If OpenAI really banned him for that reason, that would be pretty stupid. If you can no longer use an LLM for reverse engineering without worrying about your account, that drastically reduces its value.
In my efforts to reverse engineer the LG firmware to validate Gamers Nexus claims, I got a warning very quickly.
I appealed that quickly and successfully.
Then I applied for daybreak blue and haven’t had any issues since.
It also a matter of phrasing. Say what you want to achieve not how if it is approaching defensive or cyber stuff.
Also state you are working on your own devices and software. (If that is the case of course.)
> ...for a niche of customers, from whom the revenue is probably entirely negligible to OpenAI.
> Not saying it's right, ethical or anything like that, but it's not "stupid"
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.
FWIW I've spent the past few days happily reverse-engineering various aspects of DOS games I've long been curious about. I finally understand how Arjan Brussee did the scrolling in Jazz Jackrabbit. No pushback from Claude so far.
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.
Three sequent regions that move as you scroll in x/y: current/next/clean. When you wrap it moves back to the beginning. The key is that when you scroll a column or a line, that column/line is written in all three regions. The clean region is used both as a source for filling the dirty places where sprites have been written as well as the next current or next after a wrap.
VGA registers take care of the x, y start output.
Sorry, this is really hard to explain/follow without looking at it visually step by step.
It allows for infinite scroll in x/y directions with only (3x) incremental paints of new columns/lines without:
a) needing to redraw a full screen when you reach the end of the buffer/region "ring"
or
b) relying on VGA 64k address wrapping (fiddly, doesn't work the same with all cards, doesn't allow you to use a split screen for a stationary lower status bar).
Claude is absurdly sensitive to anything that touches cyber, and threatens bans if it gets a whiff of a pentest going on. it wouldnt surprise me if openai had a similar approach.
Yesterday I joked that claude gave me a cyber stop for asking how to make the anime girl video for an exploit, but it was a thing that happened. Meanwhile im trying to convince people around me that having grok nudify people isnt "fine" just because grok says it is. Its wild where the lines a drawn.
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.
Today is Sausage Saturday, not Taco Tuesday. Some people like their links and eggs, and... okay, I don't know how to double entendre this next part, but suffice it to say that it's bad faith to assume that everything related to the depiction of the natural human body is about degrading women.
This thread is literally about Grok publicly nudifying women, and people are out here saying it's comparable to seeing somebody's lunch...I know HN is a boys' club and all but this is pretty bad even by normal HN standards.
No one else mentioned women. You're the one who assumed nudification was only of women and only of unwilling subjects. I've seen people use it on pictures of themselves for... enhancement and personal gratification. I've seen men and women use it to make spicy images of adult men. And if we're talking specifically about autonomy and control in depictions of a woman's body, I've seen some women complain about the overzealous guardrails of other image generators, where something as innocent as a touch-up of a photo of their own fully-clothed body was flagged as unsafe.
This issue isn't black and white, and you're casting unearned aspersions. We should have this conversation, in actual good faith.
That's one of the weirdest takes on here in a while.
I can develop security exploits myself just fine without the use of AI. Many people don't have the capability to use Photoshop and free online porn to deepfake someone else they might or might not personally know into a realistic video...
Honestly as someone with faily little experience in pentesting or photoshop but who has dabbled in both back in highschool. I think they would both take a similar amount of practice and skill to develop those abilities. They are complete opposites so i suspect the kind of person who is naturally good at photoshop to be bad at pentesting and vis versa. But if your going to dedicate a few hours of every day to learning a skill i dont think it matters which one you choose, a bit of time, practice, and natural interest and you will be able to do the kind of work that people ask these llms to do.
The major difference being that it usually takes longer to study code because projects can be massive but at the same time the llms are looking for everything and anything while a real attacker is usually looking for specific vulnerabilities in common libraries and such so i wouldnt exactly call the amateur hacker on par with an llm but i would say they could do a similar amount of damage without llm assistance. And photoshop is basically the same. Spend a few hours every day dedicated to one thing and you will learn how to do it.
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.
The whole point of Fable was that it's Mythos but with extra guardrails, yeah. But now that Project Glasswing has been folded into the CVP, Mythos seems to have the exact same guardrails now
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.
With Kimi K3.1 Pro, today WAS the day they actually caught up.
I’ve been saying this for the past few months - once the inflection point happens (such as today), it’s only a matter of 2 years when American closed models won’t be able to catch up with Chinese open models
Chinese models don't need to stay open. The open weight ones just need to have nearly the same capabilities as the models sold by US companies. When that's the case, no one will have a reason to continue paying anything to any US company, thus destroying their business model and business case.
Idk about the destroying their business model part. Running your models on your own is akin to running a media server, which most people seem to be fine paying $20/m for someone else to do.
AI companies can’t sustain this bleeding of runway. Eventually they’re all going to have to significantly bump up pricing. I guarantee personal accounts will be between double and triple your current internet and phone plan combined
That is not going to convince people to self-host models. The AI companies effectively have infinite money. Even if they did somehow run out, the US government would bail them out just like they did the car manufacturers.
Well, maybe if your own media server only showed videos in 1fps compared to hosted ones. You’re not comparing apples to apples here. You might argue that local inference speeds are acceptable, but that doesn’t make them comparably equivalent.
In fact they can be clearly worse, so long as they are same ballpark for many use cases.
I.e. I would pay 15-20% more for comparable work from an open model I control,rather than use anthro et al.
And it seems we've gotten to the point that frontier models benefits are marginal/nominal. Whereas, not long ago Claude was materially ahead and could do things the other models simply couldn't.
Yes, of course, IF a lot of things. But if we go by what the official positions of the government is, and where the ecosystem is today, then the models stay open, as they are. And today, the US models stay closed, so lets not assume "... IF they stay closed" as nothing is pointing to this changing, just like China seems to point towards staying with open models.
They claim that the default datasets contain so much cyber stuff, so that their models became quite good at it.
They filtered the data before training to not contain this. So it's not that they train the model to not do it. They rather not have it in the Corpus at all. In theory
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.
This is again will be very funny race to watch. Right now you can fairly do lots of reverse enginnering or "hacking" with off the shelf Chinese models, and they are very capable (GLM3 for example) which can be run locally if you stomach the hardware. Tools like rea are also becoming more popular. If openai continues to be pedantic, they will lose the technical base given how close is the gap getting.
The company I work for has a plan B to switch to alternative, self-hosted models if providers pull off strange moves, such as drastic pricing changes. We have already switched from one provider to another once, and we do not want to get burned again.
No I mean being responsible for the implementation and continued good functioning of something Kevin was responsible for before he quit. So uh self-hosting in a corporate context sure
For the past few days I've been trying to use rea to reverse engineer my Samsung Galaxy Buds 4 Pro to get seamless functionality working outside of the Samsung ecosystem with no luck (the buds 4 pro require Samsung devices + a Samsung account for seamless to work, I only have a Galaxy phone + my macbook). I think we're still far away from having something that works that well.
Have you tried Qwen3.8-Flash-Next? I found it significantly better in anything I tested than GLM5.3-Flash, but the thing is you either use Alibaba cloud or you host it yourself (no lesser quant than unsloth 4.5 or mx4/nvfp4 and kv no more quantized than int8).
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.
(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.
```
+----------------------------------+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------+-----------------+-----------------+-----------------+
| 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 ...
Thanks for the data-centric perspective. It reinforces my vague impression that DS 4.1 Flash eclipses almost everything out there, or at least ties it. We're really lucky to have that one.
When running benchmarks mind how some providers lobotomise some models. For example DeepSeek Flash is fine when run via DeepSeek. The same model via Deepinfra and open router (despite setting routing to "exact") was far worse.
Regarding Qwen3.8-Flash-Next only Alibaba matches the quality I get when run local inference.
Mind I run mxfp4 and int8 kv (before I run unsloth's q4_xl). And it is much more capable than providers that claim full precision. I have no idea what they do to mess it up, maybe they quantize the kv?
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.
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.
> ...it looks like LG is worse than everyone else.
IIRC, it's mentioned at at least one point in the first big video on the topic that they haven't tested other manufacturers "'Smart' TVs" but would not be surprised to discover that other manufacturers are doing the same thing. They're not a news organization owned by one of the 0.1%, so they can only do investigation and reporting so quickly.
> There really wasn't a lot of new information in the Gamer's Nexus video.
I'm not sure which video you're talking about.
If you were expecting the recent one that talks about the lulzy ASUS RCE and how it could interact with "'Smart' TVs" to have even more information about "TV" vulnerabilities or consumer-hostile features, then your expectations are out of line.
If you're asserting that you knew nearly everything in the initial "Wow, these LG 'Smart' 'TVs' can really easily become always-on spy devices, and -in some respects- already are!" video, well, okay? There are those of us who know that shady shit is going on because we have ten brain cells to rub together, a moderate level of awareness of the world around us, and can pretty easily connect the dots. It's an entirely different thing to demonstrate that that is going on for the benefit of people who are -for some reason- reluctant to believe that -yes- Big Megacorps do heinous things to their customers in order to make a bit more money because they don't expect to get caught... and even if they get caught, the punishment will only be a tiny fraction of the profit gotten from doing those things. [0]
[0] The biggest irony here is that objections to claims that this is how Big Megacorps typically do business with us Little People are often dismissed as "4D chess" or "conspiracy theories"... but, like, this behavior is a textbook example of a rational economic actor responding reasonably to market incentives. This is the "Invisible Hand Of The Market" at work.
> if your samsung TV model doesnt have a microphone, it will look for connected devices with one, such as a soundbar or a connected bluetooth device. this gets shipped off to bixby.
Dog bark and baby crying detection are advertised features for SmartThings integrations. Door bell and door knocking are also included, this is surfaced directly if you hook the TV or sound bar into SmartThings.
I had to check this and it's true. Not saying Samsung or 3rd parties don't take advantage of any data they can collect, but the story the tweets tell is super biased against them. Here, the detection seems limited to specific pattens required for a particular feature.
These folks recently did tests on major TV brands, not accepting the on-device consent forms, and then recording how much data they continued to send after consent was denied (which itself is not always possible). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_GK06_3UY8
Samsung was the single brand reviewed which actually stopped sending data after the user told it to do so.
In February Samsung agreed to stop collecting the data when opted out in the US after a few lawsuits were lining up. LG was the target of a different lawsuit in Texas which they settled and then wrote up a forced arbitration clause and doubled-down on data collection, even when opted out.
Oh don't worry, shitty WebOS is enough to put me off that (I unfortunately own one). However in this case we were talking specifically about that recent study of the effects of opt-outs, and for LG TVs the opt-out did result in the no longer detecting any tracking.
Still, calling it "PRIVACY HORROR" as per original post is typical twitter-style sensation seeking. It's an opt-in dog barking detection that causes local chip to listen for... dog barking
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.
I will add: Use the TV as a HUB for all IOT, light sensor so you know when the light is on or someone passes in front of the TV and there are some others but I can't remember now. They are all advertised in the Smart Things app.
I hate 2 things about my samsung tv's (I have 4 only samsung): the simplistic remote and ads on home screen. Even with custom dns sometimes they get through.
There’s a meaningful difference between ML algorithms and the Grail that is (general) AI. Many of us spent years arguing that words matter and now with the VC backed hype train just about everything is AI, under penalty of stock market collapse
Because just about everything is AI. AI in itself is a rather useless term, and that was years ago.
The differences are not really that great most of the time. Quite often one type of logic in one type of ML network can be easily simulated in something like a generic transformer network and vice versa. Efficiency is typically the biggest constraint.
Remember guys, if they are reading it for wrongthink, they are reading it for industrial espionage.
Anthropic and openAI just announced they’re spinning out competitors to their biggest customers… right after ingesting all of their IP and contracts. Do the math.
(Or don’t, because they’ve been caught stealing math research)
> because they’ve been caught stealing math research
No. They haven't been caught stealing. Tristan Buckmaster publicly expressed surprise that OpenAI model has used the niche approach he pursued. 10,000 agents exploring various approaches make it much less surprising.
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.
It's not a coincidence... they literally just span up agents on every possible variant of the problem.
There are 10k agents and Tristan's approach wasn't even groundbreaking novelty, it was literally based on existing published literature from Diego Córdoba and Luis Martínez-Zoroa that the agents have seen.
It's not just probable that agents would persue his particular niche of trying to construct a blowup. It's guaranteed if you just consider the basic setup.
> The coincidence is that they took the correct path out of “every possible one"
My point was explicitly that this didn't happen. I said that they took every possible path and published the one that worked. It's exactly throw shit at the wall and see what sticks.
> exactly after one of their users took it.
All parties agree that what happened is that someone had told someone working at OpenAI that Anthropic employees are working on Navier stokes. This is where the timing comes from.
---
What you are implying is this: OpenAI didn't do the throw shit at the wall approach as outlined in their release blog they actually secretely monitor everyones chat logs and found the idea in Tristan's Chat history and stole and published it.
Or some variant of this. You are only implying what you think is the truth, please state it outright. Don't beat around the bush.
I’ll start with this because it sets the tone for how informed your opinion is, and what you think is a far fetched conspiracy theory:
> they actually secretely monitor everyones chat logs
Are you for real? They openly monitor everyone’s logs. You can ask ChatGPT and it will literally tell you that they do it. That’s how they know (and yet still fail to report) that someone is planning a school shooting [0]. They monitor anything and anyone of interest.
Now if “having agents” was enough then we’d just ask for the cure for cancer or proof for every theorem and wait for a few days. Obviously they need guidance to not get stuck in a dead end or have to brute force everything. OAI’s mathematicians weren’t able to provide a good direction so the agents stalled until someone else found the key and only then OAI had their breakthrough.
I know they monitor peoples chat logs. I'm on hacknews as much as everyone else and have read that story as well as the ones where they did report people to police based on chat logs. Thats not what I mean by conspiracy because its not conspiritotial. It's literally stated on the help page [0].
I'm not uninformed on this. I actually wasted a lot of time on it since my interests intersect at this. I've watched the numberphile interviews, read the drama, various takes etc.
What I'm saying is that its highly unlikely that in this case that Sébastien Bubeck from OpenAi decided to steal some critical idea from Buckmasters chat and feed it "Bell" the unreleased model that produced the solution.
> Obviously they need guidance to not get stuck in a dead end or have to brute force everything
Dude they did brute force everything. This is what I keep trying to say. They said they spent 130 billion output tokens.
This is quite literally like 500,000 books worth of text.
Sure, that’s why in your previous comment you were making it sound ridiculous to believe OAI is “secretly monitoring everyone’s logs”. You dug that hole.
> What I'm saying is that its highly unlikely that in this case that Sébastien Bubeck from OpenAi decided to steal some critical idea from Buckmasters chat and feed it "Bell" the unreleased model that produced the solution.
Why? Because OAI deserves the benefit of the doubt?
> The coincidence is that they took the correct path out of “every possible one” exactly after one of their users took it.
From what I read online that researcher also used a lot of AI to find this approach, so it might just be the one that is the easiest to find for AI agents and the timing would then only be caused by them working on it around the same time.
Wait are you saying: 1) the simultaneous invention defense is never valid for individuals, and 2) you don’t base your beliefs on what’s right, but on some kind of tit-for-tat retaliation?
You’re asking a loaded question based on things that were never said. Very lowbrow.
One thing is how uniformly a rule is applied. Another thing is how corect the rule is to begin with. I addressed the first because it’s far more straightforward and objective. You did some mental gymnastics to name-drop the second without even the effort to say something about it.
Another thing I addressed is the trustworthiness of these companies, or rather lack thereof. When they claim one thing in their interest it’s almost guaranteed to be deceiving. They lied to you again and again but they wouldn’t lie to you now, would they? You left that out completely, so maybe you even agree.
Next time if you want the courtesy of a reply, extend the courtesy of not bringing just a low-effort strawman.
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.
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.
>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?
Can you give me an example where this would make sense, because I just don't see e.g. OpenAI starting a grocery store chain or Anthropic building a wind turbine manufacturing company.
What I can see is that some company's products become useless, e.g. translation tools, as it is something that you can just do within ChatGPT or Claude.
For consulting they don't need to start a new company. If they eat part of that market it would be with their current products where someone uses AI instead of hiring a consulting company. So a similar approach to what happened with translation.
For sales I'm sorry, but I don't think sales companies exist? Sales is usually just a part of another company. Some of those employees might be made redundant as AI products complete part of their work, but that would also happen through OpenAI's or Anthropic's products.
So for both of those I don't see what kind of company they could spin off (excluding the example of a company that does AI implementations as I mentioned that one in my initial comment) that would compete with an existing company. For all of these things offering a product that allows existing companies to replace employees sounds like the more scalable, profitable and flexible strategy.
I am thinking a little further into the future where companies and people themselves become more dependent on AI. If LLMs disappeared today how many companies and people could not function? Probably not many. But, in 5 years how many companies will be dependent on AI? A future where companies are dependent on big AI labs to run their business could happen. I think the business term is forwards integration, where a seller moves into one of their buyer's markets.
Also, in such a future businesses would be reorganized to use AI. That probably means less employees and reduced human complexity. The business processes are further abstracted from people making it easier for a big AI lab to move in.
If I was looking at businesses today where the big AI labs could step in I would look for businesses where they earn high margins based on intellectually complex tasks. Maybe the most pure example would be trading in the stock market since it can be completely done by a computer. Then you have areas like law which process large amounts of data but are also heavily based on relationships.
Underrated approach. Even if the screens are a tad more expensive by today's subsidized standards. There are also many FHD and 4k non-smart TVs on the second hand market, with many given away for free on your preferred marketplace website.
I've seen this "yeah well they'll just connect to open WiFI" for 10+ years at this point and have never seen any vaguely credible reproduction.
Best you get is "my friend's LG TV connected to the internet even after changing his WiFI password" vaguely recalled hearsay.
Or the second order retreat-to-motte argument of "well they'll add that to the firmware overnight if ad revenues drop from enough people stop connecting to the internet".
How many open WiFi networks are around you? I live in a city and there are 0 within range. ISP routers have defaulted to password protection for more than a decade. The only places with open WiFi are places of business that provide guest work. Even those are far less common and usually password protected these days.
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.
The AI in the TV was listening for dogs barking and babys crying, a gross invasion of privacy. Possibly this could have been for ad targeting purposes.
With projects like REA, it's going to get harder and harder for companies to get away with things like this.
I'd love to see the major social media apps reverse engineered and analyzed in this way. I can only imagine the dodgy practices that'll be found if this happens.
> With projects like REA, it's going to get harder and harder for companies to get away with things like this.
Nope, don't worry, if you clicked on the linked you'd see OpenAI has already banned this person's account. Chinese models you say? See today's new Kimi release which intentionally had all cyber-related data removed from its training data. The window is already rapidly closing and will soon be completely closed.
Jaded part of me thinks companies are going frontier-model-vibe-code their security into security chips everywhere, encrypted firmware everywhere, locked down APIs everywhere and it’s going to take away the fun out of it.
"Why you bother about local AI? LOL with the $ you spend for <insert hardware here> you can buy 5 years of 20x account". Yeah. 5 years where you are told what you can do.
It’s quite something when western companies act more like authoritarian governments than actual authoritarian governments. I just wish RAM was less expensive ;(
My guess is we're within a year of the first governments banning local LLM AI at any scale. Declare GPU's as munitions that must be registered and ban any card with more than X GB of RAM and more power than a 3060 or something like that.
That could be done with an executive order in the US, and it probably wouldn't take much to get it to pass congress.
Now, don't worry, businesses can still buy a lot more GPU compute than that, but they have to register and track their usage just like any other company making/buying weapons.
You only need to ban compute on a scale that can actually compete with frontier models, which is currently something like a $500,000 investment.
"Must declare any purchase of 10 or more GPUs" does not strike me as particularly implausible.
There's already plenty of jurisdictions where possession of certain tools is considered evidence of criminal intent.
I don't think any of this is good behavior on the part of our legal system, but I do not doubt the legal system's ability to regulate this if it so chooses - and Anthropic has already gotten slapped down by the Trump administration once before.
I use local abliterated models + paid for subs like OAI or A\ and avoid touching anything that would hit their TOS + anonymously paid for Chinese pay as you go for things in between those two.
To what extend do these "smart" products state how, when and what data they are collecting and selling?
Isn't it high time for legislation that at least makes it clear on the box what kind of sensors and integrations it has and how bad the product is privacy wise?
Also, shouldn't corporate spying disguised as automated content recognition and classification be limited or outright be banned?
And all this connected garbage should by law be able to function with the cord cut and without registration, and if an update negatively changes the advertised product characteristics the customer must be allowed to return it for full paid price even if it is 10 years old. Force the manufactures to make statements on the "box" about the features, the support duration and level, and the privacy characteristics.
They don't care because of several reasons.
1. They get paid not to
2. They are told not to.
Alot of this spying ends up producing valuable data for different agencies to purchase which otherwise they cannot legally obtain without a warrant. Sure some of it has some commercial value, but a lot of it is probably more valuable for domestic spy operations.
Because there have not yet been any high profile cases involving the collected data used to embarrass or convict a politician. It just takes one embarrassed congress critter to get a giant red sticker on all these devices, their boxes and ads: "This Device Transcribes and Reports Your Conversations" and that is before including those that upload camera screenshots of what you are watching and video of the viewers doing something untoward.
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.
Because it is not the subject that will win them the next election.
And even if they care, some things are easier said than done. With politicians who care, you get things like GDPR, which goes in the right direction, but is a huge legal mess. And it is a mess because it can't be made simple.
Obviously, you have to take consumer interests into account, but you also have to take companies interest into account too, both big and small, otherwise they will just stop doing business, which is bad for the economy and will mean that consumers won't find what they want at a reasonable price. You have to think about the loopholes big companies will invariably find, and covering them will add complexity, but still make it so that small companies can comply without a full time team of lawyers assisting them.
For example, you say the consumer could return it for a full refund on a bad update, but to whom? Should the burden be put on the small retailer who sold it to you (and may be out of business)? There is already plenty of stuff the manufacturer must tell you, usually one a piece of paper no one reads, and the more you ask, the less people will read because there will be too much information. A "privacy score" may be a good idea, if well designed, it will share a place with the energy score, environment score, repairability score, safety signs, origin, etc... And how do you differentiate actual automated content recognition that consumers could want from spyware, formally, so that the first one is allowed but not the latter.
All that to say that it is not impossible, but even with politicians caring, it is complicated. European politicians care (because it can win them votes), the results are so complicated they are getting ridiculed by the rest of the world.
Claude is happily reverse engineering for me, a recently sunsetted mobile game and an old PlayStation game. If it doesn’t moralize at you and refuse to do it, it’s easier to use the smarter model on the subsidized subscription. I’m doing as much as I can now before they start refusing.
As far as I can tell, there is no write up. This is a reddit post with screenshots of a Twitter/X post by @log4j. Even the Twitter post doesn’t seem informative, but Reddit isn’t a source for the information by any means.
The original link was on HN two days ago with no traction.
So a bit of background I spent the last 17 years going Smart TV app development.
Not a lot here is any sort of surprise to anyone in the industry.
Always on audio is common on a whole swath of devices - any that want to do Alexa style voice prompts need it. ACR is table stakes for modern TVs reselling viewer data has driven down TV prices to the point where there is no going back.
The policy file here is how you build Tizen apps. It’s a list of specific features your app needs access to and certain levels of access (controlling the TV For example) require different levels of contractual relationships with Samsung.
Everything Samsung collects should be covered in their, very dense, TOS.
Oh no, how will Samsung survive this, they will have to send $5 to few thousands of people for the damages if they decide to start a class action lawsuit and if a judge/jury decides it was really causing damages... as a reminder Samsung Electronics made almost 250 B-B-B-B-illion dollars in revenues just last year.
I spent a couple years working at the platform (AndroidTV + Google Assistant) level on smart TVs.
> any that want to do Alexa style voice prompts need it
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.
Yeah I don’t disagree, but should clarify that I’m just referring to the security policy that provides access to the ambient mic. How the app/platform handles that audio is a different path that I’m not entirely familiar with.
Not really, that said it’s trivial to disable, you can opt out either via their settings or just by not connecting the TV to the internet.
I will say that how “completely” disabling ACR via settings works is not terribly clear and there are a few lawsuits questioning wether “opting out” actually works as presented.
Plus you can bet there will be a never-ending stream of "oops, a bug meant that toggle hasn't worked in 7 years, our bad. Have a free year of credit monitoring, on us!" announcements. Some might even be real accidents!
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?
I would avoid and distrust most social forums, such as reddit, that have Pookas which are fond of rumpots, crackspots and how are you bix6? -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NeEsx2QLJ40
What do you mean? I can post whatever I want on Reddit and I can make it have as many upvotes as I need. They basically make bot farms undetectable, by hiding histories and automatic username selection. Literally nothing should be considered truth with Reddit as its only source
> Literally nothing should be considered truth with Reddit as its only source
Don’t get me wrong: I completely agree that Reddit should not be the only source, and go further that nothing should be assumed to be true based on Reddit signals (such as upvotes and comments). This is why I carefully chose my words: these can be strong signals of truth.
I think it’s also worth parsing out that I don’t think this is valid across all subreddits.
In Reddits case the stock price is based on nobody noticing that most of the users fled. Now they have to AI translate Indian content into English (and vice-versa) to keep up the illusion that people still use it.
At some point this will drive away the remaining users and it will just be bots and Reddits machine translations of those bot posts. At that point AI companies will just be paying to train on machine translated versions of content they generated to begin with.
Just a reminder. You can buy a kiosk TV from major TV manufacturers. You just have to look a little. Kiosk TVs are intended for lobby signage or conference rooms. You pay a little more but the garbage UI and always on piece is gone. You get 4 HDMI with them too (from what I've used).
When I was in college this sharp phd student told me that your phone, tv, and other devices talk to each other via radio frequency to build a profile on you. I've seen zero proof of this anywhere and I still think about why he told me that.
There is a Rick and Morty episode where Rick opens up a store that removes the curses from free items the Devil is handing out.
(Surprisingly, the Devil does not consider lawyering up, which is odd because I would expect the Devil to be pretty familiar with lots of lawyers. It’s fiction of course.)
It would be great to use AI to do something analogous with these spy TVs. I would be very interested in stripping the “smart” crap out of my TV to turn it into a kiosk.
If only. The EFF has been harping about this for literally decades. The DMCA in the US and similar anti-circumvention laws around the world (primarily EU) make doing that a serious crime, with punishments well beyond any conceivable impact to society at large.
And yet that could be an undetectable "crime", if it even is a crime. People flash devices with alternative firmware all the time so flashing an alternative OS on your TV could be perfectly legal. If it isn't, the biggest difficulty would be obtaining the sw/fw from a trustworthy source.
How would anyone ever tell that a TV is running "de-samsunged" OS since the prime advantage of that is that the TV is now clean of any spyware?
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 79.5 ms ] threadThen I applied for daybreak blue and haven’t had any issues since.
It also a matter of phrasing. Say what you want to achieve not how if it is approaching defensive or cyber stuff.
Also state you are working on your own devices and software. (If that is the case of course.)
> You must not attempt to extract protected reasoning through unauthorized access, reverse engineering, or circumvention of safeguards.
This is the only mention of reverse engineering on their ToS. It only applies to trying to reverse engineering their models not others.
Moreover, their ToS is all about protecting security and privacy, which is what I was using it for.
...for a niche of customers, from whom the revenue is probably entirely negligible to OpenAI.
Not saying it's right, ethical or anything like that, but it's not "stupid"
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.
> Not saying it's right, ethical or anything like that, but it's not "stupid"
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.
For corporate accounts they are apt to get a message to the admin account saying suspicious shit is occurring provide more verification.
>OpenAI must behave like an infrastructure provider as for electricity or internet
Oh, you mean like Google? Yea, how's that working out.
Because of such reasons many companies are indeed quite suspicious of using GCP, and for the same reasons prefer to use AWS or Microsoft Azure.
VGA registers take care of the x, y start output.
Sorry, this is really hard to explain/follow without looking at it visually step by step.
a) needing to redraw a full screen when you reach the end of the buffer/region "ring"
or
b) relying on VGA 64k address wrapping (fiddly, doesn't work the same with all cards, doesn't allow you to use a split screen for a stationary lower status bar).
What is next? Power and water company suspending your account if your home and car are not streaming enough telemetry.
I am glad that open models are closing on frontier.
Yesterday I joked that claude gave me a cyber stop for asking how to make the anime girl video for an exploit, but it was a thing that happened. Meanwhile im trying to convince people around me that having grok nudify people isnt "fine" just because grok says it is. Its wild where the lines a drawn.
That's like saying it's fine to beat someone up and take their lunch, but it's not fine to learn how locks work.
Well, maybe _you_ do.
This issue isn't black and white, and you're casting unearned aspersions. We should have this conversation, in actual good faith.
1. It’s not
2. An analogy is not the same thing as saying women are like x
Remember those “A is to B as C is to D” SAT questions? Did you read them and think they were telling you that A = C?
I can develop security exploits myself just fine without the use of AI. Many people don't have the capability to use Photoshop and free online porn to deepfake someone else they might or might not personally know into a realistic video...
Are you seriously claiming that the untrained masses can start developing exploits on their devices?
The major difference being that it usually takes longer to study code because projects can be massive but at the same time the llms are looking for everything and anything while a real attacker is usually looking for specific vulnerabilities in common libraries and such so i wouldnt exactly call the amateur hacker on par with an llm but i would say they could do a similar amount of damage without llm assistance. And photoshop is basically the same. Spend a few hours every day dedicated to one thing and you will learn how to do it.
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.
Anthropic is a joke of a company.
I’ve been saying this for the past few months - once the inflection point happens (such as today), it’s only a matter of 2 years when American closed models won’t be able to catch up with Chinese open models
I.e. I would pay 15-20% more for comparable work from an open model I control,rather than use anthro et al.
And it seems we've gotten to the point that frontier models benefits are marginal/nominal. Whereas, not long ago Claude was materially ahead and could do things the other models simply couldn't.
Yes, of course, IF a lot of things. But if we go by what the official positions of the government is, and where the ecosystem is today, then the models stay open, as they are. And today, the US models stay closed, so lets not assume "... IF they stay closed" as nothing is pointing to this changing, just like China seems to point towards staying with open models.
I have been wondering if that would be a benefit of using say GLM5.3 on HF if only to get fewer cyber stop flags.
They claim that the default datasets contain so much cyber stuff, so that their models became quite good at it.
They filtered the data before training to not contain this. So it's not that they train the model to not do it. They rather not have it in the Corpus at all. In theory
Also leading the frontier is much much harder than catching up to frontier.
This reflects horribly bad on Samsung!
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.
```
Regarding Qwen3.8-Flash-Next only Alibaba matches the quality I get when run local inference.
Mind I run mxfp4 and int8 kv (before I run unsloth's q4_xl). And it is much more capable than providers that claim full precision. I have no idea what they do to mess it up, maybe they quantize the kv?
Either way the provider you choose matters a lot.
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.
But if you are talking TVs specifically, I expect they will get back to that too.
IIRC, it's mentioned at at least one point in the first big video on the topic that they haven't tested other manufacturers "'Smart' TVs" but would not be surprised to discover that other manufacturers are doing the same thing. They're not a news organization owned by one of the 0.1%, so they can only do investigation and reporting so quickly.
> There really wasn't a lot of new information in the Gamer's Nexus video.
I'm not sure which video you're talking about.
If you were expecting the recent one that talks about the lulzy ASUS RCE and how it could interact with "'Smart' TVs" to have even more information about "TV" vulnerabilities or consumer-hostile features, then your expectations are out of line.
If you're asserting that you knew nearly everything in the initial "Wow, these LG 'Smart' 'TVs' can really easily become always-on spy devices, and -in some respects- already are!" video, well, okay? There are those of us who know that shady shit is going on because we have ten brain cells to rub together, a moderate level of awareness of the world around us, and can pretty easily connect the dots. It's an entirely different thing to demonstrate that that is going on for the benefit of people who are -for some reason- reluctant to believe that -yes- Big Megacorps do heinous things to their customers in order to make a bit more money because they don't expect to get caught... and even if they get caught, the punishment will only be a tiny fraction of the profit gotten from doing those things. [0]
[0] The biggest irony here is that objections to claims that this is how Big Megacorps typically do business with us Little People are often dismissed as "4D chess" or "conspiracy theories"... but, like, this behavior is a textbook example of a rational economic actor responding reasonably to market incentives. This is the "Invisible Hand Of The Market" at work.
> if your samsung TV model doesnt have a microphone, it will look for connected devices with one, such as a soundbar or a connected bluetooth device. this gets shipped off to bixby.
(Not saying people should use bixby mind you)
Samsung was the single brand reviewed which actually stopped sending data after the user told it to do so.
Don't buy LG TVs.
We clearly need a whole new privacy framework where everything is optional and opt-in, plus open software to monitor this compliance.
I hate 2 things about my samsung tv's (I have 4 only samsung): the simplistic remote and ads on home screen. Even with custom dns sometimes they get through.
The differences are not really that great most of the time. Quite often one type of logic in one type of ML network can be easily simulated in something like a generic transformer network and vice versa. Efficiency is typically the biggest constraint.
i remember going store to store in search of one.
gg me, that was a smart move.
Anthropic and openAI just announced they’re spinning out competitors to their biggest customers… right after ingesting all of their IP and contracts. Do the math.
(Or don’t, because they’ve been caught stealing math research)
No. They haven't been caught stealing. Tristan Buckmaster publicly expressed surprise that OpenAI model has used the niche approach he pursued. 10,000 agents exploring various approaches make it much less surprising.
There are 10k agents and Tristan's approach wasn't even groundbreaking novelty, it was literally based on existing published literature from Diego Córdoba and Luis Martínez-Zoroa that the agents have seen.
It's not just probable that agents would persue his particular niche of trying to construct a blowup. It's guaranteed if you just consider the basic setup.
Monkeys on typewriters excuse only works for huge companies who can afford to buy opinions.
My point was explicitly that this didn't happen. I said that they took every possible path and published the one that worked. It's exactly throw shit at the wall and see what sticks.
> exactly after one of their users took it.
All parties agree that what happened is that someone had told someone working at OpenAI that Anthropic employees are working on Navier stokes. This is where the timing comes from.
---
What you are implying is this: OpenAI didn't do the throw shit at the wall approach as outlined in their release blog they actually secretely monitor everyones chat logs and found the idea in Tristan's Chat history and stole and published it.
Or some variant of this. You are only implying what you think is the truth, please state it outright. Don't beat around the bush.
> they actually secretely monitor everyones chat logs
Are you for real? They openly monitor everyone’s logs. You can ask ChatGPT and it will literally tell you that they do it. That’s how they know (and yet still fail to report) that someone is planning a school shooting [0]. They monitor anything and anyone of interest.
Now if “having agents” was enough then we’d just ask for the cure for cancer or proof for every theorem and wait for a few days. Obviously they need guidance to not get stuck in a dead end or have to brute force everything. OAI’s mathematicians weren’t able to provide a good direction so the agents stalled until someone else found the key and only then OAI had their breakthrough.
[0] https://airisk.mit.edu/ai-incidents/1375-openai-allegedly-di...
I'm not uninformed on this. I actually wasted a lot of time on it since my interests intersect at this. I've watched the numberphile interviews, read the drama, various takes etc.
What I'm saying is that its highly unlikely that in this case that Sébastien Bubeck from OpenAi decided to steal some critical idea from Buckmasters chat and feed it "Bell" the unreleased model that produced the solution.
> Obviously they need guidance to not get stuck in a dead end or have to brute force everything
Dude they did brute force everything. This is what I keep trying to say. They said they spent 130 billion output tokens.
This is quite literally like 500,000 books worth of text.
[0] https://help.openai.com/en/articles/6783457-what-is-chatgpt
> I'm not uninformed on this
Sure, that’s why in your previous comment you were making it sound ridiculous to believe OAI is “secretly monitoring everyone’s logs”. You dug that hole.
> What I'm saying is that its highly unlikely that in this case that Sébastien Bubeck from OpenAi decided to steal some critical idea from Buckmasters chat and feed it "Bell" the unreleased model that produced the solution.
Why? Because OAI deserves the benefit of the doubt?
From what I read online that researcher also used a lot of AI to find this approach, so it might just be the one that is the easiest to find for AI agents and the timing would then only be caused by them working on it around the same time.
That seems like a fraught way to live.
One thing is how uniformly a rule is applied. Another thing is how corect the rule is to begin with. I addressed the first because it’s far more straightforward and objective. You did some mental gymnastics to name-drop the second without even the effort to say something about it.
Another thing I addressed is the trustworthiness of these companies, or rather lack thereof. When they claim one thing in their interest it’s almost guaranteed to be deceiving. They lied to you again and again but they wouldn’t lie to you now, would they? You left that out completely, so maybe you even agree.
Next time if you want the courtesy of a reply, extend the courtesy of not bringing just a low-effort strawman.
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
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.
Can you give me an example where this would make sense, because I just don't see e.g. OpenAI starting a grocery store chain or Anthropic building a wind turbine manufacturing company.
What I can see is that some company's products become useless, e.g. translation tools, as it is something that you can just do within ChatGPT or Claude.
For sales I'm sorry, but I don't think sales companies exist? Sales is usually just a part of another company. Some of those employees might be made redundant as AI products complete part of their work, but that would also happen through OpenAI's or Anthropic's products.
So for both of those I don't see what kind of company they could spin off (excluding the example of a company that does AI implementations as I mentioned that one in my initial comment) that would compete with an existing company. For all of these things offering a product that allows existing companies to replace employees sounds like the more scalable, profitable and flexible strategy.
Also, in such a future businesses would be reorganized to use AI. That probably means less employees and reduced human complexity. The business processes are further abstracted from people making it easier for a big AI lab to move in.
If I was looking at businesses today where the big AI labs could step in I would look for businesses where they earn high margins based on intellectually complex tasks. Maybe the most pure example would be trading in the stock market since it can be completely done by a computer. Then you have areas like law which process large amounts of data but are also heavily based on relationships.
Like none of these TV's hooks to an Open Wifi Hotspot and abuse you.
I haven't managed to reproduce it.
Best you get is "my friend's LG TV connected to the internet even after changing his WiFI password" vaguely recalled hearsay.
Or the second order retreat-to-motte argument of "well they'll add that to the firmware overnight if ad revenues drop from enough people stop connecting to the internet".
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.
> 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
You could always ban it from your network at the router.
With projects like REA, it's going to get harder and harder for companies to get away with things like this.
I'd love to see the major social media apps reverse engineered and analyzed in this way. I can only imagine the dodgy practices that'll be found if this happens.
Nope, don't worry, if you clicked on the linked you'd see OpenAI has already banned this person's account. Chinese models you say? See today's new Kimi release which intentionally had all cyber-related data removed from its training data. The window is already rapidly closing and will soon be completely closed.
Yeah definitely Cyberpunk moment here.
That could be done with an executive order in the US, and it probably wouldn't take much to get it to pass congress.
Now, don't worry, businesses can still buy a lot more GPU compute than that, but they have to register and track their usage just like any other company making/buying weapons.
"Must declare any purchase of 10 or more GPUs" does not strike me as particularly implausible.
There's already plenty of jurisdictions where possession of certain tools is considered evidence of criminal intent.
I don't think any of this is good behavior on the part of our legal system, but I do not doubt the legal system's ability to regulate this if it so chooses - and Anthropic has already gotten slapped down by the Trump administration once before.
Works very well.
Isn't it high time for legislation that at least makes it clear on the box what kind of sensors and integrations it has and how bad the product is privacy wise?
Also, shouldn't corporate spying disguised as automated content recognition and classification be limited or outright be banned?
And all this connected garbage should by law be able to function with the cord cut and without registration, and if an update negatively changes the advertised product characteristics the customer must be allowed to return it for full paid price even if it is 10 years old. Force the manufactures to make statements on the "box" about the features, the support duration and level, and the privacy characteristics.
Why don't politicians care about this?
Alot of this spying ends up producing valuable data for different agencies to purchase which otherwise they cannot legally obtain without a warrant. Sure some of it has some commercial value, but a lot of it is probably more valuable for domestic spy operations.
Because there have not yet been any high profile cases involving the collected data used to embarrass or convict a politician. It just takes one embarrassed congress critter to get a giant red sticker on all these devices, their boxes and ads: "This Device Transcribes and Reports Your Conversations" and that is before including those that upload camera screenshots of what you are watching and video of the viewers doing something untoward.
A lot of info collected by 3 letter agencies is based on it.
Because it is not the subject that will win them the next election.
And even if they care, some things are easier said than done. With politicians who care, you get things like GDPR, which goes in the right direction, but is a huge legal mess. And it is a mess because it can't be made simple.
Obviously, you have to take consumer interests into account, but you also have to take companies interest into account too, both big and small, otherwise they will just stop doing business, which is bad for the economy and will mean that consumers won't find what they want at a reasonable price. You have to think about the loopholes big companies will invariably find, and covering them will add complexity, but still make it so that small companies can comply without a full time team of lawyers assisting them.
For example, you say the consumer could return it for a full refund on a bad update, but to whom? Should the burden be put on the small retailer who sold it to you (and may be out of business)? There is already plenty of stuff the manufacturer must tell you, usually one a piece of paper no one reads, and the more you ask, the less people will read because there will be too much information. A "privacy score" may be a good idea, if well designed, it will share a place with the energy score, environment score, repairability score, safety signs, origin, etc... And how do you differentiate actual automated content recognition that consumers could want from spyware, formally, so that the first one is allowed but not the latter.
All that to say that it is not impossible, but even with politicians caring, it is complicated. European politicians care (because it can win them votes), the results are so complicated they are getting ridiculed by the rest of the world.
How dare they run a classifier locally on the TV, they should upload it uncut to Czechia like Amazon did with their ring cameras!
DeepSeek will break the binary into code and Claude will search for problems. Now you have most of exploitation chain.
The original link was on HN two days ago with no traction.
https://twitter.com/log4j/status/2113014142600953868
Not a lot here is any sort of surprise to anyone in the industry.
Always on audio is common on a whole swath of devices - any that want to do Alexa style voice prompts need it. ACR is table stakes for modern TVs reselling viewer data has driven down TV prices to the point where there is no going back.
The policy file here is how you build Tizen apps. It’s a list of specific features your app needs access to and certain levels of access (controlling the TV For example) require different levels of contractual relationships with Samsung.
Everything Samsung collects should be covered in their, very dense, TOS.
> any that want to do Alexa style voice prompts need it
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.
I will say that how “completely” disabling ACR via settings works is not terribly clear and there are a few lawsuits questioning wether “opting out” actually works as presented.
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?
Don’t get me wrong: I completely agree that Reddit should not be the only source, and go further that nothing should be assumed to be true based on Reddit signals (such as upvotes and comments). This is why I carefully chose my words: these can be strong signals of truth.
I think it’s also worth parsing out that I don’t think this is valid across all subreddits.
At some point this will drive away the remaining users and it will just be bots and Reddits machine translations of those bot posts. At that point AI companies will just be paying to train on machine translated versions of content they generated to begin with.
(Surprisingly, the Devil does not consider lawyering up, which is odd because I would expect the Devil to be pretty familiar with lots of lawyers. It’s fiction of course.)
It would be great to use AI to do something analogous with these spy TVs. I would be very interested in stripping the “smart” crap out of my TV to turn it into a kiosk.
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.
How would anyone ever tell that a TV is running "de-samsunged" OS since the prime advantage of that is that the TV is now clean of any spyware?
Nitpick, but it would only make "showing others how to do that" a crime.