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

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101–110 of 114 posts

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

#101

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 get this policy in theory but don't see how it works in practice in a modern life where you want some device that runs Netflix, YouTube, of similar to show on your TV. It can be the TV or an android box - but somewhere you end up trusting a third party and a software that may end up running other this party apps. The alternative is a local jellyfin server but that means you very likely have to break some laws to pu…

I drive my TVs with a locked-down mac mini.

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

#102
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Frustratingly I do want some of the functionality that comes with connecting my TV to the network - specifically the ability to control things like turning it on and choosing which input its set to via an API it exposes. That's manageable by putting it on a VLAN which isn't allowed access to the outside world, but its also really annoying to me that I have to do that.

You don't need an api for that. You can do that with a 30 year old CRT if you wanted. Copy IR signals from remote. Put IR blaster in front of IR receiver. Make whatever tool you want to control the IR blaster. Done.

Yes. I could do that. I could also hook something up to the debug serial port and reverse engineer that, or use HDMI-CEC, or make a tiny robot that pushes the buttons on the back of the TV. I'm using the API though, because I already have a Home Assistant server on my network and that can communicate with the API without me having to faff about making tiny robots.

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

#104
post #77
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.

Allow list is the best approach. Soon TVs will randomize their MAC just like our phones do.

Indeed, but some scoundrel is probably scraping this page and having an LLM prepare their pitch as to how manufacturers could improve Ad / Data collection revenue by bypassing these suggestions :/

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

#106

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.

It's annoying because I would definitely like for some internet-enabled functionality, such as youtube. I would also like to connect it to the LAN and not to the internet for other things, such as streaming from my NAS...

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

#107
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.

>Adding to DNS block list immediately.

Just making a note here for anyone else with the same thought: I went to ping the domains listed ITT, and nothing went through. I'm running OPNsense and amongst other things using some of the hagezi DNS block lists [0]. It looks like brdtnet.com, bright-sdk.com and various subdomains were already in there, which is a nice sanity check.

That said, also worth noting that an Unbound or other resolver based DNS block list can prevent resolution but doesn't preventing connecting to the underlying IP, it's not the same thing as actually invoking your firewall itself. For that I think you need to stick the lists into something that will resolve them regularly and then actually Firewall that off. So for OPNsense you can setup an alias using the URL Table (plain text) or URL Table in JSON depending on format, or manage it externally directly if desired via external. Then the source will be updated and aliases will all be resolved on operator defined schedules, and can in turn be fed into regular firewall rules. Don't forget these can turn into massive lists, so make sure your internal resource limits (so for OPNsense that'd be Firewall Maximum Table Entries) are set sufficiently high and the hardware can handle it.

Other systems may handle it differently, just it's important to double check what is actually happening including if something malicious tries to be sneakier. And ultimately for these sorts of untrustable embedded devices that lack owner control, it's probably a lot better and more sustainable, if more effort upfront, to isolate them into their own vlan/subnet and then whitelist instead of blacklist. So they can only access what you decide they need to and nothing else, vs access everything except what is disallowed. Still, blacklisting bad actors as a final layer for everything may still be useful.

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0: https://github.com/hagezi/dns-blocklists

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

#108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That's pretty much what the bots are scraping now, with all the AI slop websites out there.

Fair point well made.

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

#109

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.

[flagged]

You taunt but you've described the ideal state.

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

#110
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Sure, but what can it do without a network?

It can store the data until it connects to one, though that's not going to be as useful for anyone selling it. Real-time auctions are where the money is, from what I understand.
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