Hacker News Reader

HNHacker News

Top New Best Ask Show Jobs

Comment by MBCook | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

MBCook·

I’m not defending the spying.

The traffic volume just sounds like a bug to me.

View on HN

A software bug in a coffee machine sounds like a problem of management not understanding the product market they're in.

No, Management completely understands.

Closed source software/hardware is a data exfiltration device first, and the thing they're sold for secondarily.

TVs, Blurays, set top boxes, MS Windows.. All of them are the same.

All these companies make their money as 'feeders' to the advertising industry, they just sell a different device to consumers in order to achieve it.

Selling devices to consumers is a solved problem. The problem we're currently trying optimise solutions for is selling consumers to the advertising companies.

Maybe they literally just don't care about how much traffic they put on your network. Maybe the thought is "1 tb of traffic internally is very low utilization of the network over the course of a month".

Whatever they're trying to accomplish with these scans would probably be impeded in some way by this much volume. Like it'd compete with the link it's using to phone home or overload whatever on-device processing it does with that data. The man in the article who discovered this called it a bug, I agree with him.

"With enough incompetence, the only interpretation is malice." - SixOThree

I'm not saying there's no malice, it's just that maliciously spamming the network would get in the way of the malicious spying they actually want to do.

When the cost of the action to you is 0, why not do it as fast and as frequently as possible until you get your intended benefit.

Even the act of engineering rate limiting costs you more than just having this run wild over your customers networks because the vast majority of people buying these machines do not have the inclination or skills to detect this activity.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com