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Legislators Introduce Bill To Stop Set Top Boxes From Watching You
An anonymous reader writes "For a few years now, we've been hearing about TV-related devices that have built-in cameras and microphones. Their stated purpose is to monitor consumers and gather data — often to target advertising. (We'll set aside any unstated purposes — the uses they tell us about are bad enough.) Now, two members of the U.S. House of Representatives have submitted legislation to regulate this sort of technology. '[They] said they want to get out ahead of the release of this new technology and pass legislation that ensures it would include beefed up privacy protections for consumers. They added that this legislation is particularly relevant given the recent revelations about the National Security Agency's Internet surveillance programs. ... Additionally, the bill requires a cable box or set-top device to notify consumers when the monitoring technology is activated and in use by posting the phrase "We are watching you" across their TV screens.'"
As if the law is going to stop people from spying...
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Don't just limit this to set top boxes, include gaming consoles and make a big fucking red blinking light mandatory on devices like Glass.
I think I'll drop my drawers and spread my ass cheeks really wide for the camera. Hopefully that'll nauseate the folks on the other end watching. Knowing my luck, if there is targeted advertising then I might suddenly see advertisements for Charmin Ultra and Tidy Bowl.
1. Don't allow the technology at all. Why does your television or set-top box (video game consoles excluded) need a camera or microphone in it in the first place?
2. Mandatory user-configurable setting to turn off such devices permanently if that's what the consumer wants, or better yet, make such devices separate accessories that physically plug in, so you can physically disconnect them when you're not actively using them.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
It's too late once you already bought the thing. There should be a message on the box in big bold letters, "this device may be used to watch what you are doing in your own house" or something, like on cigarette packs. If you don't mind, sure buy it but you should have the information ahead of time.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
The NSA doesn't ask for permission. A head honcho director just recently lied to Congress under oath about the extent of surveillance, and nobody in charge seems to mind. Tell me again exactly what this law is supposed to accomplish?
consider the habits of young folks and what could happen if this records a young girl/boy being kids
Oh Noes its dah Kiddey Pron!!!
seriously can any manufacturer guarantee that they will not record or allow to be posted online children in states of undress??
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
If you had *ANY* clue, you'd done a clean reinstall. Failing that, would merit otherworldly suspicions.
Your "MyCleanPC" sounds, judging by your post, like a sanity-infecting virus on its own.
Captcha: nebulous
also add give people the right to buy the box with no outlet / mirroring / per box access / card fees.
Heh, when was the last time anyone made a TV set that had a top big enough for any of these boxes to sit on?
More seriously.. I work for a satellite TV company, and our STBs do gather viewing information and report it back to the mother ship, but it's viewer statistics (like the Nielsen boxes) and pay-per-view info, etc. The boxes don't have cameras or mic's in them. Even if they did, since the remotes are wireless radio rather than infrared, you could put the box inside an opaque equipment rack or behind something and it would work fine with no line-of-sight to the viewer.
Why do I have to waste precious moderation points to downmod this crap? Why can't this be blocked automatically? It's not like it's something completely new and out of the blue.
The bill is H.R. 2356, introduced by Michael Capuano (D-Mass) and Walter Jones (R-N.C.).
Find your congressman here. Send them some sort of correspondence that says you wish them to co-sponsor the bill. If you e-mail, make sure you request a response.
Spam, spam, spam, spam!
Lovely spam, wonderful spam.
spaaaaaaaaaam!
"-1 Troll" is the apparently the same as "-1 I disagree with you."
...Additionally, the bill requires a cable box or set-top device to notify consumers when the monitoring technology is activated and in use by posting the phrase "We are watching you" across their TV screens.
Yeah... that's not gonna happen.
If the entertainment Industry's lobbyists are unable to get this legislation stopped that will be the first provision to be removed. It's simply too creepy and will have most people taking their STB back to the local office to get an older one with no camera.
I can't help but get the impression the wording will make all of this a piece of theater. "No no, it can't POSSIBLY be observing us, we don't need to worry, it hasn't TOLD us we're being watched right now". The NSA gets our guards down, the distributors get 'compensated' with both the data they need and a little cash reward from taxpayer pockets for having snuck around.
That's going to piss the NSA off then!
http://luckyredfish.com
Dumb idiots haven't noticed that TV is obsolete.
The last one here is the best. It doesn't even involve a virus on the computer: the advertised website cures lung cancer (and divorce, child abuse, etc.).
these sub-sentients with less than favorable lineage and parents not married (to each other) use various tricks to evade ip based blocking (and other things).
the only way for them to be blocked is for the admins to block based on keywords.
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
Why do I have to waste precious moderation points to downmod this crap? Why can't this be blocked automatically? It's not like it's something completely new and out of the blue.
Slashdot editors themselves have unlimited mod points and use them to control this type of crap.
Set your sliders to zero and you never see this because they mod them to oblivion instantly.
Hey slashdot: How bout some sliders that actually work on Android!!
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Everything is mute with EULA enforcement.. since the EULA can say anything and be changed at anytime.. You basically agree to whatever they say you agree to.. So if they use the cameras to view you naked in front of TV/xbox/etc.. then you agreed to it by saying "yes" to the EULA..
You sign a contract with lots of fine print for a cell phone.. Which is a remote bug / camera / GPS tag / etc all rolled into one nice package the government has proven time and again it loves to snatch and snoop on..
the problem isnt needing government to provide laws.. We need to educate people to understand how their privacy is a commodity they are selling cheaply for a fancy doodad or worse.. PAYING to have taken from them..
Remember the words Everything you do or say can be used against you in court - They literally mean everything if they can find proof of it..Caught speeding? used against you in future tickets, ask any felon how many times they gotten a chance from any police agency.. (I am not a felon, but Ive known a few)
In short, the stupid, uninformed and clueless will continue to throw away basic freedoms / etc for a few bright shiny things, and in some cases will even pay for the use of said shiny (think Cars with On-star)..
the "patriot act" needs to be abolished.. We need to reinstate the checks and balances in government before we force checks and balances on company's who stupid people will continue to do business with
The Xbox One is always on, but the televisions are not. And devices can be turned on remotely. Get a clue.
... is a bit disconcerting every time I make a Skype call, right? It used to be the case that recording equipment had visual indicators to let people know--but these can all be disabled.
Also, "We are watching you."
Why don't you do something intelligent: require that these peripherals and monitoring features can be evidently deactivated by end users, (privacy mode), put an elected official into the FISA court, or limit your own terms to cripple the power hoarding representatives like to engage in.
SOPA, PRISM, this??? Get some IQ Points, please.
Remember, you did swear to protect and Defend the Constitution against all enemies foreign AND domestic. Please, feel free to fire yourselves.
Since they are politicians we can safely assume that anything they say is false and everything is to be inverted, thus they are making it mandatory for the set top boxes to include surveillance capability.
"Legislators Introduce Bill To Stop Set Top Boxes From Watching You"
Awww, how considerate. How about a Bill to Stop "Prism, Fairview, Blarney, Boundless Informant ..." watching us? Oh... never mind.
Is it true that the new xbox will cause continual error displays if you try to tape over the camera, and that it actually does face recognition so that it can recognize people who walk in the room and trigger actions based on such events?
What is the resolution of these things (in millimeters at 2m)?
sorry, I thought this was a different thread. Oops! I'm an idiot. Ha ha.
Step 1 : check an image from TV, say every 15 minutes or so.
Step 2 : if no image can be detected (and even in the complete darkness with only the TV light tehre will be an image with contrast light/darkness) announce "no person detected" , then show an automatic shutdown in a few minutes message.
Step 3 : announce this feature in the manual as a power saving measure.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
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visit randi.org
easier said than done! different manafacturers of light-capture devices (cameras/webcams) have different specifications surrounding spectrum, not only visible-light spectrum, far,far beyond.... just as ELF or EHF in radio can penetrate or bounce, so light waves may behave.
3post-its should do, but what about the mic and speakers? sometimes i use a pair of headphones plugged into the mic-jack and it works well enough, built-in speakers may also be used as microphones?
the bill requires a cable box or set-top device to notify consumers when the monitoring technology is activated and in use by posting the phrase "We are watching you" across their TV screens.'"
Why doesn't anybody think of the persons suffering from paranoid schizophrenia! They will loose their marbles when they see the text across their screens.
The government doesn't like competition
The high cost? You do remember the PS3, right? That launched at $500 to $600 and that was in 2006 dollars and at a significant loss for Sony.
The Xbox One messes up on a lot of fronts but I can't really see people arguing the launch cost as extreme compared to historical console values.
Is to be informed as to which boxes have microphones and cameras, and their locations.
Ah, ahead of this technology? How many of us own a sony television with a "presence monitor"? I always wondered about the capability of this device. Considering the depth of thought required for NSA to perform in an info war, I do really wonder how many devices they have in there long before the XBone.
The janitors who run this site can barely figure out how to post submissions. Next you'll want spelling/grammar/factual checks.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Mostly hype from two Congressional want-a-bees for their back-n-the-wood constituents and pandering on national events.
Our laptops and 'smart'phones have cameras that are always on, even though "appear' off.
There is a provision that exempts monitoring that is compelled by a warrant from a secret court.
Nothing to see here. Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss. Move along.
Slashdot editors themselves have unlimited mod points and use them to control this type of crap.
Set your sliders to zero and you never see this because they mod them to oblivion instantly.
Your naïvété is touching.
Hey slashdot: How bout some sliders that actually work on Android!!
WFM in Opera and FF on multiple Android devices.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
...YOU watch the set top box!
Yeah, the Xbox 360 cost $400 in 2005. The Xbox One costs $500 in 2013 and additionally includes the next gen Kinect. Both are still less than an iPad, and Apple sold more than 60 million of those in one year. And the *current* gen consoles are still selling pretty well at $300.
The fact is $400-$500 is about right for these consoles based on the hardware they include, and based on the sales of the last gen (between 70-80M each for Xbox and PS3) it's idiotic to claim "no one can afford them". It's practically guaranteed they will sell out their initial inventory almost immediately.
How about if you want a forum with censorship, you go find one?
Help stamp out iliturcy.
"You know you're not supposed to park that on campus"
And your threshold is your last line of defense. I am leaving my xbox unplugged unless I use it. Which is less and less frequently; and I dont see myself buying any more games for it.
I want a mechanical switch to physically disconect any Camera / Microphone from the computer/TV/media box. I do not trust any software setting that just says that they are off. The computer can be lying. At least with a switch, where I can open up the box and verify that the switch really disconnect things, I can be sure that those sensors are off.
This mock concern for your privacy is actually about ensuring ALL set-top box companies work with the NSA, and inset cameras and microphones that directly connect to NSA servers on demand.
Here is what a government action to protect your privacy would look like. All set-top boxes, computers, laptops, consoles and other similar devices must, by law have user accessible switches that can physically disable any microphones and/or cameras present on the device. A simple examination of the circuitry by an expert in the field must be capable of determining that the 'off' position of the switch is effective and cannot be over-ridden by any other non-user mechanism. Devices with cameras and/or microphones must be capable of identifying whether these sensors are currently active at simple user request.
The ability to switch off the sensors must NOT be obscure, but must be a front-line function as straightforward as removing the power from the device itself. The status of the sensors must NOT be obscure, but be as clear to the user as the status of the power connection. The purpose of the sensor controls is to explicitly turn these sensors off when not in explicit use by the user.
The 'REGULATION' I detailed above is straightforward and trivially implemented. It also runs in direct contradiction to current NSA demands. The NSA is currently involved in an act of mass public grooming (Google Glass is a specific part of this program). The grooming is similar in form and intent to the increasing use of biometric identification systems in UK schools. The idea is to get people used to massive state infringements on their privacy until the sheeple are as likely to say "why shouldn't the state have cameras in your house" as they say "why shouldn't resisting arrest be a serious criminal offence, regardless of whether the arrest was legal in the first place". The most important act of a police state is to get the sheeple defending the mechanisms of a police state.
You see, people can be so dumb that they both dislike a police state, but are groomed to defend each aspect of that police state. It is GOOD that Team Obama has a camera in my living room because, after all, the media works hard to make me adore Obama like a young O.J. Simpson, and it would be plain racist and illiberal to distrust such a person. Ask yourself this question. Why does America put so many black American citizens into the prison system for the most trivial and racist of reasons, and yet the same system promotes, as 'heroes' young black sports stars whose parents dosed them with Human growth hormone (why do you think black basketball players got that tall) or steroids and other muscle bulk producing chemicals (how do you think young football players get so 'chunky).
America is the land of cretins manipulated by media and PR wizards. Does it not bother you that you literally treat some of your young people like cattle, so they become fit subjects for your 'bread and circuses'? Giving little kids Human growth hormones in the hope they'll become the next basketball champion is child-abuse in its sickest form.
The NSA spying in your own homes may seem a very different issue, but it is not. It is again based on ordinary Americans accepting any act of wickedness if some side-effect of this wickedness amuses them. You can have organised sport WITHOUT the depraved chemical abuse of children. You can have electronics in the home without the depraved abuse of NSA spying.
ANY device with a camera and Internet connection appears on a list at NSA facilities if the company that made the device (or OS in the case of Windows) has any contact with the NSA. Within a 100 milliseconds, NSA personnel can remotely tell that camera to start streaming video to their computers. With set-top boxes and the Xbox One, this function is massively enhanced with dedicated hardware blocks, including high quality real-time video compression and encryption.
Let me say this again. Every single Xbox One with a current internet connection appears on an NSA
In Soviet Russia, forums with censorship find you!
You know what Microsoft and others do with foreigners private data. :D
... people will just ignore the message. Imagine seeing some arbitrary TV report about a US family. A television is running in the background. On there, the phrase "We are watching you" and nobody cares. In fact, you'll see this everywhere ... the phrase "We are watching you" will become omnipresent, and people won't give a fuck, after a while ... that's perhaps the really sad thing about it ... recently, I heard a report about how in the US, there's not even the same concept of privacy as in other countries (the protection of personal information from scrutiny by the government or businesses).
Then, once every couple days ... BLAMO!!! Balloon or brown paper bag popped right over the mic.
This signature is false.
I am sure these jackoffs will pass a bill claiming privacy concerns, kind off ironic considering they sold out citizens privacy to the NSA.. I guess if the NSA wasn't in the news politicians would probably have blown this off. But they need to give the illusion they are fighting for your privacy1!
Now that's a rather inane answer, do you really read slashdot at -1 all the time so that you can see all the spam and trolling? Spam could be a mod option that doesn't cost points.
Or an anti-spam option like Youtube's could be implemented, but with improvements to stop it being abused.
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
Spam could be a mod option that doesn't cost points.
Which would, of course, be abused. Infinite troll points!
None of this is even a big enough deal to worry about. I just close the comments (unless someone else replied to them, in which case I usually read those).
Sticky tape over the camera and blu-tack the mic holes. Done.
Imagine this ... 45 yr old, obese man, underwear, slapping it.
Go ahead an watch.
once.
A simpler process might be to adopt a policy where score values less than -1 are deleted completely.
And maybe, additionally, a policy where repeat offenders under the same UID or IP are banned for an appropriate quarantine period.
I can understand the egalitarianism of the original Slashdot rules, but times have moved on. There are just too many bad guys, and since we aren't allowed to just kill them, other means have to be implemented.
Yes, I do. To me it's worth it to see what comments have been voted down due to moderation abuse. Sometimes they are the most interesting and informative comments of all. While I don't especially like the spam and trolling for me it's worth putting up with that to get these golden nuggets. If you don't care for it, slide the slider to "0" or "1".
Help stamp out iliturcy.
do you really read slashdot at -1 all the time so that you can see all the spam and trolling?
In my case, yes, since I often prefer to post rather than moderate, even though I seem to quite frequently have mod points. Besides which, quoting previously downmodded posts under my UID is a perfectly valid way of bringing them back into the open.
Max Headroom.
"Tricks", "anti-virus software" ? Uh. Just remove it manually, duh. Like any normal Slashdotter would.
The only "trick" I can think of that would be relevant is reimaging in fifteen minutes using a network boot installer, then after restoring only the files the user wants and I can't see how that trick would fail.
You don't know your job, please go.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
UPDATE devices SET spy_mode='1', tv_message='We are watching you' where tv_state in ('disconnected', 'off');
Quick solution to this involves stabbing both the mic and the camera with a screwdriver.