YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Samsung running a TensorFlow lite model on 960x540 image to track you

104 points mashally 2 hours ago 50 comments

MarkWayneNewton 2 hours ago | parent

How else will they subsidize the cost of the jumbotron in your living room?

dtgriscom 27 minutes ago | parent

This is the answer. Lots of people (myself included) are happy to buy a big, cheap TV, but it's cheap because the manufacturer gets money by paid app placement, ads (sometimes), and selling information about you.

A senior friend has bad vision, so I recommended an inexpensive but enormous TV that they can use as a display, and never let it connect to the network. Unfortunately, every few months the display tries to coax them into connecting to WiFi, and it confuses the heck out of them. But, that's the game.

Orygin 12 minutes ago | parent

Expensive TV also spy on you, so spending more does not help

masfuerte 7 minutes ago | parent

Wifi access points should offer a sort of "/dev/null" network for smart devices to connect to.

jareklupinski 1 hour ago | parent

i wonder if the Samsung / LG stuff is how the stock market seemed so "predictable" to some people in early morning trading for a while... imagine having the keys to buckets containing all the plaintext gathered from all the tvs listening in conference rooms on earnings days...

gruez 1 hour ago | parent

>how the stock market seemed so "predictable" to some people in early morning trading for a while

Has this been quantified? Otherwise it's easy to fall for confirmation bias, eg. "facebook is secretly listening to you"

xg15 1 hour ago | parent

> confirmation bias, eg. "facebook is secretly listening to you"

Agreeing with your general point - don't jump to conclusions without evidence - but I don't like if we're now establishing the "Facebook/Google/Apple is secretly listening to you" rumors as the canonical example of that behavior, and thereby making those companies immune to further scrutiny.

We've seen that by now there exist both the will and the technical means to pull off stuff like this, so even if it used to be a baseless rumor and urban legend, it deserves to be re-checked periodically, because companies might start to do it for real at some point. Samsung here actually did.

(Google also came awfully close with its "song detector" which is now a stock Android feature I think)

unstatusthequo 1 hour ago | parent

I sure wish Tizen was rooted. I’d love to custom flash over the slow ass Samsung UI.

BlackRabbit1 1 hour ago | parent

Time to invest a few tokens into an unneuthered model

SSLy 1 hour ago | parent

Is there anyone serving such inference? I can't fit anything usable on my hardware.

Jolter 1 hour ago | parent

I believe Mistral models are fairly capable at cybersecurity tasks, but I don’t think you could get anything useful out of anything smaller than Mistral Large 4.

FredFS456 35 minutes ago | parent

https://abliteration.ai/

But also if you're working on a local device, any Chinese model will agree to it most of the time.

rustyhancock 5 minutes ago | parent

How do people actually do this kind of work?

I can imagine working on the dumped firmware or update package.

But against the TV over the network without closed loop or access to RAM how could the model find and develop exploits?

KetoManx64 28 minutes ago | parent

OpenRouter?

stavros 1 hour ago | parent

They're running it and then throwing away the result if you don't consent? Way to waste electricity...

Gigachad 1 hour ago | parent

This is why TVs are always so laggy, they have 400 ad and tracking scripts running the whole time.

egamirorrim 1 hour ago | parent

This stuffs mad, should I be doing something to my Samsung TV to neuter it? Has anyone rolled all this up somewhere?

matkoniecz 1 hour ago | parent

Not buy smart TVs and especially Samsung smart devices in general?

From what I heard these are especially awful, even by low IoT standards.

Gigachad 1 hour ago | parent

All smart TVs are evil and you’d be hard pressed to find a non smart tv these days.

chinathrow 1 hour ago | parent

Unplug it.

Gigachad 1 hour ago | parent

There needs to be a class action against these companies. People should straight up go to jail for how invasive these TVs are.

KetoManx64 1 hour ago | parent

Do a search on X on the topic, the news about Samsung was broken on there by a guy who had rooted his Samsung TV using AI tools and he and others created guides for neutering the stuff out of it

dannyw 16 minutes ago | parent

He also got his OpenAI account banned after sharing the findings for 'violating cyber policies'. https://x.com/i/trending/2113715638950912393

ozgrakkurt 46 minutes ago | parent

Selling it off might be a good solution

killingtime74 1 hour ago | parent

It's as if an intern added it and then they just forgot about it.

lousken 1 hour ago | parent

now is the best time in history to buy a tv

just hack it right after purchase and own the glass

thenthenthen 1 hour ago | parent

Dont buy a tv? I havent had a TV for 20 years.

thenthenthen 19 minutes ago | parent

Maybe 30…

prymitive 1 hour ago | parent

It’s mind boggling that in the UK there’s a law that says:

> “A plank of wood must not be carried along a pavement. It can only be moved if it is being unloaded from a vehicle or taken into a building.”

But big tech cannot be regulated at all. We used to regulate any minor thing that was annoying enough, but a whole industry spying and prying on the whole population is fine.

eps 51 minutes ago | parent

Any rule is as good as its enforcement.

The plank rule just exists, not enforced, so nobody observes it.

Same will happen with the high-tech regulation. In fact, it is already happening left and right where it does exist.

throaway3534621 46 minutes ago | parent

> But big tech cannot be regulated at all.

It cannot be regulated because we let dollar/capital rise above political authority.

throaway3534621 40 minutes ago | parent

I remember watching this [1] couple of years ago wrt to capital; market; China; US and I'm starting to believe China's model is one we should strive for. Why isn't there AI scare/doom/replacement talk in China? It's because of that - the capital does not raise above the political authority.

[1] Eric Li on the CCP and Capital's role in America, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xzz5swYfVKk

eklavya 30 minutes ago | parent

There are a lot of things you don't have to worry about in China because someone else makes the decision for you. Sure you want to strive for that?

I feel sorry that democracies are failing their citizenry like this.

throaway3534621 11 minutes ago | parent

Sure, why not? I'd like to live in a system where the interest of the nation and the people are above your or someone else's ROI. I'd like to live in a system where if you try, like Elon Musk, to amass so much influence on the nation for your own benefits - you're gonna be Jack Ma'd.

andsoitis 31 minutes ago | parent

> “A plank of wood must not be carried along a pavement. It can only be moved if it is being unloaded from a vehicle or taken into a building.”

Is that a good law or is it a barnacle? Is it enforced in the UK?

andrewaylett 30 minutes ago | parent

In the interests of accuracy, the law (the Metropolitan Police Act 1839) actually states

""" 54 Prohibition of nuisances by persons in the thoroughfares.

Every person shall be liable to a penalty not more than level 2 on the standard scale, who, within the limits of the metropolitan police district, shall in any thoroughfare or public place, commit any of the following offences; (that is to say,)

...

8. Every person who shall roll or carry any cask, tub, hoop, or wheel, or any ladder, plank, pole, showboard, or placard, upon any footway, except for the purpose of loading or unloading any cart or carriage, or of crossing the footway:

... """ https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Vict/2-3/47/section/54

The plank of wood is one element in a much broader statute, rather than an example of hyper-specificity. And it might have been strictly applied at the time, but that doesn't mean you're definitely going to get into trouble nowadays.

In a similar vein, the UK *does* have laws that affect big tech. UK GDPR places requirements on processing of personal data:

""" Personal data shall be:

(a)processed lawfully, fairly and in a transparent manner in relation to the data subject (‘lawfulness, fairness and transparency’); """ https://www.legislation.gov.uk/eur/2016/679/article/5

Whether that's properly enforced is (as with the plank) a completely different matter.

In the UK, at least, we don't need new regulations, we need to more effectively apply the regulations we already have in place. But there is also a balance to be made between enforcement through fines and enforcement through changing behaviour: it's much better to work with companies to bring them into compliance than it is to just fine them and without actually changing anything.

masfuerte 14 minutes ago | parent

Just to emphasise:

> within the limits of the metropolitan police district

It's a local London law. In England such laws are passed by parliament because there is no other mechanism, but in countries with devolved lawmaking states and cities have much crazier laws.

Terr_ 1 hour ago | parent

Y'all remember the Energy Star logo on computers?

Maybe it's time for something like that, a shared baseline standard of "this thing won't spy on you", with massive financial penalties for companies caught lying about it. Prime adoption by making it a requirement for anything bought by the government.

Then consumers can reliably comparison-shop for a "TV" that doesn't turn into a traitorous 1984 telescreen the moment it breaks out of the LAN or you fail to click "maybe later" on its incessant dark pattern pop-ups.

fsflover 38 minutes ago | parent

https://ryf.fsf.org

breakingcups 1 hour ago | parent

Who needs DRM like HDCP if you can just use the capabilities baked into the TV to your advantage?

cisc 1 hour ago | parent

> ..its literally running.. ..It's literally called.. ..its literally AlexNet.. ..literally doesn't work..

I'm not sure it's literal enough.

VMG 29 minutes ago | parent

Hey at least you know it's not Claude

...... or do you???

gentlerain 57 minutes ago | parent

Samsung is starting to be a little too much creepy.

I don't know if it's just greed or.

I refused to create an account on their galaxy phone because of the mandatory phone number needed. Yes, I know they can harvest it in other ways, it's just a stand.

bayindirh 50 minutes ago | parent

If people can hustle for a little side money, corporations can do it as well. Why not?

Corporations are considered persons and they need to pay shareholders.

Seriously, it’s pure greed and people who love money enable this, because they think they are immune to this, or harmless.

hypfer 56 minutes ago | parent

Wasn't that used to squeeze better power efficiency etc out of the device by optimizing the parameters based on the content?

I mean it is probably also used to collect data, but this sounds like it might be more than just that. Maybe?

jacquesm 43 minutes ago | parent

If they're doing this to TVs, what are they doing with phones?