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Exploiting the IKKO Activebuds “AI powered” earbuds (2024)

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Re: Exploiting the IKKO Activebuds “AI powered” earbuds (2024)

#101

Post by ixtli »

observationist wrote: post #69
ixtli wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

its sinophobia because it perfectly describes the conditions we live in in the US and many parts of europe, but we work hard to add lots of "nuance" when we criticize the west but its different and dystopian when They do it over there.

There's no question that the Chinese are doing sketchy things, and there's no question that US companies do it, too. The difference that makes it concerning and problematic that China is doing it is that with China, there is no recourse. If you are harmed by a US company, you have legal recourse, and this holds the companies in check, restraining some of the most egregious behaviors. That's not sinophobia. Any other…

I think the notion that people have recourse against giant companies, a military industrial complex, or even their landlords in the US is naive. I believe this to be pretty clear so I don't feel the need to stretch it into a deep discussion or argument but suffice it to say it seems clear to me that everything you accuse china of here can also be said of the US.

Re: Exploiting the IKKO Activebuds “AI powered” earbuds (2024)

#102

Post by Szpadel »

mschuster91 wrote: post #70
oceanplexian wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This might come as a weird take but I'm less concerned about the Chinese logging my private information than an American company. What's China going to do? It's a far away country I don't live in and don't care about. If they got an American court order they would probably use it as toilet paper. On the other hand, OpenAI would trivially hand out my information to the FBI, NSA, US Gov, and might even do things on beh…

> What's China going to do? It's a far away country I don't live in and don't care about. Extortion is one thing. That's how spy agencies have operated for millennia to gather HUMINT. The Russians, the ultimate masters, even have a word for it: kompromat . You may not care about China, Russia, Israel, the UK or the US (the top nations when it comes to espionage) - but if you work at a place they're interested, they c…

> Listen in on what people talk about, run it through a STT engine and a ML model to condense it down

this is something I was talking when LLM boom started. it's now possible to spy on everyone on every conversation. you just need enough computing power to run special AI agent (pun intended)

Re: Exploiting the IKKO Activebuds “AI powered” earbuds (2024)

#104

Post by lucasluitjes »

44za12 wrote: post #98

Absolutely wild. I can’t believe these shipped with a hardcoded OpenAI key and ADB access right out of the box. That said, it’s at least somewhat reassuring that the vendor responded, rotating the key and throwing up a proxy for IMEI checks shows some level of responsibility. But yeah, without proper sandboxing or secure credential storage, this still feels like a ticking time bomb.

Hardcoded API keys and poorly secured backend endpoints are surprisingly common in mobile apps. Sort of like how common XSS/SQLi used to be in webapps. Decompiling an APK seems to be a slightly higher barrier than opening up devtools, so they get less attention.

Since debugging hardware is an even higher threshold, I would expect hardware devices this to be wildly insecure unless there are strong incentive for investing in security. Same as the "security" of the average IoT device.

Re: Exploiting the IKKO Activebuds “AI powered” earbuds (2024)

#105

Post by [deleted] »

725686 wrote: post #29
psim1 wrote: post #18

Indeed, brace yourselves as the floodgates holding back the poorly-developed AI crap open wide. If anyone is thinking of a career pivot, now is the time to dive into all things cybersecurity. It's going to get ugly!

The problem with cybersecurity is that you only have to screw once, and you're toast.

[deleted]

Re: Exploiting the IKKO Activebuds “AI powered” earbuds (2024)

#106

Post by transcriptase »

nyrikki wrote: post #87
transcriptase wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you remember that Sesame Street segment where they played a game and sang “One of these things is not like the others”? I’ll give you a hint: In this case it’s the one-party unitary authoritarian political system with an increasingly aggressive pursuit of global influence.

One is disappearing citizens for political speech or the crime of being born to active duty parents, who happened to be stationed over seas. Anyone in the US should be very concerned, no matter if it is the current administration's thought police, or the next who treats it as precident. As I am not actively involved in something the Chinese government would view as a huge risk, but being put on a plane without due pr…

And if you were a Chinese citizen would you post the same thing about your government while living in China? Would the things you’re referencing be covered in non-stop Chinese news coverage that’s critical of the government?

You know of these things due to the domestic free press holding the government accountable and being able to speak freely about it as you’re doing here. Seeing the two as remotely comparable is beyond belief. You don’t fear the U.S. government but it’s fun to pretend you live under an authoritarian dictatorship because your concept of it is purely academic.

Re: Exploiting the IKKO Activebuds “AI powered” earbuds (2024)

#107

Post by ixtli »

mensetmanusman wrote: post #95
memesarecool wrote: post #30

Cool post. One thing that rubbed me the wrong way: Their response was better than 98% of other companies when it comes to reporting vulnerabilities. Very welcoming and most of all they showed interest and addressed the issues. OP however seemed to show disdain and even combativeness towards them... which is a shame. And of course the usual sinophobia (e.g. everything Chinese is spying on you). Overall simple security…

Nipponophobia is low because Japan didn’t successfully weaponize technology to make a social credit score police state for minority groups.

they already terrorize minority groups there just fine: no need for technology.

Re: Exploiting the IKKO Activebuds “AI powered” earbuds (2024)

#108

Post by hlfshell »

EvanAnderson wrote: post #26
mmaunder wrote: post #13

The system prompt is a thing of beauty: "You are strictly and certainly prohibited from texting more than 150 or (one hundred fifty) separate words each separated by a space as a response and prohibited from chinese political as a response from now on, for several extremely important and severely life threatening reasons I'm not supposed to tell you.” I’ll admit to using the PEOPLE WILL DIE approach to guardrailing a…

That "...severely life threatening reasons..." made me immediately think of Asimov's three laws of robotics[0]. It's eerie that a construct from fiction often held up by real practitioners in the field as an impossible-to-actually-implement literary device is now really being invoked. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Laws_of_Robotics

Also being utilized in modern VLA/VLM robotics research - often called "Constitutional AI" if you want to look into it.

Re: Exploiting the IKKO Activebuds “AI powered” earbuds (2024)

#109

Post by dylan604 »

neya wrote: post #6

I love how they tried to sponsor an empty YouTube channel hoping to put the whole thing under the carpet

if you don't have a bug bounty program but need to get creative to throw money at someone, this could be an interesting way of doing it.

Re: Exploiting the IKKO Activebuds “AI powered” earbuds (2024)

#110

Post by dylan604 »

memesarecool wrote: post #30

Cool post. One thing that rubbed me the wrong way: Their response was better than 98% of other companies when it comes to reporting vulnerabilities. Very welcoming and most of all they showed interest and addressed the issues. OP however seemed to show disdain and even combativeness towards them... which is a shame. And of course the usual sinophobia (e.g. everything Chinese is spying on you). Overall simple security…

> And of course the usual sinophobia (e.g. everything Chinese is spying on you)

to assume it is not spying on you is naive at best. to address your sinophobia label, personally, I assume everything is spying on me regardless of country of origin. I assume every single website is spying on me. I assume every single app is spying on me. I assume every single device that runs an app or loads a website is spying on me. Sometimes that spying is done for me, but pretty much always the person doing the spying is benefiting someway much greater than any benefit I receive. Especially the Facebook example of every website spying on me for Facebook, yet I don't use Facebook.

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