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

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81–90 of 265 posts

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

#81

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

The irony of this is because it’s still fundamentally just a statistical text generator with a large body of fiction in its training data, I’m sure a lot of prompts that sound like terrifying skynet responses are actually it regurgitating mashups of Sci-fi dystopian novels.

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

#82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it is to ensure no discussion of Tiananmen square

Why? What happened in Tiananmen square? Why shouldn't an LLM talk about it? Was it fashion? What was the reason?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Tiananmen_Square_protests...

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

#83

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…

> 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

This was the opposite of a professional response:

* Official communication coming from a Gmail. (Is this even an employee or some random contractor?)

* Asked no clarifying questions

* Gave no timelines for expected fixes, no expectations on when the next communication should be

* No discussion about process to disclose the issues publicly

* Mixing unrelated business discussions within a security discussion. While not an outright offer of a bribe, ANY adjacent comments about creating a business relationship like a sponsorship is wildly inappropriate in this context.

These folks are total clown shoes on the security side, and the efficacy of their "fix", and then their lack of communication, further proves that.

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

#85

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…

To be honest the responses sounded copy and pasted straight from ChatGPT, it seemed like there was fake feigned interest into their non-existent youtube channel.

> Overall simple security design flaws but it's good to see a company that cares to fix them, even if they didn't take security seriously from the start

I don't think that should give anyone a free pass though. It was such a simple flaw that realistically speaking they shouldn't ever be trusted again. If it had been a non-obvious flaw that required going through lots of hoops then fair enough but they straight up had zero authentication. That isn't a 'flaw' you need an external researcher to tell you about.

I personally believe companies should not be praised for responding to such a blatant disregard for quality, standards, privacy and security. No matter where they are from.

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

#86
great writeup! i love how it goes from "they left ADB enabled, how could it get worse"... and then it just keeps getting worse

> After sideloading the obligatory DOOM

> I just sideloaded the app on a different device

> I also sideloaded the store app

can we please stop propagating this slimy corporate-speak? installing software on a device that you own is not an arcane practice with a unique name, it's a basic expectation and right

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

#87
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.

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 process to be sent to a labor camp based on trumped up charges by my own government is far more likely.

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

#88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's rather naive, considering China has a international police unit, that is stationed in several countries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_police_overseas_servic...

There's also the Mossad's approach to "you're out of our jurisdiction". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mordechai_Vanunu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Eichmann

Also the CIA's approach

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_rendition

Russia is more known for poisoning people. But of all of them China feels the least threatening if you are not Chinese. If you are Chinese you aren't safe from the Chinese government no matter where you are

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

#89

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-party unitary authoritarian political system with an increasingly aggressive pursuit of global influence. The United States?

Global Bully maybe. The current administration has no concept of soft power, otherwise they would have kept USAID

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

#90

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…

That's rather naive, considering China has a international police unit, that is stationed in several countries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_police_overseas_servic...

They only arrest chinese citizens.
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