptively presented, it looks like LG is worse than everyone else. Rally they're just doing what we've known for a while that all TV manufacturers are doing.

In fairness, they have not earned the benefit of the doubt based on past behavior.

At this point everyone knows you have a cat, dog or baby. Facebook, Instagram can scan your photos and see it. Same with Google via Photos' latest privacy changes. Google also knows if you ever get receipts emailed to you. Your credit card company and bank know, the CC company resells that data too. Shit, Keurig knows because their smart coffee maker scans the network and sees your baby monitor or smart pet food dispenser. All these companies are rediscovering and selling the same basic facts about you and your household.

If they wanted to know if you had dogs or babies and wanted to spy on you, they'd just transcribe the audio. People that have dogs or babies talk about them. Going to the effort to detect these and advertise it as a feature so you can secretly use it for marketing doesn't make a lot of sense.

Computer vision and categorization is ai. It isn't just generative AI.

Man, it would really be interesting if they were caught using the speakers themselves as microphones.

The "coincidence" defense never works for random individuals so I won't buy it when it comes companies worth billions which will lie, cheat, and deceive to make even more billions. They've been caught lying and stealing again and again. After so many years of this I think any trust put in them is either blissful ignorance or willful misdirection.

Another anecdotal data from an arxiv preprint [0]: "After the paper was written, the author learned that the same result was also proved independently and by a different method by Ningyi Li [7]. The result is also contained in a paper [8] released by OpenAI on October 6, 2026, in which the proof strategy and specific choices of notation are identical to a preliminary version of the present paper that was uploaded to ChatGPT on September 8, 2026."

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.

[0]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10072

I think it's just a logical conclusion if everyone keeps feeding OpenAI and Anthropic data. I don't think it's imminent, but if AI keeps improving and regulation is very lax I could see this world developing in 5-10 years.

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.

Right......

Like none of these TV's hooks to an Open Wifi Hotspot and abuse you.

I'll probably get a kiosk panel next time. But this time, yeah, I've just not configured the network. All content comes from the console. Which is a different bundle of problems and no better in a lot of ways, but it's more of a known quantity.

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.

Won't be too much longer after that where modifying LLM weights to ignore safety rules is considered a felony.

Just wait till your GPU legally requires an online connection to run an LLM.

Yeah definitely Cyberpunk moment here.

There is zero chance this will happen.

They still can’t technically obtain it without a warrant. They do it anyway.

Follow the money

Who bears responsibility when TV makers and data brokers undoubtedly had clear and verifiable evidence passing through their systems?

This is literally the history of the Video Privacy Protection Act (1988, back when video rental was a thing). It was passed immediately after, in 1987, a journalist obtained and published the video rental history of a supreme court judge nominee.

I don't think that was even asserted, much less proven. The mic usage is almost certainly for the built in voice assistant. The dog and baby detection is for publicly announced features: https://news.samsung.com/us/samsung-celebrates-debut-samsung...

Dude they just did. If you didn't understand it then you aren't gonna be able to use it.

Except it's not covered in their TOS

I spent a couple years working at the platform (AndroidTV + Google Assistant) level on smart TVs.

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.

N you please answer one thing for my peace of mind?

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?

Why and what reference do you rec instead? Even this site gets fake news that stays up for hours.

Sure, ‘knee-jerk’ reddit is unreliable, but many upvotes over time with supporting comments can be a strong signal of truth

Why? Their system is literally mined for its Q&A merit by search engines. If it was all very bad information, NYSE: RDDT would not exist.

What are you talking about? I have a samsung frame that I'm in the middle of rooting because of this excellent information.

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.

More like paperweight. This is for a 2025 tv: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50236846

"SAMSUNG ERROR 306, TV will not unlock until you give it a clear connection to starlink"

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.

I doubt any TV company will ever do this, for two reasons. The first is simply that it would be obvious due to FCC filings. The second is that 99% of their customers hook their TV up to the internet so they can use streaming apps on their TV. They're very unlikely to eat the cost of putting a cellular model in every TV, take the PR hit for doing so, simply to capture the ACR data of the 1% of their customer base that is most likely to figure out another way to disable it.

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.

Starlink? So I guess the TV cannot be used to harm Russian citizens :>

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.

Screens and menus are cheaper than remotes and buttons.

The real galling thing that my newest samsung tv started doing on the last update is that it doesn't even start out on the "Media" tab of the home screen. The number one thing I want to do with my TV is now an afterthought. It's left-down-down, click before I even get to do TV stuff with my TV (and of course, after that, I have to wade through the samsung shovelware in order to get to the 2 streaming things I actually use). I saw an "alternate home screen for your samsung tv" project on here a couple days ago and I'm definitely going to check it out when I have an afternoon to curse at samsung.

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!"

Expensive TV also spy on you, so spending more does not help

Wifi access points should offer a sort of "/dev/null" network for smart devices to connect to.

I’m just curious what brand the tv is? That way I can be sure to avoid it.

Is it actually proven that TVs are sold below cost or is it just a conjecture to justify the ads.

People still bought TV's when they were comparatively more expensive (hell we rented them here in the UK). I don't buy this line that "oh if you want a cheap TV...". No, it's an underhand tactic to try and justify adtech's creepy outreach.

Well, it would be a $3001 TV without the extra money they collected on the side...

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)

The thing about the facebook is listening to you rumors is that the reality is so much worse than them actually surreptitiously listening to you. Their knowing who you're interacting with and what you're likely to talk about is more alarming. Dismissing facebook listening to your conversations is shortsighted in a way I find fairly repulsive.

Is there anyone serving such inference? I can't fit anything usable on my hardware.

This is very true, I just used AI to deactivate tracking in my LG, I was amazed of how much faster it became.

All smart TVs are evil and you’d be hard pressed to find a non smart tv these days.

What about my existing device(s)? I don't want to be the one piling on the huge mountain of electronic trash! So how can I save my device from evil?

Except none of it is illegal, so what would you sue them for?

He also got his OpenAI account banned after sharing the findings for 'violating cyber policies'. https://x.com/i/trending/2113715638950912393

That makes it someone else's problem who is less informed. You shouldn't be fine foisting problems on people too ignorant to deal with it.

Any word on rooting TCL models?

Please do post to GitHub, I have a Samsung projector I'd love to root

I keep seeing this, and I still think it's a ridiculous ask. Whether you like it or not, the vast majority is not savvy enough to think about this, and they generally just want Netflix to work without an additional service. For a majority of people 600 is expensive, and they don't want to have to spend another 30-100 depending on the device.

Just wait until https://sidewalk.amazon/ (or competing solutions) hits Smart TV manufacturers so they can still collect data / do ad operations.

Maybe 30…

We see see two failure modes in the US, and I assume they are universal. On the small scale, enforcers don't enforce, because of resource constraints, and higher up the food chain, the enforcers are the ones breaking the law.

Journalism also fails in uncovering it.

Public awareness is step one.

Actually it is. Around 2005 I was stopped by police at 2am in Hackney and told in no uncertain terms that it was illegal for me to be walking with a 2x4 in my hand

It isn't entirely true, it has to be "to the obstruction, annoyance, or danger of the residents or passengers" for it to be illegal https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Vict/10-11/89

Although it does appear to be true in London https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Vict/2-3/47/section/54

Just to emphasise:

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.

The point of having advisors was supposed to be that they would help the elected person make up for lack of knowledge, but it doesn't seem like that pans out in reality. Either the advisors are just as lost, or they are largely ignored.

We used to solve this problem by embedding experts in government bodies.

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.

From the government perspective this is not abuse, in fact many governments make it mandatory by law

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.

But it’s absolutely placeable. The internet is run by real computers that exist in the physical world.

Maybe a bicycle counts as a vehicle.

In the UK, 'pavement' doesn't refer to any paved road, but to what Americans call a 'sidewalk'.

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.

Spoiler: it isn't. This is made up.

The horizon problem.

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.

Regulation is only as good as enforcement of it is. And it seems 9-10 figure fines are still in the realm of 'we'll deal with the fallout later'.

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?

This is why Hollywood cornered the market in slapstick comedy in the silent movie era

That's a nice certification program. I'm glad that it exists and that there's a list of products that comply with it. I've saved it for later perusal.

But it reaches a wee bit further than I actually care about for something like a television:

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.

I don't see a single TV listed.

Part of the problem is (uninformed, false) "consent" being buried in a lengthy and silently-mutating Terms of Service.

Without an account, you can’t even properly use your freezer

But the next generation of everything will be so much less efficient as the new generation of developers has forgotten how to do anything with low level methods.

My bad. Xcancel is no longer operational so I tried to find an alternative. With my setup I didn't see any ads so I didn't notice them. Sorry

And probably OLED or something close to that

A lot of rooms are space constrained, but yes, even the cheapest phones are 1080p and most have been for a decade. It's ridiculous how far larger screens have been lagging behind.

I find Apple TV to be a decent compromise.

Why in this world of yours is the only option Android TV?

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.

This just isn't true. Have never encountered this.

Depends on your living arrangements.

Laughing as i think about the 13" set we had when I was a kid.

It's a category, "Geen Smart TV", under TV's. There are several for sale up to 55".

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...

The problem is that now companies are starting to block features when the TV is not connected online.

Not sure of purpose of your question. Not everyone needs a larger TV than that or accommodate one in their living space.

Oh man, I wonder if there is some weird self-selection bias when it comes to HN audience. It is a little like my dad telling me repairing cars is easy: you only have to do x,y and z without considering that I don't have years of experience of doing just that.

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.

With that much criminal energy behind it, you might even want to remove the wifi module or ground the antenna at this point.

Nah it still boots to their annoying menus, takes forever to change modes, has lots of annoyances. I’ll be a lean firmware could be a much better experience.

I already use an Apple TV, but the Samsung’s firmware is annoying even as a dumb tv.

What I would do if I were manufacturer hellbent on spying would be to search for devices of my own brand nearby to pass data using their internet access, if no access found then extend search - basically p2p/mesh network to pass data.

Point me to another matte TV that has the electronics separated so you just need a tiny cable to the TV? I’ll switch tomorrow.

That's just weasel language. For "hey, Google" to work, the phone needs to listen. Just like it can react to "hey, Google", it can also react to any amount of other trigger words without ever actually recording your conversation.

They can already do that with most of the information they already have, they don't need to listen for that type of thing (though they still might be as you see here, data is data after all).

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.

Shout "six seven" and look over the shoulder of the twelve-year-old who magically appears?

Definitely not with a TV remote vs a keyboard/mouse.

To fully remove the national spy network from your life you would have to get rid of all other devices that will collect the same data or do already. Smartphones, smartwatches, home security systems, Wifi, any computer or device you did not build yourself, TVs, any other "smart" device, anything that has electricty going to it, any car since OnStar in the 1990s, all delivery trucks and self driving cars, your neighbors security system, devices that broadcast IDs, even bluetooth devices... So many examples..

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.

You also have to create an account to use an Osmo action cam. I almost sent the damn thing back upon finding out, but as it turns out, you can make a fake mail, fake account, and after having connected once you can treat it as if it never happened.

Still infuriating.

No streaming app is giving you a video feed with 48Gbps of data (more like 5-15 Mbps), and no one produces 120 or 144Hz video (most movies/TV are still 24Hz aren't they?), so there's no point in sending that kind of signal to a TV (you'll just have a crisp, high refresh signal of the low refresh blurry compression artifacts), but even ignoring that, cheap n100 minipcs can do 4k60 or 1k240 just fine (I use a minipc as my desktop with a 4k240 OLED).

The claim would be that the decisionmakers at Samsung are general industrialists and not people who understand the tech industry.

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.

It is weird what people think "tech" is these days. It increasingly seems to mean "anything having to do with computers".

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.

I think another, clearer way to state this hypothesis is that "the fewer business models a company has other than making money directly off your data, the more they're going to jealously hoard your data to themselves and leverage it in ways that don't involve letting any other middle-man capture it."

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.)

This is categorically false. I don't know what you're trying to allege here, but it's not that.

¿Por qué no los dos?

Found the C level.

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".

I also got ads for things I have only thought about and never ever searched online or mentioned to anyone.

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.

Sorry, but there’s just zero evidence that your phone is listening to you like this. There never has been. Lots of people have tried to uncover such evidence. On the iPhone at least (not as familiar with Android), it’s not even clear how your phone would be listening and sending the data to Meta.

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.

It's not. They can use your IP to see your approximate location is on a lake or your buddy did search and it associated to you via shared IP.

I think the issue is mostly over-sensationalizing findings.

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! ;-)

First off, not all gatekeeping is bad. The locked doors at the power plant marked caution are locked because the wrong move will kill you and it will hurt a lot the entire time.

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.

Well, person didn’t have a dog and then they suddenly do, and that will be noted by the device. I don’t understand the downplaying here, even though it’s correct that these people not necessarily know what they’re doing. The device does collect information about you and does listen (all while costing thousands of dollars). And these spy features they announce are not a product for common users but for data companies.

I agree. It is much more likely that this for QoL project not implemented. Imagine the TV being smart enough to skip to before the baby interrupted.

Just because your own imagination is limited you suppose theirs is the same? People with any semblance of power can be incredibly petty.

"they recently didn't have a baby and now they do" is worth thousands of dollars of product sales

Reverse Engineering

I've never once signed a contract for a TV. They're routinely set up a single member of the household. They're the single most plausible place for "maybe my kid / guest / cat hit OK on the remote".

Very different from a single-player video game, or a website with a login form.

Thst combination actually means there's a minimum amount of money that Samsung has to pay every time somebody sues them.