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Comment by Cpoll | Hacker News Reader

Not sufficient, given reports of TVs and other devices automatically creating mesh networks. Your disconnected TV could talk to your neighbour's connected one. If anything, I wonder why LG isn't already doing it.

Edit: Getting pushback asking for evidence (fair). Most recently I read it in an HN thread a few years back. I thought it was a TCL TV, but I can't find it anymore. It wasn't Samsung's WiFi Direct, which I don't think was ever on by default.

Lacking better evidence, I'll admit I'm probably wrong and no TV has been documented doing this (yet).

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Could you link to these reports, the ones with evidence?

https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/28/23659191/amazon-sidewalk-...

That is an article saying that mesh networking frameworks exist. It does not support the GP claim of smart TVs creating mesh networks across different owners.

If something is technically possible, one should act as though it is already happening and hope to be wrong rather than refusing to consider the issue until sufficient “proof” is given, by which it will be too late. Doubly so when advertisers are involved, who as a group are economically-incentivized to not care about consent.

This seems paranoid. There are many things which are technically possible, but there is no evidence of some super-advertiser doing. It's not even clear to me that much of the 'fingerprinting' (past basic re-targeting) actually works.

> This seems paranoid. There are many things which are technically possible, but [...]

Isn't this what people said pre-Snowden? Not that NSA spying is the same as corporate "surveillance capitalism", but if companies can make more money off it and the technology exists, it seems prudent to assume companies are trying it.

There was evidence of the NSA intercepting international communications before Snowden, but for some reason that didn't seem to make much of a lasting impression: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A

It's also significant to note that while the government is quite bad at keeping 'problematic' behavior secret, companies are much worse at it.

Analogously, there's evidence that companies will make extensive use of available techniques (browser fingerprinting, cookies, etc.) to track and surveil users without their knowledge and often against their will. The exposure of that arguably also hasn't triggered an effective backlash against those companies. So, as with the pre-Snowden evidence for domestic communication interception by the NSA, I think there's ample evidence of the willingness of companies to exploit whatever technologies they can in order to surveil users.

The way this is typically handled is through compartmentalization, where no one working has enough of a global view to be able to claim that the behaviour is problematic.

There's a lot that's problematic that we suspect that is going on but don't have firm proof, because the organization actually is pretty good at keeping it secret enough. There's some exceptions where things do get leaked/revealed, but how would you know if this was 99% of wrongdoing, or 0.99% of it?

This would be trivial to test and detect. Just like every claim that TVs will connect to open WiFi networks if you don't connect them to a network. Yet after years of these claims and being extremely trivial to test not a single shred of evidence has ever been provided.

How would you test this?

If they form a mesh and route traffic via one TV that acts as an exit node you can check the packet TTLs.

Isn't messing with TTLs a pretty obvious thing to do when communicating covertly? And wouldn't that kind of packet inspection only catch cases of TVs literally acting as packet-level routers, but not catch application-layer shenanigans like aggregating statistics in the exit node so that all the data going over your own network appears to be originating from the same device?

It's still implausible, but thoroughly verifying that your TV isn't spying on you isn't trivial.

There's no requirement that the mesh be IP-based or function as a layer-3 router...

Even if it were IP-bsaed, it would be extremely straightforward for one box to send a UDP message to another, and receive and retransmit at the application layer. No TTL nonsense, No multiple IPs showing up communicating upstream.

But if my TV is doing this, then by definition it's not acting as an exit node so how do I test it?

Put a WiFi NIC in monitor mode and see if the TV is connected to another AP based on the 802.11 packets.

Or if this theoretical implementation by a manufacturer is using a custom protocol/frequency (very unlikely for a variety of reasons), you'd begin by probing with an SDR.

Which part of that qualifies as trivial?

I only semi-agree with GP; it's trivial for someone who works in Tech to pull it off, but that's really all you need to blow the lid on the whole operation given manufacturers would likely have implemented the same behavior across all TVs of the same model/product segment.

How do you think? By broadcasting an open WiFi network and seeing if it connects and requests a DHCP Lease.

Here is maybe what he was remembering from HN:

> Our Samsung fridge’s manual says it’ll automatically and silently mesh network with any Samsung TVs in range, use AI and hidden cameras to recognize what’s in the fridge and when we use it, then have the TV inject targeted ads into programming based on its findings. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45742208

Wild. Still, paraphrased like that it triggers my "sure, that totally happened" detectors.

Unless you have evidence, please stop spreading this rumor.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6IFVTcM28KA

Please point me to the timestamp in that video that supports this claim:

> reports of TVs and other devices automatically creating mesh networks. Your disconnected TV could talk to your neighbour's connected one.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49615448

Sorry but it's up to the vendors to prove that abuse is technologically impossible (through open source software and cryptography). Closed source software should always be assumed to do the worst thing possible.

I'm afraid I can't help you with your paranoia. TVs just simply don't do this. It would be trivial to prove if they did. There's plenty here to be upset about without making up stupid conspiracy theories.

Why do you defend LG?

I'm not.

We've established that your definition of "trivial" involves complete reverse engineering of the firmware...

See: Amazon Sidewalk

I’ve heard rumors of that, and also of TVs shipping with cellular modems with which to phone home. I don’t know if either have been confirmed, but it would be ridiculous for such a thing to be legal.

Cellular modems seem unlikely, because both they and the service plan they'd need are too expensive to be justified by any benefit to the manufacturer.

Yes. Considering 90%+ of users will just connect their TV to their WiFi, shipping a cell modem with every TV to catch that last 10% seems like bad ROI.

I could however see this happening in the future in response to regulation. For example some "think of the children" rule that makes TV makers responsible for blocking mature content.

Phones already have modems that do Wi-Fi, cellular and Bluetooth in a single chip.

It may at some point no longer be economical to manufacture a Wi-Fi only modem.

Not so far fetched when your advertising revenue is in the tens of millions of dollars.

They just need this revenue by tv to be higher than the price of the mobile plan per tv. For a few Gb per month it may be relevant in the not so distant future.

Cell plans are very cheap when you are a company looking for low bandwidth off-peak service for a lot of devices. As individuals you can't get those deals, but companies can.

I don't know if TVs have a cell modem, but it isn't unreasonable to say they could.

As a different poster mentioned, the FCC needs to know about this though and so it will be documented.

I doubt the modem would cost more than $5 at scale. No idea what sort of off peak data deals you could get at scale but I have to imagine it’s close to being feasible.

You can get special IoT cellphone plans in bulk for something like $1 per device per month, or even less.

It's a longstanding, and obviously false, rumor. It would be trivial to prove that these things connect to open wifi networks to phone home, but no one has ever proved that they do that, because they don't actually do that. It would be a little harder, but still very easy, to prove that they connect to cell networks, but no one has proved that they do that either, because they don't actually do that either.

Keeping them disconnected from wifi is sufficient.

You're all over this thread posting this same thing but you admitted that to you, "trivial" means substantial reverse engineering.

"Trivial" to me means looking up the FCC ID of the device and seeing what kinds of RF emissions it is supposed to radiate.

Or, still trivial (but more expensive): Point a spectrum analyzer at it and see what kinds of RF emissions it actually radiates.

I don't need to open the box to understand what kinds of noises it makes.

Or even just realize that if the devices had this capability these companies couldn't resist using it to show you ads. Since these devices don't show up to date ads unless you manually connect them to a network you can be reasonably sure that they don't have a fallback internet connection.

It’s perfectly legal to put a cellular modem in a TV, but not without disclosing that to the FCC and on product labels. This and the mesh network thing for TVs are (currently) a conspiracy theory, which sucks because it muddies the waters in advance of it inevitably happening in reality.

In the good old USA everything is legal until Congress makes a law, and Congress shall make no law. In the EU it's illegal.

Which manufacturers and which TVs?

Otherwise it's just some 10+ year old rumour

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