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#devices#firmware#hours#reverse#monitor#few#device#why#every#pixel
Discussion (95 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
Mind you, it found and used an existing firmware flashing library for this family of devices. But it felt amazing to do in 20 mins what would probably have been hours and hours of research and tinkering that I wasn’t interested in. I just wanted a WiFi lava lamp.
I feel like Claude has shittified a bit and ChatGPT is good and fast. Gemini remains mediocre, although it seems Google AI energy is directed elsewhere.
Note that this is an OLED monitor, so the "pixel cleaning" thing is probably some sort of anti-burn in feature. You could probably ask the AI to look at the firmware and describe what it does.
You could argue that there should be an option to disable it for people who don’t care.
Refusing to take 1 minute out of your day to learn the reason for the alert is a strange self-defeating protest next to the explanation that it was a pretty expensive monitor.
Brand new models still have this popup... what "generation" are you talking about that doesn't need this? Or is it just unnecessary on the newer models but they have it any ways due to lack of firmware updates?
IMHO OLED is a planned-obsolescence dead-end anyway; LCDs can last literally decades, maybe with a backlight replacement, but OLEDs are designed to fail in a few years. I have a few (rather expensive) pieces of test equipment with OLEDs that became unreadable after only a few years and had to be replaced (fortunately with a regular LCD, and some firmware patching), while others with old-school CSTN/TN LCDs are still fine.
Or ask for a patch so it runs after the monitor has been powered off for a while...
I use an LG OLED 42inch TV as a monitor and it has a setting to do just this.
"I have never intentionally run pixel cleaning on this monitor and I never will, I don’t care, and I would like for that overlay to go away forever."
No need for ackshually, the guy is clear with what he desires. That is, by the way, the point of TFA. I want my devices to do what I want, not what a product manager wants or what a dude on hacker news wants.
The author even dropped a comment here doubling down on his intent. That is the main problem, when the smaht guys think they know better, to a pathological extent where they tell other people what they ought to do with their things .
Not just tell, actually nag, coerce and force, often in the teeth of their own total idiocy.
"Your password needs to be between 8 and 15 characters and include an upper case letter, a symbol and a number. (And an actually good, strong password will be rejected).
See that all the time, still, in 2026. So very smaht.
Honestly if you don't have working patches, it's really not owned.
I would love to get a better understanding of how to safely iteratively patch firmware. I bricked a router last week trying to add a TFTP boot path to the boot partition. It just sucks that it's so risky.
Relatedly, we also need good glitching tools, as some firmware even for cheap devices are not available unencrypted, and flash read is disabled...
We are NOT there yet but I hope we get there soon.
> we also need good glitching tools
There are a lot already, what do you feel is missing?
I have enough basic soldering to get UART attached, but not sure what to try after that.
Equipment-wise, I currently just have a few ESP32-C3s and electronics basics kit and some basic soldering stuff.
[1] - https://mordenstar.com/projects/save-our-screens
[2] - https://github.com/xchwarze/samsung-tv-ws-api
It would have been completely not worth the effort to do this by hand for a niche device. Now, in a few hours of effort there is working code and a doc.
https://github.com/philips/supernote-typescript/blob/main/pl...
https://philips.github.io/supernote-typescript/
Which doesn't mean that the LLM definitely couldn't have accomplished it without the prior art (in either the training set or explicitly in a a web search). But it does seem to be a trend.
> And the existence of WebUSB, WebHID, and WebBluetooth mean that for some devices, depending on the specifics of which classes are used, a moment of user indiscretion in accepting a permissions prompt could permanently backdoor one of their attached devices.
> Operating systems aren’t really equipped to work with the user to ensure that a microphone stays a microphone, and doesn’t spontaneously turn into a keyboard that hits Win+R and drops a payload to steal all your data when the room is quiet enough that it can assume you aren’t watching.
In a world of USB-C everything we no longer have power supplies that are physically bound to power delivery, HDMI or DP display connections that have constrained data channels, or analogue mics, headphones, and speakers. Any device can dynamically change what it senses, does, or emits.
Cue my surprise when it turns out you can use WebHID to program a Minidisc / Net-MD device [1], so.. they never did implement that filter, apparently. I mean, certainly it is useful, but ... What The F., Google?
[1] https://web.minidisc.wiki/
Do we live in a bizarro world now where we expect — no, demand — our hardware be locked down?
It's worth mentioning all USB mics are toys anyway. Analog interfaces have gone away — artificially so — now they cram them into the device.
All mics are analog.
Oof. Apple claims this is not possible for macbook cameras because the LED can't be controlled from software. Wish more manufacturers would do the same.
If you look at tear downs apparently it is connected to the webcam so it is energized when the webcam receives power making it nearly impossible to defeat.
You can say a lot about Apple but the engineering is clever at the hardware level.
The idea behind the bug was mine, it was of the "surely they weren't stupid enough to forget to do xyz" variety. Writing the code to probe for the vulnerability by hand would've taken a few hours of grunt work, including reconstructing protobuf schemas etc. In the past I just wouldn't have bothered, because in my view the odds of success were too low to be worth it. But it was a one-sentence prompt so why the hell not. And it worked!
There’s no substitute for having open systems that aren’t cryptographically locked down by the manufacturer.
Open systems are great and all in the idea, but the facts are that for profit companies do the research and produce most of the things.
There are things that the "open source movement" dreams about, and one just has to search around... E.g. like codecs, Qualcomm's aptX lossless, adaptative, and other more recent variations.
Better than each person doing “4.2 hours of Claude churn, 32 prompts” for each device. And of course LLMs can help personalize existing things for your use case.
Took about 10 hours and it now works fine. Without codex, this would have taken me significantly more weekends having little experience with skateboard firmware.
The device reports fine wifi but the backing services are totally busted.
Weird question anyway. Why eat food at all if you can't be bothered to farm it yourself.
My cat scarfed and barfed periodically, and I always wanted the Petlibro (the simple one) to slow feed by incrementally turning the auger, just to see if it helped. I might dig it out and try my hand at this.
Reverse engineering seems a good one (ev en if his RE nix sandbox looks fairly usable, it seems like a weekend to get this working.
I heard CISA is getting defunded. I wonder if it'll become a common assumption for Americans that all their devices are just perpetually compromised.
> Network-connected devices seem near universally fucked at this point?
The fact that there are so many devices lack even basic security features horrified me. A webcam that activity light can be turned off remotely, that's a big no no for me.
But the use of LLM is also very interesting, we may put LLM in the loop to harden our devices.
Sorry community, but it's our job to make the reverse engineer harder.
Yet for some reason I can’t escape these annoying pixel cleaning interruptions. Seems like a bug in the firmware.
Why hasn't that happened?
Programming has always been about putting more power into the tools.
Sadly, there doesn’t seem to be as much need for hardcore engineers.
I’d say John Deer will be among first ones requesting a halt.
It was similar with Napster vs recording companies… and then Spotify bulldozed everything with its attitude.
With LLM it could be much faster.
I watched an agent identify and find the correct firmware for a device by taking photos of its circuit boards and comparing them to those found online in internal documentation, patents, parts sheets, etc.
It's pretty fun! If you have your HAM license you can do some fun stuff letting an agemt control an SDR, too. Still a lot of fun to be had even in passive mode.
It will be interesting watching what kind of tinkerer/hacker/enthusiast cultures arises from these new paradigms. Wait til people start suping up their vehicles with natural language agents that have access to subsystems. Imagine entire automated labs hooked up to agents.