The Smart TV in Your LivingRoom Is a Node in the AIScraping Economy

> After config fetch, the SDK opens a persistent WebSocket to:

wss://proxyjs.brdtnet.com:443

This hostname resolves to AWS Global Accelerator IPs

There is some irony that both the scrapers and the websites being scraped are probably hosted on AWS, while playing an elaborate cat-and-mouse game pretending that they weren't.

I never connect any “smart” device to wifi. If it doesn’t work without connectivity, I don’t want it. I use my TVs as display devices. They have HDMI-in and that’s it.

> The SDK’s config ships a flag “use_netifs”: true. That flag triggers code in the SDK binary that constructs its NWConnection with a specific required interface: en0 (WiFi) or pdp_ip0 (cellular), rather than using the system default route.

> On iOS, this bypasses any configured VPN’s tun0 interface entirely. The peer tunnel does not cross a user-configured VPN, even when the rest of the app’s HTTPS traffic does.

What's a legitimate use case for this API? When/why should an app be allowed to bypass a user-configured VPN?

Naive question: what would I search for to find a tutorial on how to detect this on my devices, which are mostly iOS, or in my home network?

I'd love to find and remove any apps from my devices that have this SDk active.

Not if my firewall blocks it from accessing the outside world. (But allows HomeAssistant to control it)

Are there any defenses I can put in front of my websites that are good for stopping these things? The amount of traffic I see from residential proxies is just killing me. In particular defense against residential proxies.

One of the problems I can see here is the problem that running a Tor exit node has: badly behaved users are going to be using it to hide their location.

Imaging having the police show up at your door because they've figured out that you're trafficking child porn, when the actual culprit is someone that is using your TV as a proxy to trade child porn.

If the kind of proxying isn't illegal, in my opinion it should be -- saying it's bordering on circumvention of fundamental assumptions about Internet routing and IP address leasing (and ownership), would be a sorry understatement compared to what Bright Data has managed to package into a product payment:

> you are allowing Bright Data to occasionally use your device’s free resources and _IP address to download public web data from the internet_. (emphasis mine)

I think the misleading part -- to the end-user -- is the "download public web data" part. If the data is public why can't Bright Data download it themselves? Well, because the other end doesn't want them to, apparently. The product is make you help Bright Data circumvent the undesired properties of the "public" data providers, on behalf of someone who happens to have the cash but as of yet is at the short end of the Internet stick (for all the right reasons, I'd say).

This is absolutely deplorable, but knowing the directions this is heading, I am neither surprised nor concerned, frankly. People have long voted with their wallet -- it's not the privacy-conscious Joe the Hacker that is being proxied through here, it's our parents and millions of people who just want entertainment at the end of the working day, including _parents_ of small children.

Day by day the dark Internet theory sounds more plausible, and frankly I am all there for it. The Internet will collapse into a feudal internetwork where any routing will need hop-by-hop key, so real people (and agents, frankly) can maintain a measure of trust that right now is being actively circumvented.

I found some 60 iOS apps that have the SDK mentioned in the article: https://appgoblin.info/sdks/brdsdk.framework (sorry this requires a free login due to heavy scraping, feel free to contact me for list)

I was unable to find related Android SDKs. I tried looking at the various apps on AppGoblin to find the android versions, then looking through their unmapped SDK parts but didn't see anything.

https://github.com/BrightSDK/bright-sdk-gradle-plugin-docs

This looks like it should just be "com.brightdata" but I did not find anything. With 60 iOS apps there must be apps with Android SDK, but I'm not sure why I am not finding any.

If anyone knows, or would like to chat feel free to connect. I'm happy to share data.

> The TLS certificate is CN=*.luminatinet.com — the domain for Luminati Networks, Bright Data’s pre-2018 corporate name

Ah yes. The big privacy scraping company called themselves The Luminati. It’s like they are side-investing in tin foil hats or something.

Having never owned a telivision because of how much I didn't like advertising when tv was the primary delivery method, the feeling of having avoided a life sentence of bieng lashed to the tube is wierd, I know that people might catch me looking all to intently into there eyes trying to see if they are realy in there.

Years ago I had smart TV, and while I never used anything “smart”, one day I connected it to the network to update it and forgot it, two days later I was checking my dns and 80% of the traffic and blocked queries in the past two days were from one device, after tracking it, it was the TV!

So what I have now is a pre-smart TV I found at the thrift, still very good picture that’s more than enough for the few times I use it.

There should be a way to disable the “smart” garbage in new TVs, or an option to buy normal ones at least.

I find Cloudflare to be more unethical than Bright Data.

FTA:

> MDM, mobile EDR

Anyone care to ELI5 these?

So wait a second then, it connects out using a websocket to its bot C&C server, right?

Which presumably passes it a URL to scrape and waits for it to return the data.

What happens if I write my own tool that connects to that C&C server, waits for a URL to scrape, and returns gigabytes of freshly brewed hot horseshit?

Not the one in my living room.

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