Comment by lovich | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lovich | Hacker News Reader

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> Now, what he’s showing can be pretty scary. I wouldn’t want any attacker to be able to record me without knowing. But it’s important to remember the context here: earlier in the video, Wendell rooted the TV. He has full access to everything on it. To run those commands and programs, he had to log into WebOS via SSH and run them on the device. He didn't show remoting calling those commands, nor was this done on an unmodified device.

> If you root or jailbreak your devices, you've, by their very nature, broken their security. If he can demonstrate someone remotely jailbreaking your TV, or flipping on those settings without you knowing or doing anything to your TV, that would be a far more damning issue, in my view.

What is this authors point?

LG doesn’t need a root exploit to get this info because they made the fucking thing.

I read the article and then grepped for “Texas” to see if I missed it. The author never mentions the fact that this data collection was only found out initially because of a Texas government lawsuit that LG settled on by agreeing to give “informed consent” to users about data collection and then the warnings started popping up in unexpected places.

Is the author arguing that jailbreaking your device to find out what the manufacturer can do to gather data on you is dangerous because I don’t know, questioning your corporate overlords is bad or something?

Some attacks shown on the video (like the "silent" voice recording) are initiated by the people in the video manually running those commands via SSH.

This is the major issue with this video: It mixes stuff done by LG (ACR) with stuff done via rooting (audio recording). And now people think LG is 24/7 recording your conversations and uploading them somewhere. This has not been proven.

Completely agree. If anything is suspect Lg paid for this video to confuse people between their legitimate actions (mdns), legitimate crimes (acr) and the theoretical possibilities (unrequested audio) to make anyone complaining about smart TVs sound like a conspiracy nut.

Fresh account defending a corporation.

1. Ad hominem. 2. No, LG is not perfect here and their TVs are bloated as fuck and they do questionable things privacy-wise. However, that still does not mean that they listen on every conversation, as shown in the video.

That nuance is important if you value good journalism.

Otherwise if we're just our here throwing random allegations because "corp bad", might as well say LG 's TVs are turning the frickin' frogs gay.

It's not just questionable things, its using dark patterns to do things that wouldn't stand up in court because they definitely illegal in places with data protection laws.

Sorry but such contrary takes in the face of this sort of evidence are either contrary for the sake of it or paid astroturfing.

I agree on the dark patterns. And I do not claim that ACR and all the privacy violating crap bundled into modern devices is good. No, it is evil.

However, just because your TV does ACR, does not immediately mean they listen 24/7 through your TV through any conversations even if the TV is off.

That is another, also quite different level of claim.

It’s the era of ai bots and coördinated agitprop from nation states.

Spend some time building your reputation before arguing for divisive topics or be ignored.

Consider it a mechanical Turk but for social trust.

How do you build reputation if everyone starts tells you to build reputation first?

You have to start somewhere. Better makes sense to start looking at the arguments rather than the author.

It also helps you train your brain. Stop trusting someone solely because of who they are.

This is hacker news. Not Reddit.

You can comment about anything here and build credibility.

Just don’t start on the most divisive topics.

Four relevant bullet points from the Hacker News Guidelines:

* When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names.

* Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

* Please don't post shallow dismissals

* Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken.

And yet not once does it mention "don't start commenting on divisive topics"

Those guidelines were written before bots could pass the Turing test and before nation states set up active disinformation groups that don’t even set out to push a narrative, but to just push every side of divisive topics just to spread division.

You can follow them if you want, but I find it hopelessly naive to trust brand new accounts whose first topics they comment on are touchy ones.

It's not a question of defending a corporation, it's that publishing a video that mixes true facts with facts that are not quite right weakens your argument and makes it easier for the corporation to control the narrative by pointing anything that's disingenuous.

And to be clear, I'm not defending LG here. Their terms and conditions are terrible, 'We know who's in the LG household… we own the glass' is not something that should be said by any appliance company and shows a clear lack of ethics. But if someone is going to make a video explaining what's happening it's better to stick to what LG is actually doing instead of listing potential issues without making it clear.

A rooted tv by definition has less security, if you show that you can record because you have full control over the device that only shows that there's no hardware block for the mic (which most devices in existence don't have, apple, Framework, pinephones are the exception there). It's not in anyway different from most phones and devices that people use in daily life.

If they had used the public attention on real problems that would be something of note.

Intercept what a normal tv does, show it uploading your voice recordings, your local network device names, etc.

Don’t bury it under conspiracy theory. Had this contained what actually went on I suspect it would be treated far more seriously. But then the video would be shorter and fewer ad views for the “influencer”.

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