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Comment by spockz | Hacker News Reader

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.

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

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.

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.

> 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.

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!

> 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.

> Just throw the CEOs in jail for a few months

It's not that easy: with bail and well payed lawyers they spend quite no day in jail and it is no more than a fine

Bail only works while waiting for the court date. I was talking about the actual sentence if found guilty.

Going after individuals instead of fining the company is still a better deterrent. Corporate fines are paid by shareholders and customers, not by the people who made the decision.

As a side note: If we believe that well paid lawyers can win all cases, there is nothing to discuss under this thread anyway. No fine or sentence can save us.

I think that the fines should be the amount per crime that is being fined, plus the total amount of all revenue from whatever the fines are related to (including indirect, but only counted once).

So step one is a constitutional amendment to ban corporate money in politics, which is going to be suuuper hard to accomplish.

But yeah similar to how humans are put in jail and it can easily ruin their life, the punishment for a severe crime needs to ruin a company’s life. It’s an absurd double standard.

Flogging or prison time for whoever has the highest salary.

Why not both?

If the fine is higher than the revenue they get from it then that would presumably work.

Simplest thing to say is: find all the people responsible for this, from the bottom to the top, and charge them with the same crime as an individual would be. I would include everyone in the chain from the programmers that implemented it, to the VP that authorised it, and finally to the CEO because all responsibility ends with them (that's why they get paid the big bucks right?).

I'd like to say look at Volkswagen for an example but I don't know if all the necessary people were charged.

I don't blame VW because EPA's requirements were killing diesel cars in the US. There haven't been any new model diesel passenger cars in about ten years now.

Similar policy is why American trucks and SUVs are ridiculusly massive transformer-looking behemoths and there're really no 'small' trucks anymore. The Ford Ranger of today is of similar size to the Ford F-150 of 25 years 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.

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.

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.

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.

Have Claude or Astra reverse engineer the firmware?

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.

I will be very careful going forward with what I use open ai for and what I phrase how.

Very strange, check out https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49577129 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49599100 when you have time on this topic.

How do you go about generating the garbage data? Bunch of ESP32s with rngs in the same subnet?

I watch all the stations I hate, and avoid watching all my favorites.

Always speak in Klingon within hearing range of the TV. Qapla'!

I have just launched http://weowntheglass.com, it features an oled-safe screensaver steady stream of public domain images of violent uprisings against an oppressive class. The ACR should enjoy that!

What if it was a quick succession of screenshots from actual TV shows? Random pictures probably don’t have any ACR match but TV shows would.

I took a look at some of the ACR patents I could find and it seems they typically use a perceptual hash time series to positively ID content, with short match rejection to avoid 'channel surfing' attributions. So the effective strategy would be a random feed of conflicting demographic content streamed for at least a few minutes each -- something like 5 minute shuffle of Miss Rachel, Game of Thrones, This Old House, 30 Rock, The Decalogue, Gunsmoke, CSPAN, Sesame Street, QVC, something like that. Problem is... who wants that actually streaming on their screen all day? My site as built probably doesn't actually poison the ACR data, it's more like waging memetic warfare/raising awareness.

>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).

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.

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.

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.'

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.

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.

Depends on how deep you want to climb down that rabbit hole. You can go all Rusty Shackleford if you’re a privacy enthusiast. It can be fun.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempest_%28codename%29

> it's not like it's not known

It's not known. Ask the average person that owns a smart TV if they think they're being listened in on. Or even what kinds of data they think their smart TV collects. I could bet you anything that for nearly all people, their answers would be "I never thought about that", "I didn't know they collected data" or "I thought it was only what I watched".

It's highly insidious - our society was reshaped to normalize data collection like this by adtech. At the same time, these invasive technologies were quietly integrated into existing devices people assumed they knew. TVs look like the same black rectangles they were 15 years ago. Cars today are similar to cars from the early 2010s. The average person doesn't understand how adding internet connectivity to some device exposes them to this until it's explained to them. To them, the notion that they record everything sounds as cospiratorial as "your microwave is secretly recording you on camera". If technological limitations required TVs with mics to have a huge studio microphone protrude on top of it with a flashing red light, a lot more people would suddenly care.

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.

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

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