GamersNexus and LG: Or why rooting your TV is a bad idea

Posted by drasticactions 10 hours ago

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Comments

Comment by adithyassekhar 8 hours ago

I think the author took the wrong message from the video.

His arguments are all

- yes everyone does this not just lg; :)

- yes it can be used to track the user; but unless you literally go into lg ads hq, you can’t say they don’t

- they rooted to trigger this; well the os and system apps don’t need root, we need it to observe.

If the author is here please consider these as the reasons to why an LG customer would be mad.

- They did not knew LG has an ads subsidiary, whose CEOs and executives constantly go on investor meetings claiming “they own the glass”, “they own the living room”, “they own the network and devices” in the “lg household”

- if the above was said by lg tv division it would have still stung less. This was said by an ad company they didn’t knew existed nor did they agree to be associated with when they bought a home appliance.

Stop focusing on the technical details, look at the larger picture.

Comment by drbscl 7 hours ago

Yes, as the owner of an LG OLED, I paid a premium for a good quality panel, and expect it to be mine.

Also, I anticipated ads on a smart TV (unfortunately it's inevitable), but (wrongly) assumed that such invasive tracking and "we own the glass" would be a bar too low even for the budget manufacturers.

I'm never buying any LG product ever again.

Comment by cassianoleal 5 hours ago

I have an LG OLED as well. When I bought it, it was the previous year's flagship. I am also mad at this.

I also had an LG washing machine. The dispenser plastic drawer broke after a year of use. After over a week of multiple emails and calls with the shop, LG themselves and third-party spares shops trying to get a replacement, I bought a Bosch.

I am also never buying anything from LG again.

Comment by psd1 4 hours ago

Your broken waking machine drawer is an orthogonal problem, and perhaps not specific to one corp. Plastic parts break but, OTOH, overbuilding consumes resources with diminishing utility. A deep spare parts market is a cost.

May i suggest basic home repair? Two techniques that work in many cases are:

- "welding" with a soldering iron, using cable tie as a filler rod. You'll want good ventilation and a sacrificial tip - epoxy repair putty

Superglue (cyanoacrylate) tends to give disappointing results on its own, but can be a good first step before putty. Putty can be reinforced with some kind of fibre. Never use cyanoacrylate with the welding technique (cyanide).

I don't love the model profusion that makes spare parts markets inefficient, but free markets are inefficient all over the place. Price in the externalities.

Comment by stdbrouw 4 hours ago

I used to think this too, but e.g. Bosch and IKEA have great replacement parts websites accessible to the consumer. IKEA’s parts are mostly free, too! With modern logistics (automated warehouses, cheap shipping, ordering online) it is actually a solvable problem, if the company gives a damn about it.

Comment by psd1 4 hours ago

I'll take that as a recommendation, thank you! Fwiw, i have found spares for many brands by searching model numbers and wading through spate parts aggregators. The market exists. It's often uneconomic :-(

Comment by croon 5 hours ago

I own an LG TV as well, and while I assume the Mi TV Box 4K tracks me instead, at least it's unpowered while the TV is off, and the TV itself is not connected to my network. I have updated TVs/soundbars/etc, but only through USB. When they remove that option is the day I stop being a customer, moving to one that still does.

Better yet would be never needing an update, but alas.

Comment by rickdeckard 7 hours ago

I agree with the author, the point is that the way the video and the overall research was done, the entire message was diluted too much.

There is substance in what they did. But they should have worked with an actual journalist to frame this properly and create pressure on the overarching topics.

If a TV company (LG or ANY of the others who have Ad-subsidiaries) needs to respond to this video, they can easily reframe the whole topic.

The most blatant example is that they demonstrate in the video that this TV, which has a built-in microphone for voice-control, that can be switched off with a mechanical switch:

1. Will record your voice when you ask it to transcribe your input to a textbox

2. Will process your voice to create this text it shows, as visible on the logs of the rooted OS

3. Will SHOW you that it's transcribing your input on the screen.

This is weakening the whole story.

In HN-terms: It's a constant-power, constantly-connected IoT-device with lots of sensors and huge compute-power, located in the center of your home.

There are big topics around this that deserve a huge spotlight, which apply to ALL TV manufacturers:

a. What data is actually being collected about the user, and what is done with this data?

b. How well is security handled on the TV to ensure no malicious usage?

Repeatedly jumping to the conclusion during the video that LG specifically is collecting ALL this local data to spy on you, without clear evidence, this just gives LG an easy way to respond and every other vendor enough room to distance themselves from the whole story.

Comment by taurath 7 hours ago

> What data is actually being collected about the user, and what is done with this data?

This question implies that the answer could be something other than the maximum amount of data collection and monetization of that data they can get away with.

If that statement gives you pause please spend even a short amount of time reading about ad networks, data brokers, and corporate surveillance.

Comment by rickdeckard 6 hours ago

Yeah, I wouldn't vouch for a US court, but lucky me I'm in the EU, where the answer "the maximum amount of data collection and monetization of that data they can get away with" is not compliant to the requirements of GDPR.

So even IF that would be a sufficient answer in a court of US, it would not be sufficient in a court of an EU country.

--> Hence my point on how the overall message was diluted too much.

See, you may look at all this as "nothing can be done anyway, so let's bunch it all together and rant about it as emotionally as possible". But I look at it as "this is all potential evidence that a law was either already broken or needs to have a loophole closed"

But you won't get any of this done by spraying all over how normal this is and how everyone does it anyway. You get this done with a precise shot at ONE of them, concise enough to pin them down while aiming at the next one.

Comment by lukeschlather 7 hours ago

LG's terms of service essentially state that they will record any voice commands and store them for 6 months. They explicitly say they may store them in Korea. https://us.lgappstv.com/main/terms

Actually I think everything you're suggesting is unclear, LG explicitly say they do these things in their ToS. I skimmed their privacy policy, and I'm pretty sure it essentially says they collect all this information and use it for targeted advertising.

Comment by rickdeckard 6 hours ago

Yeah, and here's the part that's interesting to me as a EU-consumer: This wording doesn't exist in the European ToS: https://gb.lgappstv.com/main/terms#tabContentTerms6

So there's the angle that US is lacking the proper regulation, and the angle that LG may have violated its ToS in the EU.

But neither of this is going to get pinned down if everything is bunched together without focus and clear evidence...

Comment by psd1 4 hours ago

The numerical majority of developed counties have some kind of privacy law. Murrica is an outlier, because of course it is.

Comment by stuaxo 7 hours ago

It's such a bad take.

It's either a deliberately contrary or the author has other motives (which may sound ridiculous, but we know that bad actors have been paying people for bad takes for years - Malcolm Gladwell for instance being paid by oil and gas).

Comment by shellfishgene 7 hours ago

I was also a bit disappointed with the video. I don't usually watch the channel, but the previous video on LG with the McAfee thing was good. This one, well it has important points and exposes some very valid concerns. However I mostly agree with the linked article, it does not properly spell out what they actually can prove, and what's just conjecture. The video gets lauded as investigative journalism, I think the technical details are important to get right and make clear to non-tech people. A normal consumer would have no idea how to really judge the danger to their privacy after watching this, they'd come away thinking that for sure someone can listen in on their living room.

Comment by expedition32 4 hours ago

LG has an ads subsidiary, whose CEOs and executives constantly go on investor meetings claiming “they own the glass”, “they own the living room”, “they own the network and devices” in the “lg household”

Uhm every tech bro does this it is what makes the tech industry a fucking Bond villain lol.

Comment by Retr0id 9 hours ago

> If you root or jailbreak your devices, you've, by their very nature, broken their security.

> If he can demonstrate someone remotely jailbreaking your TV, or flipping on those settings without you knowing or doing anything to your TV, that would be a far more damning issue, in my view.

There are ways to remotely jailbreak LG webOS TVs without user interaction, using the same (or similar) vulnerabilities you use to root your own TV voluntarily.

The main reason tools like https://rootmy.tv are prefixed with disclaimers and require user interaction is because we're being courteous, not because they're technically necessary. (source: I own the rootmy.tv domain)

Comment by froddd 8 hours ago

Most of what I’m reading on rootmy.tv says the vulnerability it exploits has been fixed. So, if one were to keep software up to date on their TV, there is an improbably small chance it can actually be remotely jailbroken — am I reading this right?

Comment by Retr0id 8 hours ago

The specific vulnerabilities exploited by rootmy.tv have been patched, yes, but there are plenty more unpatched vulnerabilities remaining. There are also more up-to-date rooting tools beyond rootmy.tv.

The security posture of webOS is absolutely terrible, at least, it is in the way LG deploys it.

Comment by rickdeckard 8 hours ago

> The specific vulnerabilities exploited by rootmy.tv have been patched, yes, but there are plenty more unpatched vulnerabilities remaining.

But vulnerabilities that can be remotely exploited without user interaction (CVSS grade 9-10)?

Comment by Retr0id 8 hours ago

Yup. I'm sitting on one that doesn't even require an internet connection, only RF down the TV antenna input. I'm waiting for my model to go EOL before I release it.

Comment by minetest2048 8 hours ago

I'm guessing that you're exploiting some sort of exploit (buffer overflow???) on the DVB-T demodulator

Comment by delta_p_delta_x 8 hours ago

> only RF down the TV antenna input

Holy shit. RF to zero-click exploit is a new one. I guess digital-everything wasn't always a good idea, this probably wouldn't ever have been a problem with analogue antennas and CRTs.

What are the people at LG even doing?

Comment by Ekaros 8 hours ago

Teletext was available in analogue times. So I could well imagine there to be a possible avenue of exploits with it too. Would take a bit of time, but I see no reason why wouldn't some data result in a incorrect handling.

Comment by hnlmorg 7 hours ago

Exploiting what? There wasn’t any software hierarchy for Teletext to escape from in analogy TVs. If you found a bug in the Teletext chip you couldn’t then go on to do anything to the TV set aside print different data to the screen. And since you’re already tuned into that radio frequency and controlling the data sent on it, you already have control of what’s sent to the TV screen already anyway so who cares?

As an aside, I once interviewed one of the guys who wrote Teletext processors for analog TVs. He was a very interesting individual.

Comment by rickdeckard 8 hours ago

> Yup. I'm sitting on one that doesn't even require an internet connection, only RF down the TV antenna input. I'm waiting for my model to go EOL before I release it.

So no responsible disclosure, I see.

Not knowing any more details, it still sounds like you'd still need the user to tune to the actual frequency on the correct receiver (to cause some buffer overflow?). But then still there's no internet to do anything. So you'd need some very specific f/up exploit to then change local settings on the device I imagine.

Either way, would be a great opportunity to demonstrate this in a video, now that there's attention on the topic, to further amplify the pressure on LG's "terrible security posture" as you say.

Comment by michaelt 6 hours ago

> So no responsible disclosure, I see.

If I, a corporation, declare that I only accept security reports carved on clay tablets in ancient greek and hand-delivered to my office in Timbuktu during a total solar eclipse - does that stop responsible security researchers from disclosing their findings publicly?

Of course not.

If the guy sends a clear message to the best public contact address he can find with 15 minutes of searching; and gives them 30 days to patch before publicly disclosing the bug; then he's performed responsible disclosure.

The vendor's corporate policies and release cycles and contact addresses and triage procedures are their problem.

Comment by RobotToaster 5 hours ago

> So no responsible disclosure, I see.

If the manufacturers responsibly included a responsible way to install custom software/firmware, perhaps people would feel more inclined to help them. Their current attitude buys them very little goodwill.

Comment by Retr0id 8 hours ago

> So no responsible disclosure, I see.

Huh?

Comment by rickdeckard 7 hours ago

You stated that you're "sitting on one that doesn't even require an internet connection [..] I'm waiting for my model to go EOL before I release it"

I read this as "Wait until the model is EOL, hoping it won't be disclosed and fixed until then and also not fixed afterwards"

Is this not what you meant to say?

Comment by mort96 7 hours ago

Responsible disclosure makes sense when the user and the manufacturer have the same goal of the product being secure. Jailbreaking is a case where the user and the manufacturer have opposing goals: the user wants to be in charge their hardware, the manufacturer wants to prevent the user from being in charge of their own hardware. Responsible disclosure doesn't make sense, the manufacturer would just patch the vulnerability before users could use it.

If manufacturers had a sanctioned way for the user to get root access to their own hardware, responsible disclosure would've made sense, but as it is, vulnerabilities are a useful tool for the owner of the device.

Comment by rcxdude 6 hours ago

Exactly. This control-freak nature of manufacturers is sadly what makes me cheer for the security holes much of the time.

Comment by p0lychromatic 5 hours ago

Yet here we are, in this thread, discussing why LG is spying on us.

While some stuff are legit issues such as ADR, people now think they are wire-tapping. Because somebody used a rooted device to show-case recording silently through their device.

Can you blame corporations having this control-freak nature when shit like this happens?

It's stuff like this that likely pushes corporations now to invest more into device security, and locking down their stuff more.

Good for security and the corporation.

Maybe mid-term good for you consumer, because they might get more cautious with tracking stuff.

But long-term bad for you consumer, too, because they will make sure to lock down their devices better.

Comment by mort96 5 hours ago

The best solution is obviously sanctioned rooting so that vulnerabilities can be freely shared with manufacturers and fixed.

But that's not going to happen.

Comment by rcxdude 5 hours ago

The solution to misleading reports about your software isn't more opacity, though, quite the opposite. If they were transparent about what they were doing then there would be much less room for speculation and misleading reports.

(And yeah, as pointed out by another comment, if you officially allow users full control of their devices, you are less likely to have people sitting on undisclosed exploits so that they can get it without your help, and as a bonus you have an easier argument for why you are not liable for what someone does with that control)

Comment by croon 5 hours ago

> While some stuff are legit issues such as ADR, people now think they are wire-tapping. Because somebody used a rooted device to show-case recording silently through their device.

> Can you blame corporations having this control-freak nature when shit like this happens?

Is "shit like this" referring to the corporation spying on the user, or the user discovering it? Because one happened before the other, and so impossibly could have caused the former.

> It's stuff like this that likely pushes corporations now to invest more into device security, and locking down their stuff more.

Or they could just sell the device users want, and not sell their users.

Comment by rickdeckard 6 hours ago

To me as a user, responsible disclosure is most-valuable for every vulnerability that could be exploited remotely without me being in control.

The video draws exactly that picture, a nefarious actor, remotely taking control over my TV and recording Audio from it

Comment by mort96 5 hours ago

To me as a user, responsible disclosure takes away my right to do what I want with my hardware.

Comment by MrGilbert 7 hours ago

This would be one way to interpret it. Another way would be: "If the model is EOL, the potential attack surface gets lower, because you cannot buy it any longer and the amount of devices in use will reduce over time."

On a different note: Are you, in any way, affiliated with LG? You read to me as someone who is "unhappy" with the findings.

Comment by rickdeckard 5 hours ago

The attack-surface doesn't get lower, it just doesn't continue to increase UNLESS the same vulnerability is not carried over to other products.

The attack-surface only gets lower when the TV is no longer in use and is disposed. That doesn't happen at EOL, customers don't suddenly throw away their TVs after 2 years.

I'm happy with the findings and hope that it gains momentum, but unhappy with the dilution of the matter with speculation, assumptions and sensationalism, because it allows the vendor to wiggle out of it and wait for attention to wind down.

I would prefer a clear spotlight to be shined on #1 the ad-networks business model of TV-manufacturers and #2 the security of their (very powerful) products.

If the process results in regulation which also requires the TV manufacturer to offer root-access to the consumer to verify and control its operations, I would be overjoyed.

But this is unfortunately not a subject of the current narrative at all, it will actually result in the opposite (more effort to lock-down the OS to prevent future sensationalism reporting)

Comment by Diti 6 hours ago

Not disclosing a vulnerability you found to the manufacturer (while the product can still hopefully be patched) is “not responsible”. I think that’s what the person is trying to say.

Comment by Retr0id 5 hours ago

It seems that some people do not appreciate the amount of labour that can be required to turn knowledge of a vulnerability into an actionable bug report. (Before someone says "ask an LLM to do it", LG has that option available to them, too)

It is certainly not work that I would do to benefit a many-billion dollar company, for ~free. I may do it to benefit device owners such as myself, instead.

LG is solely responsible for the security of the products that they choose to sell.

Comment by hypfer 1 hour ago

Looking forward to your writeup/talk/whatever. Root via analog(?) RF signal sounds amazing.

Comment by Brian_K_White 3 hours ago

Why do you even ask? Why do you even think this is at all unlikely?

It doesn't even matter what exploits are publicly known and closed at any given moment. What we know is that at every given moment, no matter what security hole was just found and closed right now in some device, always later it turns out there were others not yet known by you but known and used by someone. This has been everything with an OS for 40 years. So yes, of course, right now, on every tv, and everything else, from any manufacturer, there are "grade 9-10" exploits just sitting there. It's the default state not some exception.

Comment by mort96 7 hours ago

why would I want to keep the software on my TV updated, it's a screen

Comment by dgellow 6 hours ago

It’s a whole computer that runs YouTube, Netflix, Amazon video, etc

Comment by mort96 6 hours ago

I've never used a TV that way, that's the job of whatever is connected to the TV. But if you do use your TV like that, didn't those things work when you got it? Why do you need software updates?

Comment by bcraven 5 hours ago

I think you're being deliberately obtuse. You would update software on a TV for all the same reasons you update software on any other device: improved performance, better compatibly, new features, etc

Comment by mort96 5 hours ago

No. My computer is a tool I actively use. The TV is an almost entirely passive consumption device. Was performance not good enough when it was new? If it wasn't, will the new software versions truly buck the trend we've seen in software for the past few decades and improve performance? What new features are necessary? Video playback has been a solved problem for the past few decades.

Comment by sersi 5 hours ago

With streaming apps unfortunately you can run in compatibility issues if you do not update. So for people using the TV for streaming, it does make sense to at least update that part of the software.

Comment by mort96 5 hours ago

And if a streaming app stops working due to a compatibility issue, I might consider updating if it's a streaming app I use a lot. If I can update the app independent of the OS, great; if not, it might mean an OS update.

Comment by Brian_K_White 3 hours ago

All of the software on a tv is a client to some service, and the service changes constantly, and so must also the client whether anyone likes it or not, and you already knew all of this perfectly well.

Comment by franga2000 8 hours ago

These vulnerabilities only get fixed because they're used by public rooting tools. If blackhat hackers found them instead, kept quiet about them and used them carefully, they'd never be fixed.

Comment by toast0 8 hours ago

> So, if one were to keep software up to date on their TV,

I presume LG is like most vendors and stops issuing updates for older models after a while. It's pretty hard to keep software up to date when the vendor stops issuing updates.

Comment by LoganDark 8 hours ago

I read the documentation and it appears that the only reason it doesn't still work is because development was "postponed for a few months" back in 2021. Presumably there is still the possibility of exploits on the latest versions, it's just nobody's bothered yet.

Comment by rickdeckard 8 hours ago

Thanks for the write-up, it reflects my own impression of the video.

The video is quite a mixed set of topics mangled together, which is a pity because IMO a cleaner separation would be more beneficial to get the point across.

They should have decided to set the focus on a specific area and then present every finding around that, i.e.:

1. The Ad data-collecting platform TV-manufacturers are operating, what data they collect and how they use it.

2. The vulnerabilities of the OS in a SmartTV, and the potential issues to exploit them for malicious purposes.

3. The general behavior of the device when connected to your network, with features like voice control, App control, Smart Home etc. enabled, and how it may expose information about yourself.

All the points and scenarios in the video might be valid, but they jump between those scopes and imply that its all the same, weakening the whole investigation.

If I'm LG and forced to respond to this, I can easily focus on dissecting the voice-input topic as a mere demonstration of the feature and how rooting the TV beforehand just showed the local process of handling it, steering the narrative away from the (IMO) much more important topics...

Comment by jeffbee 8 hours ago

Yeah if GN wants to keep my attention on this topic they need to edit out all the stuff about normal Wi-Fi stack behaviors and normal local device discovery behaviors. They didn't need to pad their feature-length video with these non-issues.

Comment by rickdeckard 7 hours ago

And how they asked the device for voice-input for a websearch via the UI, and the device proceeded to perform voice transcription, filling the searchbox with everything that was said...

Comment by rcxdude 6 hours ago

They are pretty infamously overly verbose.

Comment by bakugo 6 hours ago

GN has sadly been trending towards overly long, rambly clickbait videos in recent years, in line with the rest of Youtube. Most of their videos could easily convey the same information with a third of the length.

It's unfortunate, because they're one of the few voices speaking out about issues like this.

Comment by expedition32 4 hours ago

Apparently 40 percent of Dutch fifteen year olds can't read. So YouTube is unfortunately the future.

Comment by thefz 1 hour ago

> normal Wi-Fi stack behaviors and normal local device discovery behaviors

Sending to LG a JSON with a list of all the devices in the current broadcast domain is NOT "normal local device discovery behaviors" and everyone should be irate about it. Stop normalizing capitalism surveillance.

Comment by taylorfinley 8 hours ago

This reads like a PR crisis management firm planted article. it probably isn't, but it reads like one. It muddies the waters with vague implications and suggests we cannot infer anything from encrypted packets. If your screen is showing content sourced over HDMI and the packets are heading to the ACR endpoint, I think it's safe to infer HDMI is being ACR'd.

Comment by pmlnr 8 hours ago

> If you root or jailbreak your devices, you've, by their very nature, broken their security.

Wow. Please stop spreading things like this.

Not having root means not owning a device you paid for and have in your home.

Comment by p0lychromatic 7 hours ago

I know people here do not want to hear it, but it is a very two-sided sword.

Of course root allows you to tinker with your device and make it run what you want, but:

- Rooted devices make devices unpredictable. As shown in the video: How do you trust that your hotel/AirBnB is not using root on _their_ TV to use its microphone to spy on you? Or actually records your video output (instead of "just" ACRing it)?

- Re-selling: How do you know that TV you bought is untampered? How do you know it does not have software with malware installed that steals your credentials?

Comment by cryptonym 7 hours ago

With an on premise device, the game is already lost. They may plant a separate mic device inside the TV, or elsewhere. Rooted TV doesn't really impact BnB security model.

Comment by pmlnr 5 hours ago

> Rooted devices make devices unpredictable.

you/we/me not having root while, for example, Google Play Services does on invalidates everything you said.

Comment by p0lychromatic 5 hours ago

Isn't that more predictable though, if you know that Google Play Services does shady stuff? :)

Compared to, say, random Magisk modules or some random crap the OEM developed?

Comment by sdcfgy 5 hours ago

All of those things are: you don’t.

If it’s a problem, unplug it.

If it’s a problem, don’t buy it.

Works for everything!

Comment by like_any_other 7 hours ago

> How do you know that TV you bought is untampered?

Many rooted devices display during boot a warning that they have been rooted. This is a problem that has been solved for more than a decade, but manufacturers pretend not to know the solution, because they are actively hostile to user freedom.

> How do you trust that your hotel/AirBnB is not using root on _their_ TV to use its microphone to spy on you? Or actually records your video output (instead of "just" ACRing it)?

Let's pretend there aren't plenty other ways they could spy on you. If it's bad if a hotel does it, why is it okay if LG does it? Do you honestly trust LG, and the thousands of "partners" that they sell your data to, and every government whose warrants they have to honor?

Your argument reduces to "if the warden lets us out of our jail cells, who will make sure we behave?"

Comment by p0lychromatic 6 hours ago

> Many rooted devices display during boot a warning that they have been rooted.

Usually, this happens after a bootloader unlock because then verified boot is disabled. You can still have a rooted device and not break verified, resulting in no warning. See: jailbroken iPhones.

I wouldn't say it's a solved problem. Just have to find an exploit that works with verified / attested boot.

And device manufactures are getting more and more restrictive here, too. Why do you think that is?

> Let's pretend there aren't plenty other ways they could spy on you.

Sure, of course there are other ways to spy on people. But as we see here: If the device itself does it, then we like to blame LG. If they used an exploit to do that, then we blame LG's shitty security.

If a hotel owner installed a microphone inside one or their specific TVs, then we blame the hotel owner at least - not LG.

> If it's bad if a hotel does it, why is it okay if LG does it?

It doesn't seem like it is okay. We are discussing this right here.

> Do you honestly trust LG, and the thousands of "partners" that they sell your data to, and every government whose warrants they have to honor?

Do I trust LG more than a shady hotel / BnB owner or eBay seller? Yes. Do I trust them fully? No. It's not fully binary, I'd say.

> Your argument reduces to "if the warden lets us out of our jail cells, who will make sure we behave?"

I am just trying to say, it's really not that binary. You can extend that to other places whenever attestation is involved.

Do I like Linux and open platforms? Sure! Tampering is fun! Do I hate people using open platforms to scrape my websites and constantly cause load, steal my content and use that for AI training? Also, yes.

But how can I fight that? We run into CAPTCHAs, Cloudflare, Anubis and co. Now that issue is reduced, but the openness is also gone.

And you always see in tech spaces we rather want "dumb" devices rather than smart devices, because we cannot trust them.

Attestation buys you more trust, but at the cost of openness.

Comment by sersi 5 hours ago

> I wouldn't say it's a solved problem. Just have to find an exploit that works with verified / attested boot

In general though on devices that are rootable, white-hat hackers are more inclined to responsibly disclose vulnerabilities instead of releasing them as a way to root said device. So having a rootable phone does increase security.

What doesn't increase security is when bank apps that are essential to daily life start detecting that a device has been rooted and force a lot of people into using closed source extensions to hide the fact that the devices is rooted.

Comment by p0lychromatic 5 hours ago

The thing is, the whole topic is not fully binary. I agree with you that having a rootable phone does increase security in certain ways.

> What doesn't increase security is when bank apps that are essential to daily life start detecting that a device has been rooted and force a lot of people into using closed source extensions to hide the fact that the devices is rooted.

I'll ask naively: Why not? I can come up with a bunch of arguments why it does help the bank and why it might reduce the risk of certain attacks.

Comment by armadyl 7 hours ago

Honestly in a lot of cases people here are too ideologically blinded to see the logic that you’re laying out. It’s the same mental gymnastics that let many here praise something like GrapheneOS yet turn around and screech over it not allowing root which is nearly central to its entire security architecture.

But in this case… I don’t know. The OEM is so actively hostile you might be better off just taking the risk with root if you must purchase it at all (and physically removing the radio/microphone hardware not being an option).

Comment by mort96 7 hours ago

Wait who are these people who praise GrapheneOS but complain about it not allowing root? It sounds like you're conflating two groups of people

Comment by dugite-code 46 minutes ago

Agreed the modern push against root access is a prime example of attempted enshitification lock-in.

If you don't have root rights, you don't really own it. All other arguments are talking past this key point.

Comment by rickdeckard 7 hours ago

True, but rooting the device de-facto means breaking the trust-chain of the OS.

The inevitable outcome of this video is that TV vendors are pushed to harden the security and preserve the trust-chain, because part of the (valid) claim is that nefarious actors may break the security to use the device for spying on you.

With support from an actual journalist, it could be reframed to also emphasize the importance of controlled root-access to monitor and control the devices behavior.

But none of this was done unfortunately, and if I'm LG I don't want to see another video where someone reframes user-initiated voice-input for a web-search as spying initiative by showing some device-logs of the transcription process in parallel...

Comment by m4rtink 5 hours ago

The trust chain is long broken since the TV is spying on you a the manufacturer is bragging about them "owning the glass and the living room".

Comment by 7 hours ago

Comment by pmlnr 5 hours ago

> True, but rooting the device de-facto means breaking the trust-chain of the OS.

Like every single Microsoft laptop out there does so? Think a bit harder before sentences like this, please.

Comment by badsectoracula 9 hours ago

> If he can demonstrate someone remotely jailbreaking your TV, or flipping on those settings without you knowing or doing anything to your TV, that would be a far more damning issue, in my view.

Do you actually want a channel with 2.66 million subscribers to show how to get remote access to TVs used by millions of people? :-P

Comment by Krutonium 9 hours ago

I'm pretty sure they DID mention that they can remotely flip settings. So that's a thing for sure.

Comment by m4rtink 5 hours ago

Yeah, why not ? LG should make their stuff secure (by not shipping bloat and spyware), so it is on them.

Comment by jaimex2 8 hours ago

That would be against Youtubes terms, the video would get pulled.

Comment by Arcuru 8 hours ago

demonstrate != explain?

Comment by supriyo-biswas 8 hours ago

They do show using https://github.com/raws0kil/jsbro-autoroot to get root access. For anyone interested, that pointer is enough, I guess.

Comment by VCFundedGenYer 1 hour ago

> If you root or jailbreak your devices, you've, by their very nature, broken their security.

Yeah no this is just incorrect. There's many cases where jailbreaking actually fixes issues when a vendor abandons the platform. It also enables usefulness for a product long after it's been EOL'd.

Comment by bob1029 9 hours ago

> What am I meant to take away from this? If you look at other IoT devices, they’re going to show the same thing. But here it’s presented as bad. Why?

The influencer economy is a bit soaked these days. You need to crank up the stakes to keep the viewer's attention.

Comment by fulafel 8 hours ago

Seems incoherent. What exactly is the bad idea and why? Are they rediscovering "don't run stuff needlessly as root"?

Comment by p0lychromatic 8 hours ago

The bad idea is that by rooting, you can (of course) turn your device into a 24/7 surveillance device that sends voice and video data everywhere.

That does not mean that LG does all that by default.

Comment by t_mahmood 4 hours ago

You're just jumping around a single point about rooting, whereas the video shows it's logging all the devices, with their ip, name, even detecting someone being in a Teams call. And you are as with the article, trying to sidetrack all of it by focusing on rooting.

Comment by nokeya 7 hours ago

Because of course it does. You are fighting the wrong side, they should proof they are good, not you defend them.

Comment by m4rtink 5 hours ago

Yeah, it is insane a fully open source firmware with reproducible builds is not a minimum standard for something as sensitive as a modern smart TV.

Comment by p0lychromatic 5 hours ago

It is not the minimum standard for computers. Why should it be for TVs?

Comment by m4rtink 2 hours ago

It should be the minimum standard everywhere.

Comment by Havoc 5 hours ago

I’m convinced the only thing saving us from hardware manufacturers security incompetence is NAT

Comment by pid0x17 4 hours ago

I am still somewhat new to networking concepts (currently reading Computer Networking: A Top Down Approach by Kurose & Ross), and as far as I understood, most IPv6 networks don't have a NAT, or did I misunderstand? If that is the case, that means homes using IPv6 have globally routable IP addresses for their connected devices, right?

Would the router's firewall protect it if it denies incoming connections?

Comment by liveoneggs 2 hours ago

Yeah you just need to remember to login to your totally-not-corrupt ISP's definitely-easy-to-use firewall manager app and setup your firewall rules to prevent hostile governments from using your microwave as a passive listening device, which they sell back to your own government for probable cause, to arrest you for cooking the wrong brand of popcorn.

Comment by LoganDark 8 hours ago

They rooted the TV to study it. They're not saying you're in sudden danger of attackers rooting your TV and running commands over SSH. They're saying there's evidence that certain data is collected when you wouldn't want it to be, and there are any number of potential vulnerabilities that could provide hackers access, on top of LG potentially having access as well which you also probably wouldn't want.

Comment by p0lychromatic 8 hours ago

They still run the audio recording manually through SSH and then claim that your TV is spying on your private conversations "silently".

Otherwise, they start a voice command service (clearly displayed on the screen) and then say your TV is recording on your conversation. Like duh, of course my TV starts recording voice when I use voice commands.

And of course you have to trust LG with their TV and (not) having access. That same logic applies to every different company.

Comment by headsman771 2 hours ago

I don't think you paid very close attention. They clearly showed it transcribing audio when the TV was "switched off". And they weren't "running audio recording through SSH", SSH was just incidental to watch the audio recording and transcription that was happening.

Comment by wewewedxfgdf 7 hours ago

I'll save you the time and effort trying to work out the point being made:

GamersNexus did an investigation which may overstate the privacy threat posed by LG smart TVs.

Comment by laylower 4 hours ago

Why is this a post even? What is it that the author is trying to say or take a view on?

They literally write "Now, I’m not going to claim to be a network expert. I may be totally off-base, but what? Reverse DNS? I don't know what this means."

The findings are a smoking gun already.

The bar shouldn't be a video of an NSA agent or someone from LG listening your everyday life. I don't doubt this happens but we shouldn't expect gamernexus to be able to prove it.

Jesus some people with their whataboutism and nihilism.

Comment by delduca 5 hours ago

Reading this, I do not have a LG TV, but I have 3 LG AC connected to WiFi… Ouch

Comment by hypfer 7 hours ago

Semi-OT, possibly interesting:

Maintaining enemy lists like the one of Drew linked there has been illegal in Germany since 2021 as part of the government's (very necessary!) efforts against hate crimes and right-wing extremism.

Or at least that's my understanding of the law there. Maybe it's exempt based on technicalities.

In any case, I can in many cases emotionally relate to why he is doing that, but.. oof.

Comment by cassianoleal 5 hours ago

So, why is it a bad idea?

Comment by ChrisArchitect 8 hours ago

216M Spy TVs – The LG Smart TV Problem [video]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49592375

Comment by rbanffy 8 hours ago

Now I want to build a cluster of rooted WebOS TVs.

I always say any serious computer needs blinkenlights and a smart TV has literally millions of them.

Comment by lovich 8 hours ago

> Now, what he’s showing can be pretty scary. I wouldn’t want any attacker to be able to record me without knowing. But it’s important to remember the context here: earlier in the video, Wendell rooted the TV. He has full access to everything on it. To run those commands and programs, he had to log into WebOS via SSH and run them on the device. He didn't show remoting calling those commands, nor was this done on an unmodified device.

> If you root or jailbreak your devices, you've, by their very nature, broken their security. If he can demonstrate someone remotely jailbreaking your TV, or flipping on those settings without you knowing or doing anything to your TV, that would be a far more damning issue, in my view.

What is this authors point?

LG doesn’t need a root exploit to get this info because they made the fucking thing.

I read the article and then grepped for “Texas” to see if I missed it. The author never mentions the fact that this data collection was only found out initially because of a Texas government lawsuit that LG settled on by agreeing to give “informed consent” to users about data collection and then the warnings started popping up in unexpected places.

Is the author arguing that jailbreaking your device to find out what the manufacturer can do to gather data on you is dangerous because I don’t know, questioning your corporate overlords is bad or something?

Comment by p0lychromatic 8 hours ago

Some attacks shown on the video (like the "silent" voice recording) are initiated by the people in the video manually running those commands via SSH.

This is the major issue with this video: It mixes stuff done by LG (ACR) with stuff done via rooting (audio recording). And now people think LG is 24/7 recording your conversations and uploading them somewhere. This has not been proven.

Comment by newsclues 8 hours ago

Fresh account defending a corporation.

Comment by p0lychromatic 7 hours ago

1. Ad hominem. 2. No, LG is not perfect here and their TVs are bloated as fuck and they do questionable things privacy-wise. However, that still does not mean that they listen on every conversation, as shown in the video.

That nuance is important if you value good journalism.

Otherwise if we're just our here throwing random allegations because "corp bad", might as well say LG 's TVs are turning the frickin' frogs gay.

Comment by stuaxo 7 hours ago

It's not just questionable things, its using dark patterns to do things that wouldn't stand up in court because they definitely illegal in places with data protection laws.

Sorry but such contrary takes in the face of this sort of evidence are either contrary for the sake of it or paid astroturfing.

Comment by p0lychromatic 5 hours ago

I agree on the dark patterns. And I do not claim that ACR and all the privacy violating crap bundled into modern devices is good. No, it is evil.

However, just because your TV does ACR, does not immediately mean they listen 24/7 through your TV through any conversations even if the TV is off.

That is another, also quite different level of claim.

Comment by lovich 7 hours ago

It’s the era of ai bots and coördinated agitprop from nation states.

Spend some time building your reputation before arguing for divisive topics or be ignored.

Consider it a mechanical Turk but for social trust.

Comment by p0lychromatic 5 hours ago

How do you build reputation if everyone starts tells you to build reputation first?

You have to start somewhere. Better makes sense to start looking at the arguments rather than the author.

It also helps you train your brain. Stop trusting someone solely because of who they are.

Comment by lovich 5 hours ago

This is hacker news. Not Reddit.

You can comment about anything here and build credibility.

Just don’t start on the most divisive topics.

Comment by handoflixue 5 hours ago

Four relevant bullet points from the Hacker News Guidelines:

* When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names.

* Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

* Please don't post shallow dismissals

* Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken.

And yet not once does it mention "don't start commenting on divisive topics"

Comment by sersi 5 hours ago

It's not a question of defending a corporation, it's that publishing a video that mixes true facts with facts that are not quite right weakens your argument and makes it easier for the corporation to control the narrative by pointing anything that's disingenuous.

And to be clear, I'm not defending LG here. Their terms and conditions are terrible, 'We know who's in the LG household… we own the glass' is not something that should be said by any appliance company and shows a clear lack of ethics. But if someone is going to make a video explaining what's happening it's better to stick to what LG is actually doing instead of listing potential issues without making it clear.

A rooted tv by definition has less security, if you show that you can record because you have full control over the device that only shows that there's no hardware block for the mic (which most devices in existence don't have, apple, Framework, pinephones are the exception there). It's not in anyway different from most phones and devices that people use in daily life.

Comment by nalekberov 7 hours ago

Anyone who uses GenAI for content creation, isn't worth my time. My rationale is simple: If I wanted to, I could have asked "AI" to generate that content for me, when I am spending my time consuming your content, I expect to get something unique.