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Everything I own, owned

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Re: Everything I own, owned

#201

Post by jeroenhd »

qlte wrote: post #45
AshamedCaptain wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I kinda remember that the counterargument Google used is that only devices with a special attribute would ever be available through WebHID, ensuring that such older devices would never be exposed. Cue my surprise when it turns out you can use WebHID to program a Minidisc / Net-MD device [1], so.. they never did implement that filter, apparently. I mean, certainly it is useful, but ... What The F., Google? [1] https:/…

The user has to first specifically pick the device from the list and grant the website access. If a user is confused by a permissions prompt and has no idea what is going on, the default path is to reject the permission.

WebHID being used to access a microphone is risky though. Microphones are already often exposed to web browsers, so asking for microphone access wouldn't be out of the ordinary.

Maybe MD drives aren't really at risk, but things like HID peripherals definitely are.

Re: Everything I own, owned

#202

Post by utopiah »

Honestly I do like this trend if it genuinely leads to more interoperability. Im not sure that is the case though and in fact I worry people will start to imagine that anybody can do that in no time and that future devices will remain hackable this way. I have no doubt it was fun for OP to do but I bet most people who try that, people with less understanding, will inevitably end up nowhere or, worst, with bricked device in unrecoverable states. I feel this is one of the best use of AI at the moment, namely gaining agency by having devices do what their own wants and I hope it will lead to manufacturers selling both safer AND more interoperable devices but I'll remain prudently skeptical.

Re: Everything I own, owned

#203

Post by mschuster91 »

AshamedCaptain wrote: post #82
NavinF wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WebUSB has been live in Chrome for 9 years and nothing happened. Compare to all the features that result in people getting hacked every day. Your threat model is ridiculous.

Look, I find it funny that I find myself arguing on the other side of the discussion that I'm frequently on, but here is where I draw the line, and I think what is ridiculous is to think otherwise. How many hoops Google asks you to go to install an Android app ? (Androids amounts to basically the most sandboxed environment one can have today; malware installed there can practically do _nothing_) MANY. Centralized reg…

> How many hoops Google asks you to go to install an Android app ? (Androids amounts to basically the most sandboxed environment one can have today; malware installed there can practically do _nothing_) MANY. Centralized register of apps and remote blacklisting, a lot of permission prompts, password check, and they are even literally pushing to even have a physical 24h cool-off period if you skip the centralized register.

I 'member (and miss) the old Android days before everything became the locked down hellscape Android is these days. And I also member why it became that way, there was a loooot of bad actors exploiting that open model.

For operating systems it's similar. DOS/Windows up to and through ME didn't have the concept of different user levels, the file system didn't allow for it, and if you had physical access to the machine it was trivial to corrupt and subvert it. Only with Windows XP, Microsoft switched the consumer OS to NT and its multi-user model.

And so it will be for WebUSB et al. First it will be a pretty open and unrestricted world, and only if there turns out to be a significant problem, security will (need to) be tightened.

Re: Everything I own, owned

#204

Post by hypfer »

jfsebastian wrote: post #199
hypfer wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't get your hopes up. What you're saying only applies to what is out there right now. New stuff will eventually just be locked down more. It's of course still huge to be able to do this with all tech up until this cut-off point. Eventually though, LLMs will have to break SOTA cryptography to keep doing this, and if they should ever manage to do that, there will be a rough awakening for the world that runs on that…

Generally, I'm with you, but over the past decades I often saw companies being lazy about their software. So I think chances are good that we can make use of this situation. Not long ago, you had to accept certain decisions or servers going down with leaving devices useless. I'm hopeful that more stuff can have a 2nd/better life in our hands.

I like being able to have all this access, of course, but I'm not sure if "we" all truly have the character to be good stewards of this.

Or rather I am sure that we do not.

OTOH, maybe it needs events like these to build character. It just will suck for whoever turns out to be the collateral.

Re: Everything I own, owned

#205

Post by jfsebastian »

My Sony TV also faced some issues in the past, which at least let me start some investigation. Unfortunately it confirmed my assumptions that the hardware is very limited and already runs on full load most of the time. Still thinking about putting some more effort into this, but killing the device was also one of my concerns.

A really fun project was extendending the abilities of my reMarkable Pro. I missed a decent Manga Reader on the device, so I created a native one which makes use of my custom server.

Re: Everything I own, owned

#206

Post by mschuster91 »

Marsymars wrote: post #160
ryandrake wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not even that clever, really. The camera power rail must be physically close to the camera, so it's trivial to hang an LED off it. A device manufacturer has to go out of their way to make it so the LED and camera function are independent, and I'm sure many do, for the worst reasons you can possibly think of.

Nest cameras used to have a user toggle to enable/disable the camera LED; not the worst reason I can think of.

Yeah, and then came people hiding cameras in places where you clearly did not want a camera to be. Bathrooms in public areas, hotels, workplaces and AirBnBs are a much too common issue, it's like daily news some creep gets busted for running cameras.

Re: Everything I own, owned

#207

Post by UltraSane »

userbinator wrote: post #91
ndiddy wrote: post #35

> My ASUS ROG Swift PG42UQ monitor was actually where I started, because I got annoyed at the pop-up overlay that comes up every once in a while that tells me to run “pixel cleaning”. I have never intentionally run pixel cleaning on this monitor and I never will, I don’t care, and I would like for that overlay to go away forever. Maybe there’s a debug menu or something that can turn it off, or worst case we patch a b…

The Internet seems rather reluctant to explain what exactly "pixel cleaning" does, but based on the vague useless "explanations" I could find, I suspect it's a sort of "flat-field correction" where it calibrates the pixel drive current to darken the less worn and/or brighten the more worn ones so it eliminates the burn-in effect. This obviously leads to a vicious cycle where more worn pixels are driven harder and hen…

OLEDS have two HUGE advantages over LCDs

Extremely accurate and vivid colors due to their low black level.

And VERY fast pixel response times, 0.01ms to 0.03ms compared to 1ms to 5ms for the fastest LCD gaming monitors.

Re: Everything I own, owned

#208

Post by mschuster91 »

SoftTalker wrote: post #75
darknavi wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is giving me the confidence to RE my cat feeder. The company (Petlibro) has an outage and now my chilled wet feeder that should be a dumb, offline feeder is basically bricked now. The device reports fine wifi but the backing services are totally busted.

Why do you have a cat when you can't be bothered to feed it yourself?

As soon as you have more than one cat, which you absolutely should because cats at least when held in captivity require playmates matching their physical ability, you should have some sort of smart feeder system.

Otherwise, you will inevitably end up with one chonk and one cat with food panic that gorges on whatever food it can grab in a single setting before everything is gone.

Re: Everything I own, owned

#209

Post by fodkodrasz »

People are praising how this new age of owning our stuff is here, while actually all this will bring is stricter lockdown in every level of the supply chain. Enjoy while it lasts, but I expect even more closed stuff, and less openness from these t.rends

Re: Everything I own, owned

#210

Post by lionkor »

tired_and_awake wrote: post #124

I spent a decade in robotics and have built firmware for dozens of devices. And yet I was never able to successfully fix my webcam device driver on linux with Claude. I'm jealous of this person's prompting skills! Or perhaps pwning is easier than fixing the nightmare that is Intel open source device drivers?

There are two nuances here;

1. The author might be exaggerating or lying in regards to the capabilities, ease of use, and result

2. if Claude can do it without hardware access, I struggle to see how it could be anything other than unsigned unencrypted firmware images that you can unpack and mess with

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