Recently, reports emerged that LG TVs are sniffing around your local network, and even listening to your local environment, even when the TV is purportedly “off.” Some of those voice commands were then stored in plain text and uploaded to the internet. LG’s response? To deny everything.

For decades now we’ve documented how while “smart” TV makers are obsessed with making money off of in-home surveillance (which is now more profitable than the actual TV), they do an abysmal job protecting the data they collect. They also routinely don’t respect consumer choice when users say they don’t want to participate in the full scope of hyper-commercialized mass surveillance.

That latter point is central to a new study out of Northeastern that conducted 5,943 experiments across twelve commercial “smart” TV devices. The researchers found that most smart TVs utilize automatic content recognition (ACR), a technology that captures audio or video snapshots of viewed content and then monetizes that data to help build personalized profiles of viewers.

TV makers insist that users are supposed to be able to opt out, but the choice simply doesn’t work across a large segment of TVs. Companies like Vizio simply ignored the consumer requests entirely more often than not:

“We find that the advertised ACR opt-out fully suppresses ACR-attributable traffic on only four operating systems; on Samsung Tizen traffic consistent with ACR activity persists in more
than 60% of evaluated scenarios, and on Vizio SmartCast a content correlated endpoint hosted on Amazon Kinesis continues to receive traffic in 100% of opted-out scenarios.”

These companies have been awful for a long while now, and U.S. regulation of the sector has varied between soggy and inconsistent. Many smart TV manufacturers fail to encrypt sensitive data, or remove features if you refuse to have your daily viewing habits measured and monetized (by say, disconnecting your TV from the internet).

Vizio was fined $2.2 million by the FTC back in 2017 for failing to tell customers that their televisions were spying on them. The company also wound up facing a $17 million lawsuit that wound up giving consumers somewhere between $13 and $31 (lawyers in the case saw $5.6 million in fees).

The researchers say since they can’t see the precise scope of what’s being collected due to encryption, they’re unsure whether Vizio is technically violating its FTC agreement (not that we have a current FTC that would care if they were):

“The opt-out setting has no observable effect on traffic sent to this endpoint; however, we cannot inspect the payload due to encryption so we cannot confirm whether this violates the FTC settlement.”

Results of whether opting out of ACR tracking actually stopped ACR tracking were all over the map. Roku, for example, ignores opt-out requests when users are watching Roku’s own channels. None of the smart TV vendors track Netflix viewing for fear of violating agreements with the streaming giant. Samsung’s opt out function was more likely to actually work when a user was watching antenna broadcasts.

On two Smart TV platforms, personal viewing data collected by ACR remains unencrypted, despite years of bad press and scandal on the subject. Many appear to be violating the law, but because U.S. regulatory oversight has been gutted, they see no meaningful accountability. That includes smart TV OS’ like VIDAA, which is most prominently found on Hisense and Toshiba smart TVs:

“VIDAA OS sends ACR data to servers run by Unruly over MQTT without encryption, so anyone on the network path between the TV and those servers can read it. Each message carries a Client ID, a permanent identifier for the TV that can’t be reset, along with the time zone, the app name, the input (antenna, HDMI), the antenna channel and an audio fingerprint.

The app name alone can be revealing. We saw ACR on apps such as VIDAA Kids, which raises concerns under the U.S. children’s privacy law (COPPA), and Christianity and Money. VIDAA’s own HOME OS app sent show and film titles in place of the app name.”

Keep in mind these researchers just focused on ACR — or video, image, or audio snippets taken to track your viewing and build a profile on you. There are numerous other ways smart TVs can track you — and numerous other avenues via which your traffic is being surveilled by everybody along the chain, including your telecom provider.

This persists because companies do not fear U.S. regulators, because U.S. regulators have been largely lobotomized via corruption. The United States also remains too corrupt to base even a baseline privacy law for the internet era or regulate the data brokers that further monetize much of this data. Still the researchers were nice enough to provide regulators a path, should they someday choose to do their jobs.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/53941212

A Maryland hairdresser who voted for Donald Trump in 2024 after believing his promises to lower living costs said she has since lost her home and car, struggled to pay her credit cards, and watched customers disappear from her business. Now, she bitterly regrets helping return him to the White House, declaring that only the devil could govern with such cruelty.

Celia Salmerón, 58, accused the Trump administration of bringing hardship rather than the financial relief he promised voters. She immigrated from El Salvador as a child, and now runs a hair salon in a working-class Maryland neighbourhood with a large Hispanic population.

'He promised to give us money. But he didn't give us anything. What he gave us this time were problems,' Salmerón recently told a media outlet, adding that she had been unable to keep up with her debts and had lost almost everything she worked to build.

'Ever since Trump came in, I have been bankrupt. I have lost everything: my house, my car. I can't pay my credit cards,' she said.

A Maryland hairdresser who voted for Donald Trump in 2024 after believing his promises to lower living costs said she has since lost her home and car, struggled to pay her credit cards, and watched customers disappear from her business. Now, she bitterly regrets helping return him to the White House, declaring that only the devil could govern with such cruelty.

Celia Salmerón, 58, accused the Trump administration of bringing hardship rather than the financial relief he promised voters. She immigrated from El Salvador as a child, and now runs a hair salon in a working-class Maryland neighbourhood with a large Hispanic population.

'He promised to give us money. But he didn't give us anything. What he gave us this time were problems,' Salmerón recently told a media outlet, adding that she had been unable to keep up with her debts and had lost almost everything she worked to build.

'Ever since Trump came in, I have been bankrupt. I have lost everything: my house, my car. I can't pay my credit cards,' she said.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/53940728

Jeffrey Epstein besty Mark Zuckerberg will keep protecting his friends & their filth as much as he can. Meta and their platforms haven proven a proven to be powerful tools for pedos around the world, we need to fight them wherever, however we can, until we stop them.

DeMeta with others now!

Recently, reports emerged that LG TVs are sniffing around your local network, and even listening to your local environment, even when the TV is purportedly “off.” Some of those voice commands were then stored in plain text and uploaded to the internet. LG’s response? To deny everything.

For decades now we’ve documented how while “smart” TV makers are obsessed with making money off of in-home surveillance (which is now more profitable than the actual TV), they do an abysmal job protecting the data they collect. They also routinely don’t respect consumer choice when users say they don’t want to participate in the full scope of hyper-commercialized mass surveillance.

That latter point is central to a new study out of Northeastern that conducted 5,943 experiments across twelve commercial “smart” TV devices. The researchers found that most smart TVs utilize automatic content recognition (ACR), a technology that captures audio or video snapshots of viewed content and then monetizes that data to help build personalized profiles of viewers.

TV makers insist that users are supposed to be able to opt out, but the choice simply doesn’t work across a large segment of TVs. Companies like Vizio simply ignored the consumer requests entirely more often than not:

“We find that the advertised ACR opt-out fully suppresses ACR-attributable traffic on only four operating systems; on Samsung Tizen traffic consistent with ACR activity persists in more
than 60% of evaluated scenarios, and on Vizio SmartCast a content correlated endpoint hosted on Amazon Kinesis continues to receive traffic in 100% of opted-out scenarios.”

These companies have been awful for a long while now, and U.S. regulation of the sector has varied between soggy and inconsistent. Many smart TV manufacturers fail to encrypt sensitive data, or remove features if you refuse to have your daily viewing habits measured and monetized (by say, disconnecting your TV from the internet).

Vizio was fined $2.2 million by the FTC back in 2017 for failing to tell customers that their televisions were spying on them. The company also wound up facing a $17 million lawsuit that wound up giving consumers somewhere between $13 and $31 (lawyers in the case saw $5.6 million in fees).

The researchers say since they can’t see the precise scope of what’s being collected due to encryption, they’re unsure whether Vizio is technically violating its FTC agreement (not that we have a current FTC that would care if they were):

“The opt-out setting has no observable effect on traffic sent to this endpoint; however, we cannot inspect the payload due to encryption so we cannot confirm whether this violates the FTC settlement.”

Results of whether opting out of ACR tracking actually stopped ACR tracking were all over the map. Roku, for example, ignores opt-out requests when users are watching Roku’s own channels. None of the smart TV vendors track Netflix viewing for fear of violating agreements with the streaming giant. Samsung’s opt out function was more likely to actually work when a user was watching antenna broadcasts.

On two Smart TV platforms, personal viewing data collected by ACR remains unencrypted, despite years of bad press and scandal on the subject. Many appear to be violating the law, but because U.S. regulatory oversight has been gutted, they see no meaningful accountability. That includes smart TV OS’ like VIDAA, which is most prominently found on Hisense and Toshiba smart TVs:

“VIDAA OS sends ACR data to servers run by Unruly over MQTT without encryption, so anyone on the network path between the TV and those servers can read it. Each message carries a Client ID, a permanent identifier for the TV that can’t be reset, along with the time zone, the app name, the input (antenna, HDMI), the antenna channel and an audio fingerprint.

The app name alone can be revealing. We saw ACR on apps such as VIDAA Kids, which raises concerns under the U.S. children’s privacy law (COPPA), and Christianity and Money. VIDAA’s own HOME OS app sent show and film titles in place of the app name.”

Keep in mind these researchers just focused on ACR — or video, image, or audio snippets taken to track your viewing and build a profile on you. There are numerous other ways smart TVs can track you — and numerous other avenues via which your traffic is being surveilled by everybody along the chain, including your telecom provider.

This persists because companies do not fear U.S. regulators, because U.S. regulators have been largely lobotomized via corruption. The United States also remains too corrupt to base even a baseline privacy law for the internet era or regulate the data brokers that further monetize much of this data. Still the researchers were nice enough to provide regulators a path, should they someday choose to do their jobs.

cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/12260539

Britain should be prepared for an AI-powered cyberattack on its critical national infrastructure in the next two years, the UK's National Cyber Security Centre said on Tuesday, adding that China was likely the best equipped to conduct such operations.

Richard Horne, chief executive of the NCSC, which is part of the GCHQ spy agency, said far too many organisations and supply chains in Britain had got away with "doing tech on the cheap" for decades, leaving them vulnerable.

...

"But we must be clear that is not because AI has invented new ways to attack us, but because vulnerabilities that have been tolerated for far too long can now be discovered and exploited at a scale that was once unimaginable."

In its annual report (pdf), the NCSC said it was highly likely there would be  a ransomware attack involving AI-powered malware by 2028 on the nation's critical infrastructure.

During that same period, it warned that AI use by hostile actors was also set to enhance the scale and efficiency of their operations.

...

govdigital eG has awarded IONOS a four-year framework contract under KoDaS, the abbreviation for a collaboration and file storage system. The service delivered under it is built on Nextcloud and sold as Nextcloud Workspace.

It is meant for schools and school authorities in the German states of Berlin, Hamburg, Bremen, North Rhine-Westphalia, Rhineland-Palatinate, and Hesse. Other German states can join later, and schools are not mandated to implement it.

How the deal works

IONOS is the main contractor. It is tasked with delivering and operating the service, running the cloud infrastructure located in German data centers, and building it all on Nextcloud's open source software.

The tender notice for KoDaS sets a maximum value of 67.5 million euros and a maximum term of 48 months from the award. Nextcloud's announcement names the six states and their schools as the main parties who can order, leaving room for other states to be added later.

The announcement does not say what the contract will actually be worth. 📝

The notice calls for procuring software available under an OSI-approved open source license, citing digital sovereignty, lasting availability, and the ability to switch providers.

Among its asks for bidders are ISO 27001 certification, at least 10 million euros in turnover, liability insurance of at least 5 million euros, and a reference project with at least 10,000 active users and fully separated tenants.

For the features, the notice calls for central file hosting and sharing, a browser-based office suite for working on documents together, calendar and contact management, and an integrated email client.

Pricing depends on how many people actively use the service, and it is split into five tiers that start at the up to 50,000 users mark, ending above 500,000. No school authority has to commit to a set volume up front, so each can begin with its current users and grow from there.

Nextcloud's main argument is that public institutions should have alternatives to proprietary platforms so they keep control of their data. The company also believes students who start out using open source tools are less likely to reach for big-vendor products afterward.

We have seen this already

Other German institutions are also reworking their software. Last year, we heard that almost 80% of Schleswig-Holstein's state government workplaces had switched away from Microsoft.

Mecklenburg-Vorpommern is replacing SharePoint with a self-hosted Nextcloud that around 5,000 employees use today, and the state plans to bring that to 50,000 across the public sector.

Then there's the federal Deutschland-Stack, published by the Federal Ministry for Digital Transformation and Government Modernization, which covers all levels of public administration and permits use of only ODF and PDF/UA for documents.

I anticipate more such moves across Europe as governments realize that keeping sensitive data with providers that fall under foreign law can expose it to access they have no say over, irrespective of where the servers are located.

The ongoing US midterms could also shift the conversation depending on who comes out ahead.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/53940728

Jeffrey Epstein besty Mark Zuckerberg will keep protecting his friends & their filth as much as he can. Meta and their platforms haven proven a proven to be powerful tools for pedos around the world, we need to fight them wherever, however we can, until we stop them.

DeMeta with others now!

cross-posted from: https://cake.kobel.fyi/c/anythingbutmetric@discuss.tchncs.de/p/247819/new-ai-data-center-is-so-huge-that-it-ll-generate-the-heat-of-23-atomic-bombs-every-si

23 °AB