It’s mind boggling that in the UK there’s a law that says:
> “A plank of wood must not be carried along a pavement. It can only be moved if it is being unloaded from a vehicle or taken into a building.”
But big tech cannot be regulated at all.
We used to regulate any minor thing that was annoying enough, but a whole industry spying and prying on the whole population is fine.
The problem with regulating big tech is the unplacable internet. Who can regulate the internet? Who gets to make rules for the global network?
Politicians are keenly aware that regulation has to be administered, and administration costs money. The internet subsists on low overhead, and per jurisdiction administration would significantly change almost everything about the current internet. The public wont allow that.
If the public actually starts demanding regulation, we will see a fracturing of the internet into national networks. It will become impossible (or at least uneconomical) to run reddit, youtube, or facebook as global networks. They might continue to exists, but they will be sectioned off.
The main issue is that the attention economy and social pressure are so hard to break. People keep using WhatsApp because it is convenient and everyone is there. There are no other reasons.
I don't know that this is a discovery issue. It has been widely publicised that all your devices are spying on you for at least a decade now - hard proof was previously somewhat hard to come by, but a suitable regulatory agency could have gone digging at any point.
> Nothing and nobody rises above the authority in a dictatorship, that's kind of the point
Until they do. That’s the problem with dictatorship. If you can kill and swiftly replace the dictator, you become the dictator. What the masses believe is irrelevant.
Despite really kicking our asses on their approach to an AI ecosystem, China has problems of its own. Too bad we can't just copy the parts that work but those are the rules I guess.
Someone else making the decision for you is a good description for laws, which we decided a long time ago we would in fact have. It's weird how people come out of the woodwork like this when those laws start to point at rich people.
Stupid obsolete laws that stay on the books forever is seemingly the American way and occasionally we refresh them with new even stupider laws that were obsolete before they were even proposed.
Sure, why not? I'd like to live in a system where the interest of the nation and the people are above your or someone else's ROI. I'd like to live in a system where if you try, like Elon Musk, to amass so much influence on the nation for your own benefits - you're gonna be Jack Ma'd.
> I'd like to live in a system where the interest of the nation and the people are above your or someone else's ROI.
Democracies are much closer to that than dictatorships as they don't need to care about the people and never did.
Crazy that you like a system where somebody can just get kidnapped. It never just affects the "right" people, but also a lot of other people. China is jailing and kidnapping a lot - easily tens of thousands of more - of their citizen to sustain control.
> There is a counter incentive, the money the companies pay the politicians.
That's disingenuous. The public has been told a beautiful fairy tale about technology for years. There are huge outcries every single time any politician tries to regulate big tech.
Now I know that this isn't because the public is somehow ideologically opposed to regulation. We have been paid off, just as much as the politicians have. When they increase the prices of televisions and say it's because they this new regulation, we show up to support them.
Actually it is. Around 2005 I was stopped by police at 2am in Hackney and told in no uncertain terms that it was illegal for me to be walking with a 2x4 in my hand
If your building or other construction is unsafe for the public, the local authority has the right to make it safe, if necessary by demolishing it; if you are insufficiently responsive to a notice that you must make it safe. Maybe tech companies need that kind of incentive before they will care enough not to subject their customers to this kind of abuse.
People understand what a plank of wood is and how it works.
People, including the vast majority of politicians, don’t understand our technology at all. It’s magic. Why does a light come on when they flip the switch? Magic. Computers are deep black magic.
How can they write effective regulation? Or tell the difference between proposals that are good or bad written by others?
If politicians regulated big tech more we’d probably end up with a ton of regulatory capture that legislated monopolies for big tech and shut out open source and startups, because who has the money to influence the ignorant lawmakers at scale?
We are now in a world where small groups of high priests understand certain things, and few others. We’ve been there for a while but it’s gotten far more opaque in the last 25 years or so.
Even something like a nuclear reactor or an aircraft is much easier to explain. The last episode of the Chernobyl series did a great job explaining what was wrong with that reactor design to a layperson. But computing… and networks… people who do understand it have forgotten just how ludicrously arcane and inscrutable it is to most.
A big difference too is that by the Church-Turing theorem there is (as a side effect of it) a provably infinite number of ways to perform any computation. Which means you can’t just legislate “don’t do that.” Physical machines are not like that.
The point of having advisors was supposed to be that they would help the elected person make up for lack of knowledge, but it doesn't seem like that pans out in reality. Either the advisors are just as lost, or they are largely ignored.
The need for good advisors is a major point in Sun-Tzu's Art of War.
Surround yourself with good advisors and the surrounding kingdoms will notice and be less inclined to attack. If you have bad advisors, your enemies will perceive that as their opening
In the interests of accuracy, the law (the Metropolitan Police Act 1839) actually states
"""
54 Prohibition of nuisances by persons in the thoroughfares.
Every person shall be liable to a penalty not more than level 2 on the standard scale, who, within the limits of the metropolitan police district, shall in any thoroughfare or public place, commit any of the following offences; (that is to say,)
...
8. Every person who shall roll or carry any cask, tub, hoop, or wheel, or any ladder, plank, pole, showboard, or placard, upon any footway, except for the purpose of loading or unloading any cart or carriage, or of crossing the footway:
The plank of wood is one element in a much broader statute, rather than an example of hyper-specificity. And it might have been strictly applied at the time, but that doesn't mean you're definitely going to get into trouble nowadays.
In a similar vein, the UK *does* have laws that affect big tech. UK GDPR places requirements on processing of personal data:
Whether that's properly enforced is (as with the plank) a completely different matter.
In the UK, at least, we don't need new regulations, we need to more effectively apply the regulations we already have in place. But there is also a balance to be made between enforcement through fines and enforcement through changing behaviour: it's much better to work with companies to bring them into compliance than it is to just fine them and without actually changing anything.
> within the limits of the metropolitan police district
It's a local London law. In England such laws are passed by parliament because there is no other mechanism, but in countries with devolved lawmaking states and cities have much crazier laws.
Samsung is starting to be a little too much creepy.
I don't know if it's just greed or.
I refused to create an account on their galaxy phone because of the mandatory phone number needed. Yes, I know they can harvest it in other ways, it's just a stand.
Without an account, they don't even allow installs from galaxy store. So their default apps and their security updates are probably contingent on having an account now.
Not much different from playstore but that is also a problem.
It's beyond me why people are still buying smart TVs.
I've juist looked on a large EU webshop (bol.com).
You can buy a non-smart, full-HD, 40 inch TV for less than $200.
All the ad tracking in smart TVs has driven prices down. Tracking and ad data has turned a customer from a one time purchaser to a revenue stream for as long as the device is in use.
If you want a high quality TV for the best price your best bet is either disable/opt out of all the tracking data, or even better just never hook it up to the internet at all and plug an AppleTV or Chromecast on it.
If you look for a Samsung TV without “smart” features you pretty much have to find them under “commercial displays” and you’ll pay a premium for it.
I'm not the only one who made note of that behavior, but if i recall sometime before breaking my phone in the last couple months the behaviour ceased. probably after a factory rom update, but at this point i can no longer confirm or deny. but! i did and do have a backup of the potentially offending apk.
i wonder if the Samsung / LG stuff is how the stock market seemed so "predictable" to some people in early morning trading for a while... imagine having the keys to buckets containing all the plaintext gathered from all the tvs listening in conference rooms on earnings days...
> confirmation bias, eg. "facebook is secretly listening to you"
Agreeing with your general point - don't jump to conclusions without evidence - but I don't like it if we're now establishing the "Facebook/Google/Apple/etc is secretly listening to you" rumors as the canonical example of that behavior, and thereby exempting companies from further scrutiny in this.
We've seen that by now there exists both the will and the technical means to pull off stuff like this. So even if it used to be a baseless rumor and urban legend, it deserves to be re-checked periodically, because companies might start to do it for real at some point. Samsung here actually did.
(Google also comes awfully close with its "song detector" which is now a stock Android feature I think)
This is the answer. Lots of people (myself included) are happy to buy a big, cheap TV, but it's cheap because the manufacturer gets money by paid app placement, ads (sometimes), and selling information about you.
A senior friend has bad vision, so I recommended an inexpensive but enormous TV that they can use as a display, and never let it connect to the network. Unfortunately, every few months the display tries to coax them into connecting to WiFi, and it confuses the heck out of them. But, that's the game.
This is the point everyone misses. It's not just that they are subsidizing the price of the TV. Whenever there is an opportunity to extract more profit, eventually they will do it. The rich are not immune from being targeted by this but they sure like to think that they are when they support this behavior in the companies they control.
There was just a post yesterday about how to root your samsung. I rooted my samsung and removed ads, mics, and my agent is looking into this one as we speak [codex].
Do a search on X on the topic, the news about Samsung was broken on there by a guy who had rooted his Samsung TV using AI tools and he and others created guides for neutering the stuff out of it
Maybe it's time for something like that, a shared baseline standard of "this thing won't spy on you", with massive financial penalties for companies caught lying about it. Prime adoption by making it a requirement for anything bought by the government.
Then consumers can reliably comparison-shop for a "TV" that doesn't turn into a traitorous 1984 telescreen the moment it breaks out of the LAN or you fail to click "maybe later" on its incessant dark pattern pop-ups.
The mechanism you are thinking of - optimizing brightness and dynamic contrast, happens in TCON in low level hardware at fraction of a fraction of power
But the next generation of everything will be so much less efficient as the new generation of developers has forgotten how to do anything with low level methods.
Just yesterday I hacked my Samsung Frame tv. The AI (codex) used an off-the-shelf root with Developer Console access (built in). Though root doesn't give you the signing keys to blow everything away and still boot (is my best understanding), but as a workaround you can still change anything you want after boot automatically.
I had it do:
- Stripping ads
- Disabling mics
- Turning off updates
- Leaving root SSH in place (protected) for future access
The key to getting codex to do this was that this is legal under DMCA, but after a certain point I had to get a new session to change all the "hacking" words into synonyms to not trigger false security alarms. Wouldn't be surprised or bothered if my chatgpt account gets banned though.
I can write a blog post and publish the repo if you want
I think in this case, the Tizen OS (by Samsung) on these TVs has a developer mode where you can use their Samsung Debug Bridge CLI tool on another computer to connect to the TV and get a regular Linux user shell. From there, they found a local privilege escalation bug to get root. I don’t know the exact details but a lot of smart devices get poor security support, so you can just shotgun different known vulnerabilities and get lucky with one pretty often rather than needing to develop a novel one.
I believe Mistral models are fairly capable at cybersecurity tasks, but I don’t think you could get anything useful out of anything smaller than Mistral Large 4.
I agree with this. At this point, AI has gotten smart enough that most smart TVs can be hacked (I just did it with my LG), and TV manufacturers haven't caught up yet.
> “A plank of wood must not be carried along a pavement. It can only be moved if it is being unloaded from a vehicle or taken into a building.”
But big tech cannot be regulated at all. We used to regulate any minor thing that was annoying enough, but a whole industry spying and prying on the whole population is fine.
Politicians are keenly aware that regulation has to be administered, and administration costs money. The internet subsists on low overhead, and per jurisdiction administration would significantly change almost everything about the current internet. The public wont allow that.
If the public actually starts demanding regulation, we will see a fracturing of the internet into national networks. It will become impossible (or at least uneconomical) to run reddit, youtube, or facebook as global networks. They might continue to exists, but they will be sectioned off.
It cannot be regulated because we let dollar/capital rise above political authority.
Public awareness is step one.
The CEO of Alibaba was kidnapped after he publicly criticized the government.
It's generally no surprise that there are not that many critical voices in a dictatorship.
Until they do. That’s the problem with dictatorship. If you can kill and swiftly replace the dictator, you become the dictator. What the masses believe is irrelevant.
https://www.wsj.com/world/china-economy-gen-z-f9058941
I feel sorry that democracies are failing their citizenry like this.
The way a farmer decides what their pigs eat is far from the way a caring lover chooses their partner's dinner.
This is generally not possible to do consistently, as if A prefers option 1 and B prefers option 2, you're at an impass...
And I'd take the inefficiencies of democracies over dictatorships any day...
Democracies are much closer to that than dictatorships as they don't need to care about the people and never did.
Crazy that you like a system where somebody can just get kidnapped. It never just affects the "right" people, but also a lot of other people. China is jailing and kidnapping a lot - easily tens of thousands of more - of their citizen to sustain control.
How do you think Xi Jinping’s family became billionaires?
That's disingenuous. The public has been told a beautiful fairy tale about technology for years. There are huge outcries every single time any politician tries to regulate big tech.
Now I know that this isn't because the public is somehow ideologically opposed to regulation. We have been paid off, just as much as the politicians have. When they increase the prices of televisions and say it's because they this new regulation, we show up to support them.
Is that a good law or is it a barnacle? Is it enforced in the UK?
Although it does appear to be true in London https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Vict/2-3/47/section/54
People understand what a plank of wood is and how it works.
People, including the vast majority of politicians, don’t understand our technology at all. It’s magic. Why does a light come on when they flip the switch? Magic. Computers are deep black magic.
How can they write effective regulation? Or tell the difference between proposals that are good or bad written by others?
If politicians regulated big tech more we’d probably end up with a ton of regulatory capture that legislated monopolies for big tech and shut out open source and startups, because who has the money to influence the ignorant lawmakers at scale?
We are now in a world where small groups of high priests understand certain things, and few others. We’ve been there for a while but it’s gotten far more opaque in the last 25 years or so.
Even something like a nuclear reactor or an aircraft is much easier to explain. The last episode of the Chernobyl series did a great job explaining what was wrong with that reactor design to a layperson. But computing… and networks… people who do understand it have forgotten just how ludicrously arcane and inscrutable it is to most.
A big difference too is that by the Church-Turing theorem there is (as a side effect of it) a provably infinite number of ways to perform any computation. Which means you can’t just legislate “don’t do that.” Physical machines are not like that.
Surround yourself with good advisors and the surrounding kingdoms will notice and be less inclined to attack. If you have bad advisors, your enemies will perceive that as their opening
""" 54 Prohibition of nuisances by persons in the thoroughfares.
Every person shall be liable to a penalty not more than level 2 on the standard scale, who, within the limits of the metropolitan police district, shall in any thoroughfare or public place, commit any of the following offences; (that is to say,)
...
8. Every person who shall roll or carry any cask, tub, hoop, or wheel, or any ladder, plank, pole, showboard, or placard, upon any footway, except for the purpose of loading or unloading any cart or carriage, or of crossing the footway:
... """ https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Vict/2-3/47/section/54
The plank of wood is one element in a much broader statute, rather than an example of hyper-specificity. And it might have been strictly applied at the time, but that doesn't mean you're definitely going to get into trouble nowadays.
In a similar vein, the UK *does* have laws that affect big tech. UK GDPR places requirements on processing of personal data:
""" Personal data shall be:
(a)processed lawfully, fairly and in a transparent manner in relation to the data subject (‘lawfulness, fairness and transparency’); """ https://www.legislation.gov.uk/eur/2016/679/article/5
Whether that's properly enforced is (as with the plank) a completely different matter.
In the UK, at least, we don't need new regulations, we need to more effectively apply the regulations we already have in place. But there is also a balance to be made between enforcement through fines and enforcement through changing behaviour: it's much better to work with companies to bring them into compliance than it is to just fine them and without actually changing anything.
> within the limits of the metropolitan police district
It's a local London law. In England such laws are passed by parliament because there is no other mechanism, but in countries with devolved lawmaking states and cities have much crazier laws.
The plank rule just exists, not enforced, so nobody observes it.
Same will happen with the high-tech regulation. In fact, it is already happening left and right where it does exist.
I don't know if it's just greed or.
I refused to create an account on their galaxy phone because of the mandatory phone number needed. Yes, I know they can harvest it in other ways, it's just a stand.
Corporations are considered persons and they need to pay shareholders.
Seriously, it’s pure greed and people who love money enable this, because they think they are immune to this, or harmless.
Not much different from playstore but that is also a problem.
If you want a high quality TV for the best price your best bet is either disable/opt out of all the tracking data, or even better just never hook it up to the internet at all and plug an AppleTV or Chromecast on it.
If you look for a Samsung TV without “smart” features you pretty much have to find them under “commercial displays” and you’ll pay a premium for it.
It doesn't matter whether you run android TV from the TV itself or an external device.
All the popular streaming services throttle or block open devices.
There's no regulation on it, because regulators want locked-down hardware that can only take actions approved by them.
I'm not the only one who made note of that behavior, but if i recall sometime before breaking my phone in the last couple months the behaviour ceased. probably after a factory rom update, but at this point i can no longer confirm or deny. but! i did and do have a backup of the potentially offending apk.
Has this been quantified? Otherwise it's easy to fall for confirmation bias, eg. "facebook is secretly listening to you"
Agreeing with your general point - don't jump to conclusions without evidence - but I don't like it if we're now establishing the "Facebook/Google/Apple/etc is secretly listening to you" rumors as the canonical example of that behavior, and thereby exempting companies from further scrutiny in this.
We've seen that by now there exists both the will and the technical means to pull off stuff like this. So even if it used to be a baseless rumor and urban legend, it deserves to be re-checked periodically, because companies might start to do it for real at some point. Samsung here actually did.
(Google also comes awfully close with its "song detector" which is now a stock Android feature I think)
A senior friend has bad vision, so I recommended an inexpensive but enormous TV that they can use as a display, and never let it connect to the network. Unfortunately, every few months the display tries to coax them into connecting to WiFi, and it confuses the heck out of them. But, that's the game.
Happy to post to github if you'd like.
From what I heard these are especially awful, even by low IoT standards.
Maybe it's time for something like that, a shared baseline standard of "this thing won't spy on you", with massive financial penalties for companies caught lying about it. Prime adoption by making it a requirement for anything bought by the government.
Then consumers can reliably comparison-shop for a "TV" that doesn't turn into a traitorous 1984 telescreen the moment it breaks out of the LAN or you fail to click "maybe later" on its incessant dark pattern pop-ups.
I'm not sure it's literal enough.
...... or do you???
I mean it is probably also used to collect data, but this sounds like it might be more than just that. Maybe?
I had it do:
- Stripping ads
- Disabling mics
- Turning off updates
- Leaving root SSH in place (protected) for future access
The key to getting codex to do this was that this is legal under DMCA, but after a certain point I had to get a new session to change all the "hacking" words into synonyms to not trigger false security alarms. Wouldn't be surprised or bothered if my chatgpt account gets banned though. I can write a blog post and publish the repo if you want
Basically all Qwen models got un-neuthered.
Even the big ones (Deepseek, etc.) got their protection layer ablated.
But also if you're working on a local device, any Chinese model will agree to it most of the time.
I can imagine working on the dumped firmware or update package.
But against the TV over the network without closed loop or access to RAM how could the model find and develop exploits?
just hack it right after purchase and own the glass