Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Smart TV in Your LivingRoom Is a Node in the AIScraping Economy

blog.includesecurity.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 114 posts

Re: The Smart TV in Your LivingRoom Is a Node in the AIScraping Economy

#51

Post by Eisenstein »

dylan604 wrote: post #42
graypegg wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a smart TV that's never spoken to the internet after exiting the factory, but it's a pretty tenuous state of affairs. I have this fear that someone staying over is going to see the "Services unavailable, press [menu] to troubleshoot" toast that shows up overtop the HDMI feed for a few seconds and think they're helping me by connecting it. 4-5 years worth of firmware updates all at once... half a decade of watc…

> I have this fear that someone staying over is going to This happened to me. After they left, I tried a factory reset, but I don't have confidence there's not some code to remember previously saved wifi connections because my tinfoil hat is firmly in place. However, as you've said I only use the TV as an HDMI receiver. None of the TV's apps are used again. So I'm not sure how much they can detect from just the use o…

HDMI is heavily used for ACR (automatic content recognition) in smart TVs:

"Our findings indicate that (1) ACR operates even when it is used as a “dumb” display via HDMI"

"For both LG (a) and Samsung (b)TVs, the scenarios with the highest ACR traffic are Linear and HDMI."

* https://dl.acm.org/doi/epdf/10.1145/3646547.3689013

Re: The Smart TV in Your LivingRoom Is a Node in the AIScraping Economy

#52

Post by onesociety2022 »

archerx wrote: post #49
graypegg wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a smart TV that's never spoken to the internet after exiting the factory, but it's a pretty tenuous state of affairs. I have this fear that someone staying over is going to see the "Services unavailable, press [menu] to troubleshoot" toast that shows up overtop the HDMI feed for a few seconds and think they're helping me by connecting it. 4-5 years worth of firmware updates all at once... half a decade of watc…

Find the TV’s MAC address and block it on your router. My brother home network had this system where your MAC address had to be whitelisted on the router to communicate with the network, as the days go by I see how in hindsight how this might be for the best in the end.

I’m paranoid that actually blocking internet access to the TV will result in filling up the TV’s disk with all of this intrusive data they have collected waiting to be uploaded, eventually run out of space and brick the TV. This could be just bad software or actually malicious where they intentionally break something if it loses connectivity for too long and they can see you using it with other connected devices.

We really need normies to care enough about this to the point manufacturers will need to think they need to advertise on their TVs that they are privacy-friendly and don’t collect anything as a selling point. Until then, they don’t really care. I just wish someone like Apple made a TV with their Apple TV functionality baked in that I could trust.

Re: The Smart TV in Your LivingRoom Is a Node in the AIScraping Economy

#53

Post by xg15 »

BLKNSLVR wrote: post #46
xg15 wrote: post #5

> After config fetch, the SDK opens a persistent WebSocket to: wss://proxyjs.brdtnet.com:443 This hostname resolves to AWS Global Accelerator IPs There is some irony that both the scrapers and the websites being scraped are probably hosted on AWS, while playing an elaborate cat-and-mouse game pretending that they weren't.

Adding to DNS block list immediately.

Don't forget the config endpoint before as well.

> On every launch the SDK calls:

GET https://clientsdk.bright-sdk.com/sdk_config_ios.json>?appid=&ver=&uuid=sdk-ios-

Re: The Smart TV in Your LivingRoom Is a Node in the AIScraping Economy

#54

Post by ErroneousBosh »

voakbasda wrote: post #28
woffoor wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most scrapped websites have https, so you need to perform a MITM attack. Scrapers will probably notice that.

No, you just need to stand up your own website and feed the scraper a URL to it.

I would just generate scads of Markov chain output and make it look like a plausible web page.

Re: The Smart TV in Your LivingRoom Is a Node in the AIScraping Economy

#55

Post by elzbardico »

onesociety2022 wrote: post #52
archerx wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Find the TV’s MAC address and block it on your router. My brother home network had this system where your MAC address had to be whitelisted on the router to communicate with the network, as the days go by I see how in hindsight how this might be for the best in the end.

I’m paranoid that actually blocking internet access to the TV will result in filling up the TV’s disk with all of this intrusive data they have collected waiting to be uploaded, eventually run out of space and brick the TV. This could be just bad software or actually malicious where they intentionally break something if it loses connectivity for too long and they can see you using it with other connected devices. We…

Lot's of people do it and I haven't seen nobody reporting this. Given the miser hardware specs most smartvs have, if this was a problem, it wouldn't take years to fill up the small storage space most of those TVs come with.

Re: The Smart TV in Your LivingRoom Is a Node in the AIScraping Economy

#56

Post by elzbardico »

lelandfe wrote: post #7
cobbzilla wrote: post #3

I never connect any “smart” device to wifi. If it doesn’t work without connectivity, I don’t want it. I use my TVs as display devices. They have HDMI-in and that’s it.

On my TCL TV, you have to connect it to read the Google policies you are agreeing to. If you don't, you agree to policies unread. Thankfully, the blast radius of this is nothing without connectivity.

If I don't connect to the internet ever, my agreement to Google policies is probably a moot point.

Re: The Smart TV in Your LivingRoom Is a Node in the AIScraping Economy

#57

Post by NewsaHackO »

ddxv wrote: post #30

I found some 60 iOS apps that have the SDK mentioned in the article: https://appgoblin.info/sdks/brdsdk.framework (sorry this requires a free login due to heavy scraping, feel free to contact me for list) I was unable to find related Android SDKs. I tried looking at the various apps on AppGoblin to find the android versions, then looking through their unmapped SDK parts but didn't see anything. https://github.com/Bri…

Why can't you just post the list as a comment?

Re: The Smart TV in Your LivingRoom Is a Node in the AIScraping Economy

#59

Post by dawnerd »

graypegg wrote: post #31
cobbzilla wrote: post #3

I never connect any “smart” device to wifi. If it doesn’t work without connectivity, I don’t want it. I use my TVs as display devices. They have HDMI-in and that’s it.

I have a smart TV that's never spoken to the internet after exiting the factory, but it's a pretty tenuous state of affairs. I have this fear that someone staying over is going to see the "Services unavailable, press [menu] to troubleshoot" toast that shows up overtop the HDMI feed for a few seconds and think they're helping me by connecting it. 4-5 years worth of firmware updates all at once... half a decade of watc…

I fear the same but made sure I block basically everything at the network level. First thing I do is hook the tv to the network and black hole its mac.

Re: The Smart TV in Your LivingRoom Is a Node in the AIScraping Economy

#60

Post by trumpdong »

xg15 wrote: post #5

> After config fetch, the SDK opens a persistent WebSocket to: wss://proxyjs.brdtnet.com:443 This hostname resolves to AWS Global Accelerator IPs There is some irony that both the scrapers and the websites being scraped are probably hosted on AWS, while playing an elaborate cat-and-mouse game pretending that they weren't.

Cloudflare sells DDoS protection services to DDoS control panels.
Post reply on HN