Nah it still boots to their annoying menus, takes forever to change modes, has lots of annoyances. I’ll be a lean firmware could be a much better experience.
I already use an Apple TV, but the Samsung’s firmware is annoying even as a dumb tv.
What I would do if I were manufacturer hellbent on spying would be to search for devices of my own brand nearby to pass data using their internet access, if no access found then extend search - basically p2p/mesh network to pass data.
I'm sorely tempted to go down that road, I have a few frames. They've never been connected to the Internet, but the software on them is trash - literally the only thing I ever want it to do is display art (in standby) or display the Apple TV connected to HDMI.
It's been well known for the last 5-10 years that Samsung has degraded into one of the worst consumer device manufacturers, whether it's all this tracking, or forcing you to watch ads on the home screen of your expensive tv etc.
No idea why you'd even consider anything Samsung related.
I've just removed my 50€/year Frame subscription. Samsung, if you're reading this, you know why.
The art was good, and I liked having it. I was disappointed that it was subscription-based. From now on the TV will be disconnected from the power supply, until I want to occasionally watch Netflix.
@brookst, let me know if you play with the firmware ;)
The idea was always that Facebook or Google were listening to us and whenever we would talk about something we would shortly thereafter see an ad related to it.
Now we can basically say that its not Facebook and Google doing this directly, its our televisions and appliances that are listening and just selling that data back to the ad-networks.
That's a pretty good point. We kept hearing these rumors for a while now and all the usual suspects keep saying "we don't listen to your microphone on your phone" but yeah nobody expects the TV and fridge to do it, so maybe that's how it happens and people are not crazy.
That's just weasel language. For "hey, Google" to work, the phone needs to listen. Just like it can react to "hey, Google", it can also react to any amount of other trigger words without ever actually recording your conversation.
This is similar to Flock and Palantir who collect info the government is not allowed to and then sell it to the government.
In this case Meta, Google etc can honestly say they aren't surrepticiously listinging to you or collecting data not in their privacy statement. They just buy it instead.
So I need to write a chaffing agent that runs when I am not home and randomly spouts synthetic conversations through non-smart speakers about nappies (kids a re long gone), nuclear weapons development, plumbing, union membership, crochet, video games, crypto coins, and other things we don't normally do.
Has this not been proven by now? That smart devices are used to do this, including smartphones? Their OSes just ship with apps that that record that audio information right out of the box.
> Now we can basically say that its not Facebook and Google doing this directly
Finding out that TVs are listening does not mean Google and Facebook aren't. I've had plenty of times in an old car, or on a walk talking about something only to have related ads pop up later.
They can already do that with most of the information they already have, they don't need to listen for that type of thing (though they still might be as you see here, data is data after all).
Most people are not that unique. They know where you are and who you are with and any searching or sites you have been to and what is in your text messages or whatsapp as well as that same information for all the people 6 degrees away from you. They know people like you, who are your age and like the things you like and are where you are with friends like yours etc etc it goes on and on.
People rarely talk about things unprompted and you will only notice when you think you talked about something and then see an ad for it so there is a confirmation bias as well.
Facebook was always doing this. It just wasn't proven they were.
VoIP has been around for 25 years. Compressed audio is a tiny amount of packets. It doesn't need HD audio, it just needs enough to recognize words. Enterprise VoIP only needed a 128kb connection 25 years ago to work. On a smartphone, 128kb is nothing and will blend in with background connections. Facebook could record and monitor your audio 24/7 and it won't even be a blip in the network traffic, especially if it does a quick process of the audio before sending it to Facebook.
Maybe I'm just old fashioned or out of touch, but why is it such a barrier for people to treat their smart TV as a dumb display? Hook up a computer via HDMI and never connect the TV to wifi.
I understand that the tech in these things is a horrorshow, But so is the tech in every other smart device that normal ("I don't care how it works, just that it works" types) people allow into their homes every day - and these are the people who tech is built for, not "us". Of all the tech to raise red flags about, this seems the easiest to mitigate.
And to be completely fair, I haven't purchased a new TV (Projector yes, TV no) since I bought my plasma in 2014. That 2014 TV has smart features as well but has just never been hooked up to the internet. Maybe the new rigs can't be used until connected to a network but I wouldn't know. Enlighten me if this is the case.
This is what I do. I find navigating with a remote control to be infuriating, especially when you need to search for something. With an old computer and wireless mouse and keyboard, it's so much better. Some minor configuration of Firefox's homepage and it's a fine start page for watching TV, with all your stuff right there. Plus you can have extensions that save hours of your life over time. The only downside is the remote becomes the literal keyboard and mouse which might be cumbersome for some, but I don't even think about it anymore. I've been using the same 50" for ten years.
It's not hard; but often the TV will nag and nag until it gets a wifi connection.
And with how hard these manufacturers are trying, I wouldn't be at all surprised if they start including some alternate data connection for metadata/DRM/whatever. (ie, not the primary streaming data connection)
>Hook up a computer via HDMI and never connect the TV to wifi.
Having just gone through this...it's a lot harder than you think.
Current gen TVs have specs that garden variety connect a computer can't supply over HDMI. You need HDMI 2.1 with FRL to hit it. So you climb onto google, discover yes there are minipc that can do that...except only the new ones...the "AI" ones that cost you an arm and a leg. Also they need fast DDR5 memory which is great fun right now. And the more affordable ones are AMD so no quicksync.
So you think lets maybe do a USBC dongle to an existing device, only to discover that they require different firmware (!) on the dongle depending on whether you're using a mac or a windows PC [0]. And then you realize you actually need a cable capable of 48gbps and none of the ones lying around are labelled so you have to buy a new one just in case. And after you've done all that you still don't know why its connecting at 120hz not 144hz per TV specs. And then the whole media encoding circus starts...
I can 100% understand why people just type in wifi password and call it a day. The average consumer is not up for flashing firmware onto dongles to watch their big brother series.
No streaming app is giving you a video feed with 48Gbps of data (more like 5-15 Mbps), and no one produces 120 or 144Hz video (most movies/TV are still 24Hz aren't they?), so there's no point in sending that kind of signal to a TV, but even ignoring that, cheap n100 minipcs can do 4k60 or 1k240 just fine (I use a minipc as my desktop with a 4k240 OLED).
They are and that's part of the reason why it matters.
144/24 = 6
120/24 = 5
60/24 = 2.5
TVs compensate by showing you every 2nd image longer causing a slight but noticeable judder effect. Panning shots don't look smooth etc. Much like font kerning once you see it you can't unsee it.
Plus ofc other uses like gaming. And frankly I also didn't want to set up a home theater with half the tech modern, the other half not. A bit like you want your PC screen and GPU to be paired well and not a 1080p screen with a 5090...
My minipc has no issue outputting at 24 or 23.976 or 30 or 29.97 or 59.94 Hz either. And again that big brother series on the smart TV app is going to be garbage quality anyway. It's like setting up a 4k240 OLED and 5090 to run an N64 emulator to play games with a 20 FPS limit and prerendered backgrounds with no texture replacers or anything.
And for "other uses like gaming" you are using an external computer over HDMI, not smart TV apps.
>My minipc has no issue outputting at 24 or 23.976 or 30 or 29.97 or 59.94 Hz either
I don't think you've understood the problem I'm describing. A TV with a 60hz panel literally can't smoothly display a 24fps incoming signal. Even though 60 is more than 24 modern TVs can't [0] drop the panel rate to match the incoming 24 fps signal. Instead they keep the panel at 60hz and fuck with the timing of every 2nd frame to compensate for 60 not being divisible by 24 - judder.
To get a smooth picture everything has to be either same or a clean multiple of the source material. (roughly - fractions like 23.976 aren't noticable but 60/24=2.5 is right in the middle....worst case scenario).
Best way around this mess is 120hz end to end - which means no N100. Or just accept the judder.
>not smart TV apps.
I'm not advocating for them, just saying I understand why less tech inclined use them.
Okay, but if you have a 120Hz panel, as you said, you can just hold your 24Hz signal for 5 frames. And a minipc and TV can happily negotiate a 24Hz HDMI signal. Flicker fusion also has nothing to do with this unless you have like BFI or something. You're not opening and closing an aperture for each frame.
If your source is 24Hz, it will never be 120Hz end-to-end. It's already 24Hz. You can just send that to the display. If your panel can't cleanly display that, it's not going to be able to with a built in app either. The app is also getting a 24Hz video.
Funny I am also using a Plasma from around that time (Samsung one but hopefully too dumb to spy). I guess the problem is that they'll keep turning the screws, in the same way it gets harder and harder to use Windows and Office without an account and internet connection.
As a result I'm not upgrading my TV anytime soon, and when I do, I hope to find a dumb one.
Its all about UX, I recently got sick of my LG and switch to Apple TV and made LG a dumb TV with HDMI, and surprisingly UX ia significantly worse. Apple being Apple and force their shit weird UX. My kids can’t figure it out, they used to use LG TV by themselves to open what they want to open.
Even I fucking hate it because Apple UX. is just bunch of weird behaviors popping out from every action. Apple UX rant aside, similarly many solutions has tons of UX problems, connecting a PC to TV unfortunately leads to even more problems.
All of these shit supposed to work but in practice way too many edge cases, and random issues.
People were up in arms (and rightly so) when the LG TVs were found out for their spying thanks to the Gamers Nexus investigation. At least LG TVs can be rooted and you can install apps like Glasshouse [0] to disable all the telemetry and add substantial new features that you can't do via the officially sanctioned Dev Mode. The vulnerability that enabled rooting was recently patched so hopefully another can be found.
Hopefully similar apps will come along for Samsung now that root on it can be achieved [1].
vocal people on the Internet are "up in arms" but does the general public care that some LG exec says they "own the glass"? I think that at best, they might care until they see the ad-subsidized price tags.
I was at the butcher one day and asked for "ossobuco" because I wanted some bones for my dog, then all of a sudden I got reels with ossobuco in it, recipes, sellers, nearby shops, etc and I said WTF? Who the fuck makes posts about ossobuco? Why all of a sudden after using social apps just for football and porn all I start getting is ossobuco ads everywhere? A word you will never see anywhere now popping up in all my social feeds.
Possibility of that being random? Zero, not in this probabilistic universe we live in
I got had a similar thing happen.
My buddy inherited a lake house from him father. The dock needed repair. We talked about it one evening and that same night, I got a dock supply house ad. We never once looked it up online since we are both general contractors and already know how to fix it.
Dock repair is too random of a subject to be a coincidence.
Some version of this has been posted a dozen times now. The dog barking and baby crying detection are advertised features of this product range which is used for SmartThings integration.
Swarms of RE-hopefuls are now using tools they don't understand to work on projects they don't understand. Anyone doing RE knows step 1 is read public documentation, FCC filing, patent applications, etc. That step would tell you what the device does out of the box, no RE required to find everything the OP has actually uncovered.
Instead they busted out Claude and have been gaslit by their own AI into thinking they've discovered something. They just discovered features that Samsung has been pitching for years.
Different people learn new things differently. Folks without a background in RE, who are playing with these tools, may also not care about privacy until they find a reason to. I don’t see anything wrong with folks taking a roundabout way of finding out how things work; Be it software or privacy.
I think the issue is mostly over-sensationalizing findings.
For example, it would be tiresome to have someone insist that s0ss is clearly an illegal hacker with multiple felonies to his name solely because he chats with YCombinator's secret anonymous hacking collective. And yet this post right here makes it very clear you are one of us! ;-)
This reads like you want to gate-keep people first exploring and discovering the absurdity of the surveillance state we live in.
In my opinion, Claude "gaslighting" is a signal the other way - If Claude thinks they've discovered something, that means the llm-compression of most digitalized human knowledge still finds SmartThing a disturbing piece of tech that user do not want.
First off, not all gatekeeping is bad. The locked doors at the power plant marked caution are locked because the wrong move will kill you and it will hurt a lot the entire time.
So first we have to the examine the gate being kept, and who's the keeper. If it's "being allowed to vote" and the gate is being kept by "men", sure, tear down that wall. In this case however, the gate being kept is not reading the documentation and being mind blown for something that's documented. Not like, hidden away somewhere, but plainly documented. I'm torn though, because xkcd 1053 also applies. Unfortunately, tech is one of those areas where you can only cry wolf so many times before people just totally ignore you.
> Swarms of RE-hopefuls are now using tools they don't understand to work on projects they don't understand
I mean, that’s just a statement of fact from the grandparent, no? I don’t see it as gatekeeping; are you focusing on some other part of the comment?
I think someone who’s aware of how to do Reverse Engineering being tired of those who’re making mistakes but advertising the output of those mistakes as legitimate discovery is pretty normal. I remember when I was learning FreeBSD that I’d show up in the mailing lists thinking I’d found bugs, but really I hadn’t read the docs well enough, and people were direct with me that I needed to do better if I threw the word “bug” around. It’s just normal peer feedback.
I would respectfully submit that trying to treat Anthropic’s models’ nonsense alarmism like it is legitimate output is closer to gaslighting. At best, the output shows that the majority of people have an alarmed tone.
The comment seems to imply to me that they are too gullible to understand what the LLM tells them and are being gaslit into believing things that smarter researchers would know without needing an LLM. Honestly, the comment seems dismissive of the current reality in general.
If actual researchers with real experience are disagreeing with LLMs, I'd generally still trust the real experts.
At a dead minimum, I'd expect something like "addressing the concerns the experts are raising" instead of trying to do a character assassination.
I generally read "character assassinations" as suggesting that someone has no real technical arguments available - conversely, the experts here are citing specific facts and evidence.
I don't see how you get to the conclusion that the original commenter thinks people are being gullible.
I look at the original comment and it doesn't say anything about gullibility. It expresses frustration that there's an influx of people interested in the field of Reverse Engineering but aren't digging deeper to where the answers are. I read the comment as being more similar to the complaints of the Eternal September, when an existing culture got permanently swamped by people who wanted to interact with the tools of the culture but didn't realise there was a process to learn first.
For myself, I'm glad there's an influx of people interested in technology and being able to grasp at the tools that can deliver outcomes. I don't love seeing people appearing that want to tell me that deeper understanding is dead, not because it does me any particular daily harm but because I think there's still a lot of value in understanding the details of a topic which summaries tend to gloss over. I've been feeling this for a long time, though, it's not related to LLMs but to a culture of knowledge more fixated on soundbites than on getting at the truth of things.
In this case, I see the original commenter reflecting my own concerns, but that's so often the way: we see things as we are, not as they are, which may be colouring my read.
Reasonable minds can disagree, of course, and I respect that we may just be reading the comment quite differently.
I don't get why people think it would be worth all this effort for Samsung to nefariously work out not only if you have a dog and/or a baby, but exactly when they make noise. Like, sure, that would be a gross invasion of privacy if they were doing it - but what's the business reason for putting all this effort into it?
I can almost see the "they're using it for advertising" or "they're selling information about whether you have a dog or a baby, of course!", but notifying every time they make noise?
There's obviously more to this story than these sensational knee-jerk reactions assume. They're just so non-curious for a supposed 'investigation'.
Well, person didn’t have a dog and then they suddenly do, and that will be noted by the device. I don’t understand the downplaying here, even though it’s correct that these people not necessarily know what they’re doing. The device does collect information about you and does listen (all while costing thousands of dollars). And these spy features they announce are not a product for common users but for data companies.
"They recently had a baby and now they suddenly don't" is probably a datapoint they sell to ambulance-chasing medical malpractice lawyers and PE-owned grief counseling clinics...
Well yes, but when was the last time any police force had the mental ingenuity of asking the Samsung corporation about details on on someone's living environment? And what level of accuracy would you trust that intel?
I don't think I'm the one being overly credulous here.
None of the assertions you made are backed by this 'research' which as far as I can see only shows that the TV is capable of detecting dog barks and baby cries.
You're just presuming that because the TV is capable of sensing these things (which Samsung advertises - links at end) this data is being collected and sent to Samsung - and then sold on.
So, some questions:
Is information about every time your baby cries or dog barks even valuable enough that this is plausible?
Is there any evidence that this is actually being sent over a network - for purposes other than the features they advertise?
Is there evidence that these are even being monitored if the dog bark or baby cry feature is not turned on?
Shouldn't the burden of showing things like this be on the people making the sensational accusations?
I could come up with more, but I think that these are enough. I'd love (well, hate, because I don't want it to be true) to see some actual proof of any of this.
Sometimes, the essence of a story and end goals has more value than the actual finding and story itself. Most us probably don't know this is part of a documented feature, and this is the first time I'm hearing of SmartThings integration. I'm still not quite sure what the point of these detection are.
If normies understood that baby crying detection also requires everything-except-baby-crying detection, they would be up in arms about being spied upon... and here they are
Dog barking is, like, 1% of the findings. They also claim the TV is:
1. taking screenshots of your screen
2. fingerpriting devices on your local network
3. connects to bluetooth mics in the room and recording audio without asking etc.
Leading to one of my favourite jokes: The Soviet Union is socialist, and bugs it's citizen's homes. America, though, is capitalist - the people must buy their own bugs.
79 comments
[ 0.25 ms ] story [ 11.5 ms ] threadI guess I’m going to have to just write replacement firmware, aren’t I?
I already use an Apple TV, but the Samsung’s firmware is annoying even as a dumb tv.
No idea why you'd even consider anything Samsung related.
The art was good, and I liked having it. I was disappointed that it was subscription-based. From now on the TV will be disconnected from the power supply, until I want to occasionally watch Netflix.
@brookst, let me know if you play with the firmware ;)
Now we can basically say that its not Facebook and Google doing this directly, its our televisions and appliances that are listening and just selling that data back to the ad-networks.
In this case Meta, Google etc can honestly say they aren't surrepticiously listinging to you or collecting data not in their privacy statement. They just buy it instead.
So I need to write a chaffing agent that runs when I am not home and randomly spouts synthetic conversations through non-smart speakers about nappies (kids a re long gone), nuclear weapons development, plumbing, union membership, crochet, video games, crypto coins, and other things we don't normally do.
Finding out that TVs are listening does not mean Google and Facebook aren't. I've had plenty of times in an old car, or on a walk talking about something only to have related ads pop up later.
Most people are not that unique. They know where you are and who you are with and any searching or sites you have been to and what is in your text messages or whatsapp as well as that same information for all the people 6 degrees away from you. They know people like you, who are your age and like the things you like and are where you are with friends like yours etc etc it goes on and on.
People rarely talk about things unprompted and you will only notice when you think you talked about something and then see an ad for it so there is a confirmation bias as well.
VoIP has been around for 25 years. Compressed audio is a tiny amount of packets. It doesn't need HD audio, it just needs enough to recognize words. Enterprise VoIP only needed a 128kb connection 25 years ago to work. On a smartphone, 128kb is nothing and will blend in with background connections. Facebook could record and monitor your audio 24/7 and it won't even be a blip in the network traffic, especially if it does a quick process of the audio before sending it to Facebook.
I understand that the tech in these things is a horrorshow, But so is the tech in every other smart device that normal ("I don't care how it works, just that it works" types) people allow into their homes every day - and these are the people who tech is built for, not "us". Of all the tech to raise red flags about, this seems the easiest to mitigate.
And to be completely fair, I haven't purchased a new TV (Projector yes, TV no) since I bought my plasma in 2014. That 2014 TV has smart features as well but has just never been hooked up to the internet. Maybe the new rigs can't be used until connected to a network but I wouldn't know. Enlighten me if this is the case.
And with how hard these manufacturers are trying, I wouldn't be at all surprised if they start including some alternate data connection for metadata/DRM/whatever. (ie, not the primary streaming data connection)
Having just gone through this...it's a lot harder than you think.
Current gen TVs have specs that garden variety connect a computer can't supply over HDMI. You need HDMI 2.1 with FRL to hit it. So you climb onto google, discover yes there are minipc that can do that...except only the new ones...the "AI" ones that cost you an arm and a leg. Also they need fast DDR5 memory which is great fun right now. And the more affordable ones are AMD so no quicksync.
So you think lets maybe do a USBC dongle to an existing device, only to discover that they require different firmware (!) on the dongle depending on whether you're using a mac or a windows PC [0]. And then you realize you actually need a cable capable of 48gbps and none of the ones lying around are labelled so you have to buy a new one just in case. And after you've done all that you still don't know why its connecting at 120hz not 144hz per TV specs. And then the whole media encoding circus starts...
I can 100% understand why people just type in wifi password and call it a day. The average consumer is not up for flashing firmware onto dongles to watch their big brother series.
[0] https://kb.cablematters.com/index.php?View=entry&EntryID=147
They are and that's part of the reason why it matters.
144/24 = 6
120/24 = 5
60/24 = 2.5
TVs compensate by showing you every 2nd image longer causing a slight but noticeable judder effect. Panning shots don't look smooth etc. Much like font kerning once you see it you can't unsee it.
Plus ofc other uses like gaming. And frankly I also didn't want to set up a home theater with half the tech modern, the other half not. A bit like you want your PC screen and GPU to be paired well and not a 1080p screen with a 5090...
And for "other uses like gaming" you are using an external computer over HDMI, not smart TV apps.
I don't think you've understood the problem I'm describing. A TV with a 60hz panel literally can't smoothly display a 24fps incoming signal. Even though 60 is more than 24 modern TVs can't [0] drop the panel rate to match the incoming 24 fps signal. Instead they keep the panel at 60hz and fuck with the timing of every 2nd frame to compensate for 60 not being divisible by 24 - judder.
To get a smooth picture everything has to be either same or a clean multiple of the source material. (roughly - fractions like 23.976 aren't noticable but 60/24=2.5 is right in the middle....worst case scenario).
Best way around this mess is 120hz end to end - which means no N100. Or just accept the judder.
>not smart TV apps.
I'm not advocating for them, just saying I understand why less tech inclined use them.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flicker_fusion_threshold
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w98CjESkbLE
If your source is 24Hz, it will never be 120Hz end-to-end. It's already 24Hz. You can just send that to the display. If your panel can't cleanly display that, it's not going to be able to with a built in app either. The app is also getting a 24Hz video.
As a result I'm not upgrading my TV anytime soon, and when I do, I hope to find a dumb one.
Even I fucking hate it because Apple UX. is just bunch of weird behaviors popping out from every action. Apple UX rant aside, similarly many solutions has tons of UX problems, connecting a PC to TV unfortunately leads to even more problems.
All of these shit supposed to work but in practice way too many edge cases, and random issues.
Hopefully similar apps will come along for Samsung now that root on it can be achieved [1].
[0] https://github.com/rorygallagher2024/glasshouse
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50218633
I was at the butcher one day and asked for "ossobuco" because I wanted some bones for my dog, then all of a sudden I got reels with ossobuco in it, recipes, sellers, nearby shops, etc and I said WTF? Who the fuck makes posts about ossobuco? Why all of a sudden after using social apps just for football and porn all I start getting is ossobuco ads everywhere? A word you will never see anywhere now popping up in all my social feeds.
Possibility of that being random? Zero, not in this probabilistic universe we live in
Dock repair is too random of a subject to be a coincidence.
Swarms of RE-hopefuls are now using tools they don't understand to work on projects they don't understand. Anyone doing RE knows step 1 is read public documentation, FCC filing, patent applications, etc. That step would tell you what the device does out of the box, no RE required to find everything the OP has actually uncovered.
Instead they busted out Claude and have been gaslit by their own AI into thinking they've discovered something. They just discovered features that Samsung has been pitching for years.
For example, it would be tiresome to have someone insist that s0ss is clearly an illegal hacker with multiple felonies to his name solely because he chats with YCombinator's secret anonymous hacking collective. And yet this post right here makes it very clear you are one of us! ;-)
In my opinion, Claude "gaslighting" is a signal the other way - If Claude thinks they've discovered something, that means the llm-compression of most digitalized human knowledge still finds SmartThing a disturbing piece of tech that user do not want.
So first we have to the examine the gate being kept, and who's the keeper. If it's "being allowed to vote" and the gate is being kept by "men", sure, tear down that wall. In this case however, the gate being kept is not reading the documentation and being mind blown for something that's documented. Not like, hidden away somewhere, but plainly documented. I'm torn though, because xkcd 1053 also applies. Unfortunately, tech is one of those areas where you can only cry wolf so many times before people just totally ignore you.
I mean, that’s just a statement of fact from the grandparent, no? I don’t see it as gatekeeping; are you focusing on some other part of the comment?
I think someone who’s aware of how to do Reverse Engineering being tired of those who’re making mistakes but advertising the output of those mistakes as legitimate discovery is pretty normal. I remember when I was learning FreeBSD that I’d show up in the mailing lists thinking I’d found bugs, but really I hadn’t read the docs well enough, and people were direct with me that I needed to do better if I threw the word “bug” around. It’s just normal peer feedback.
I would respectfully submit that trying to treat Anthropic’s models’ nonsense alarmism like it is legitimate output is closer to gaslighting. At best, the output shows that the majority of people have an alarmed tone.
At a dead minimum, I'd expect something like "addressing the concerns the experts are raising" instead of trying to do a character assassination.
I generally read "character assassinations" as suggesting that someone has no real technical arguments available - conversely, the experts here are citing specific facts and evidence.
I look at the original comment and it doesn't say anything about gullibility. It expresses frustration that there's an influx of people interested in the field of Reverse Engineering but aren't digging deeper to where the answers are. I read the comment as being more similar to the complaints of the Eternal September, when an existing culture got permanently swamped by people who wanted to interact with the tools of the culture but didn't realise there was a process to learn first.
For myself, I'm glad there's an influx of people interested in technology and being able to grasp at the tools that can deliver outcomes. I don't love seeing people appearing that want to tell me that deeper understanding is dead, not because it does me any particular daily harm but because I think there's still a lot of value in understanding the details of a topic which summaries tend to gloss over. I've been feeling this for a long time, though, it's not related to LLMs but to a culture of knowledge more fixated on soundbites than on getting at the truth of things.
In this case, I see the original commenter reflecting my own concerns, but that's so often the way: we see things as we are, not as they are, which may be colouring my read.
Reasonable minds can disagree, of course, and I respect that we may just be reading the comment quite differently.
I can almost see the "they're using it for advertising" or "they're selling information about whether you have a dog or a baby, of course!", but notifying every time they make noise?
There's obviously more to this story than these sensational knee-jerk reactions assume. They're just so non-curious for a supposed 'investigation'.
None of the assertions you made are backed by this 'research' which as far as I can see only shows that the TV is capable of detecting dog barks and baby cries.
You're just presuming that because the TV is capable of sensing these things (which Samsung advertises - links at end) this data is being collected and sent to Samsung - and then sold on.
So, some questions:
Is information about every time your baby cries or dog barks even valuable enough that this is plausible?
Is there any evidence that this is actually being sent over a network - for purposes other than the features they advertise?
Is there evidence that these are even being monitored if the dog bark or baby cry feature is not turned on?
Shouldn't the burden of showing things like this be on the people making the sensational accusations?
I could come up with more, but I think that these are enough. I'd love (well, hate, because I don't want it to be true) to see some actual proof of any of this.
https://www.samsung.com/us/smartthings/experience-smartthing... https://www.samsung.com/ie/smartthings/care-for-your-pet/
There have been countless reports of various malicious activity from these TVs (and not just Samsung).
(Joking or /sarcasm.)
1. taking screenshots of your screen 2. fingerpriting devices on your local network 3. connects to bluetooth mics in the room and recording audio without asking etc.
Samsung just needs you to buy a TV.