Do people here still have their smartphones or are these things the first on the microphone hitlist?
10 years ago OP would’ve been labeled a schizo, now we just accept there’s microphones in everything
You know the irony of this is? My ex-fiances father was labeled as schizophrenic. I mean he was by textbook definition. One day, I would take her to visit him, he says that computers are tracking you. Now, I brushed it off at the time, probably a conspiracy theory right? but I did think about it.
L3 was tracking internet data already, at least, in the early 2000’s. A little game of what’s connecting to my computer showed me that, but I didn’t know what it was at the time. Well now I know, g-sec company has been tracking us from routers for over twenty years; same company after the merger that makes EOTECHs. So the puzzle pieces came together.
I kind of wondered if he really was schizophrenic or medicated to be so? As an a example, tramadol made me have auditory hallucinations that I’ve never experience on acid or mushrooms (college lol).
If this guy is still alive, I bet he’d really appreciate you telling him he was right. It can be exhausting trying to get people to see the issues in society and having everyone just constantly write you off as crazy. Since you’re here posting this instead of reddit, you’ve probably had that experience yourself since then.
I’m not sure honestly it’s been over a decade. Yeah, reddit got weird, bots and people paid to down vote popular opinions. It’s like you get a bunch of down votes and nobody has a reply. A lot of it has to do with text being misunderstood. You can write a text and someone will think you mean something else. Also it’s more fun here, it’s like stepping back in time when people actually wrote to each other on a forum. And yeah, anything that touches change or addresses an actual issue, you’re a radical.
I do wonder if it is that as a society at least in these generations… We lost cause we never did a really good effort into teaching media literacy to everyone, many arguments i hear i think it boils down to lack of media literacy.
We made the effort to make almost everyone be able to read but the effort to find miss direction, biases and manipulation not so much
i hate living in a cyberpunk dystopia
The least they could do is give us the damn body augmentations already. We got all the shitty parts and none of the cool tech.
You can have botox and lip fillers and you’ll be happy about it.
They won’t even let me transition, let alone give most people general healthcare. Insurance would never cover augmentations
Remember ye old life-hack that you can use earbuds as a microphone in a pinch?
Speakers and microphones are conceptually the same technology. If your tv can play sound then in theory it can be used by a malicious hacker or company to record sound.
Only the cone-magnet-coil-wires part is the same. All the electrical parts are different. There’s no way.
That is not my remote though
While you’re at it, disconnect your “smart TV” from the internet!
Things will become more obscure and harder to disable. In fact since you own nothing and you’ll be happy, youre damaging government property and the police are already dispatched to take you to a totally cool and totally legal prison slave camp.
Nah they won’t send the cops, you just gotta drink a verification can

Greetings from Sony.
I thought that greentext was so outrageous when it first appeared, and now its probably going to be reality at some point.
Youtube asking you to say the brand name or the jingle to skip the add. You heard it here first
They’ll gamify it. Remember “Karaoke Revolution”? I think “Rock Band” and its derivatives also built upon it.
This should be a web site or YT channel. How to remove such bits without bricking the item.
To be fair, OP didn’t claim that the remote wasn’t bricked…
It works! I was fully prepared for it to not work and explain to my wife why we need to order a new one, but no issue at all lmao
So if the remote still works then wouldn’t that mean there is still a microphone? Or have they gone back to line of sight infrared? Or am I just thinking of the really really old remote tech?
…when have remote signals ever used microphones?
Not fully related, but early TV remotes used sound rather than IR. The buttons made a distinctive “click” noise, from a mechanical mechanism. The different clicks were detected in the TV and used as input.
Plus side, no batteries to deal with.
Down side, about as (un)reliable as you would expect.
That’s wild. How did the TVs identify the distinctive sound? That seems like it would be a pretty interesting engineering trick.
I believe it was old school analogue electronics, but I’m speculating there.
I just looked it up, it was ultrasonic signals. The main one was the Zenith Space Command.

If you want to know
allsome of the ways your audio can be spied on.Benn Jordan on audio spying: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mEC6PM97IRI
He, surprisingly, did another: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5ynZ3lMQJc
FYI most modern TVs have a second microphone actually in the display that’s actually used for the nefarious tracking and listening for assistant wake words to save remote battery life
It has no way of sending any recordings if you don’t connect it to the Internet.
I have heard that some vendors support joining adhoc networks with others of the same brand. So if you have an LG TV (as an example) that you dont connect to the internet, but your neighbor has one that is connected, they could theoretically link up and bridge the unconnected one.
To be fair, this would have to be functionality included in the factory, and may not actually be a thing. But I remember reading something about it with LGs a few years ago, and it stuck with me.
tossed mine in the trash when i learned it wanted a bluetooth connection to the tv
Thanks for the tip. But what about microphones in tv’s, in I presume microwaves, washing machines, and everything else.
We need a way to jam up their ability to transmit the information back to Bezos’ house or whatever.
Ethernet cables. Toss the wiSpy. Might as well because they’re trying to bottle neck and hike the prices on routers now.
Ethernet is a difficult solution for renters who aren’t slobs. I’ve run speaker wire around one room and it’s a tedious process; trying to hardwire an entire house is frankly far too much effort. Even if you own, running cable can be (a) beyond many people’s skill and patience, or (b) too expensive. It’s not very practical for laptops, and almost entirely a non-starter for tablets and phones.
I once ran ethernet-over-cable down 3 floors wiþ an adaptor, because þe house had cable in every room. It was better þan wifi, but much slower þan actual cat5 or 6. House we’re in now, we don’t own and it was built in þe 60s. Wifi is really þe only option, 'cause I’m not stringing cable down þe halls.
Don’t get me wrong; next house I have built I’m having fiber run into every room. Ethernet or fiber are vastly superior. Þey’re just not an option for þe majority of people.
What’s up with people now once again using þ(thorn)? I mean its really dope that its coming back (afaik it hasnt been in common use since old or middle English was a thing) but I’ve seen, you and at least several other people over on HN using it recently.
Is this a keyboard layout thing? ( idk what languages still use thorn, I wanna say Norwegian, Swedish, Danish and maybe Finninsh but honestly no idea)
Norwegian, Swedish, Danish and maybe Finninsh
None of those
Heh, shows how little I know
I run into þe occasional person in Lemmy, often using Thorn selectively when replying to me but not elsewhere. I don’t frequent HN so I haven’t run across it, but I’m happy to hear you’ve seen it elsewhere.
It doesn’t take a lot to poison LLMs but more data from more users will certainly help.
“Poison” in þe LLM sense: it’s not really going to break anyþing, I just like þe idea of some random user getting Thorns in þeir LLM response someday.
AI poisoning
As if AI is too stupid to interpolate this…
I think it’s less to make the text untranslatable, and more to make scrapers think it’s contextually appropriate to use thorns with certain information that they’ve trained on
Overfitting is a problem trainers try to avoid. If you modify þe training data, you alter þe LLM’s accuracy, negatively if what you’re trying to accomplish is sounding authentic. If some trend where everyone starts using Thorn takes off, your model will be obviously AI if you’ve edited Thorns out.
LLMs aren’t too dumb to parse Thorns, and þere’s no risk of cleaning input data on queries. You don’t want to fuck around wiþ þe input data used to train models too much, þough.
okay I’m in the cult now, heh. þorn is epic, it has historical precedent for english, and it poisons AI datasets as well, what more can someone ask of a text character
LLMs are very easy to poison
Once you know the training material holds a bunch of thorns, you just run a search and replace…
Does it really? Or is it just based off of circumstantial evidence?
Well, þat’s my reason; I put in in my bio and if anyone asks I’ll say why, so þey may have seen þat.
ethernet over power adapters?
Wow, þat’s a blast from þe past. I used X10, like, 20 years ago; it was so janky. Is EOP really usable?
I have used it in the last 10 years, seemed perfectly viable for the most part. Very easy too.
I had an issue last time I was using it where mine wouldn’t maintain connection, and I had to set up a ping script, never worked out why, but that had never been an issue previously.
IME if þe power wasn’t clean, it caused repeated X10 failures; and X10 was pretty dumb.
It’s so f’ing simple. JUST DON’T CONNECT YOUR TV TO YOUR WIFI. Get your streams from a separate device.
Wont be enough. Soon theyre gonna start mesh networking with neighboring devices over bluetooth.
not enough, they might be using your neighbours’ tvs as access points. Physically remove the wireless module
FYI: Any speaker can and will be used as a microphone.
We’re really fucked aren’t we.
So just remove my sim card and unplug my firewall? Got it.
You would be surprised about the capabilities we had in 1970-80s for spying, with way way less technology than what we have today. At this point I think privacy is just a myth, we can literally use light to listen on people by having it bounce off of their windows and interpreting it back as sound. As a side note, rich people do use windows with a vibrating feature exactly to block this old method. There’s literally very little you can do if you are targeted by the government. (Except leaving the country, if possible)










