Robot vacuum cleaners hacked to spy on, insult owners

[dang]

Hacked Robot Vacuums Across the U.S. Started Yelling Slurs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41815055 - Oct 2024 (1 comment)

Robot Vacuums Hacked to Shout Slurs at Their Owners - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41812546 - Oct 2024 (1 comment)

Insecure Deebot robot vacuums collect photos and audio to train AI - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41753983 - Oct 2024 (37 comments)

ABC News hacks into popular robot vacuum, watches owner through camera - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41735871 - Oct 2024 (138 comments)

[qmr]

It's almost like you shouldn't connect random ass appliances to the internet.

My ancient roombas clean just fine with no cameras, internet, or AI nonsense.

[badgersnake]

Yep, I was gonna say exactly the same thing. Don’t connect it to the internet, just don’t do it.

[deepfriedchokes]

God bless these teenage degenerates and their endlessly creative fuckery. They bring more color to the world.

[marcosdumay]

More importantly, they are raising consciousness of fundamental problems that can lead to very damaging consequences by doing cheap pranks with trivial consequences.

[woodrowbarlow]

... for invading someone's privacy and screaming racist obscenities in their home? i vehemently disagree.

[delichon]

My Roborock has a three button combination you have to press on the bot to enable remote viewing. I suppose once you do that all bets are off. But at least it requires access to the hardware and is off by default. Better if you could configure it to disable again after each use or periodically.

I'd really want this feature to keep an eye on my pets if I work away from home again. I could see buying a bot just for that.

[joe_the_user]

How do you know those buttons go to hardwired switches rather than being controlled by software that could be remotely hacked?

[iAMkenough]

My pup would be tormented by the vacuum following it around while I'm not there. She gets freaked out enough by a stationary PTZ camera on my bookshelf.

[gnabgib]

Related Insecure Deebot robot vacuums collect photos and audio to train AI (82 points, 15 days ago, 37 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41753983

[gedy]

These darn things don't need to be "cloud enabled", or even wifi. Please make them Bluetooth, etc only.

These dopey use cases of needing to trigger a cleaning while miles away have always seemed like a stretch.

[Syonyk]

Right. But the actual use case of being able to sell your home's floorplan and general cleaning schedule/behaviors/etc to advertisers requires cloud functionality, so you need some fig leaf to cover up the requirement...

I agree, local only would be great. But that's not aligned with the "sell a product once, sell the data collected forever!" model that most modern consumer tech products operate on.

[amelius]

Even if they're Bluetooth-only: AdTech will invent some way to send Ethernet packets over it, sooner than you might expect.

[LinuxBender]

Maybe the fact it shows how these devices can spy might educate people on what IoT's are doing all day every day in their homes and around their kids. Would this be considered hactivism?

I'm half curious if they got some of the idea from Michael Reeves [1].

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvz3LRK263E [video][11 mins][language, wear headphones maybe]

[dijit]

I’m immediately envisioning the watch dogs 2 “jumper” bot.

https://youtu.be/f5oKFufx2Z0?si=xGMEkAMZRgIqJuH_

[moepstar]

Put Valetudo on it - https://valetudo.cloud/

Robot incompatible? That’d be a hard pass…

[jbaber]

This looks great. Hard to find used robots it supports.

[jowea]

I was almost starting to think hacking had gotten too professional and commercialized for script kiddies to exist.

[accrual]

If anything, I'd expect it to proliferate with the easy access to GitHub and now LLMs. When I was a script kiddie we had to find tools on various forums attached as a .zip/.tgz and hope the supplied .exe/bin wasn't a virus. :)