alt Hacker NewsIs there anyone who has done a technical write up and investigation into the firmwares?
Like reverse engineering how the software on the TVs work.
Also what third parties are involved.
I have a feeling there must be some third party vendor selling the same toolkit that manufacturers use.
Would be nice to figure out if it's possible to send junk data to the endpoints.
Replies
LG for large parts of the product series use WebOS, which was the OS of the shortlived attempt by Palm to compete in the smartphone market with iPhone, which then changed hands a bit till landing there.
Me too. I was hoping for a better write up than a pay walled verge article. Yes I'm being lazy but this is hn and I like technical break downs and not just moral panic. I own an older lg tv and I'm not dismissing the societal issues.
Gamers Nexus has a 2h video doing reverse engineering and a lot of tests
> Is there anyone who has done a technical write up and investigation into the firmwares?
I extracted the firmware and filesystem of a webOS 3.5 and webOS 24 TV previously so I could remove the spying bits and get an internet connected TV back. I asked Claude Opus 5 to do some analysis on the ACR implementation yesterday. I haven't had time to check it myself, so it might give some insight but take it with a grain of salt. Also because I'm not entirely sure I extracted the complete filesystem for the webOS 24 TV.
See the documents temporarily hosted here [1][2][3]. You can find the Markdown originals in the HTML source. The Markdown has also been pasted here [4] (although the forum software has sometimes inserted a lot of tildes).
LG uses the "Alphonso SDK" for ACR, a company which it seems to have a majority stake in [5].
WebOS itself is actually pretty neat once you get root on the device. It still has open source releases, uses a well documented service bus, the UI apps are unobfuscated Javascript. It's a genuine Linux TV if only LG allowed you to get root and would not install spyware by default. Secure boot unfortunately does prevent you from messing with the boot process.
If you want to know anything specific, let me know. There's also a pretty active Discord (ugh) community here [6].
Personally, I'm most interested whether LG and other device manufacturers are getting informed consent for ACR in European markets, and what the consent screen looks like. I doubt that many consumers actually know what they're consenting to, which might be a GDPR violation.
[1] https://scriptbase.org/lg-tv/webos-24.html
[2] https://scriptbase.org/lg-tv/webos-3.5.html
[3] https://scriptbase.org/lg-tv/comparison.html
[4] https://gathering.tweakers.net/forum/list_message/86090672#8...
[5] https://www.adexchanger.com/tv-2/lg-grabs-a-majority-stake-i...
Pihole has worked reasonably well upto this point, however the web is catching up, lots of sites that use Admiral refuse to work with piehole running.
I suspect it will only be a matter of time before hardware manufacturers wise up and prevent you from using the TV if you block their ad network traffic.